-
Dealing with the Dawks
10 January 2012
This morning I idly tweeted that ‘atheism gets more like the Tea Party every day’ and linked to the of The Reason Rally, ‘the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history’. Responses ranged from ‘bollocks’ and ‘what a load of cobblers’ to the slightly more reasonable ‘What? For holding an event?’ and Theists hold gatherings too, you know. Some attend them every Sunday.’ Perhaps the most relevant were the sarcasm of Steven Nash – ‘Oh those crazy atheist extremists! How dare they try and force rationalism, science and reason on the rest of us!’ – and this from John Furlong – ‘Atheism is a concept, not a movement’.
It’s not much of a concept – it exists solely as a negation – but Furlong is right to say it is not a movement. Or rather it shouldn’t be, but, of course, it now is. Militant atheists – henceforth know as the Dawks – do seem to believe that they should ‘force rationalism…’ on the rest of us. The Dawks do this on the basis that religion is a particularly harmful human habit. Since communism, the bloodiest belief system in human history, was militantly atheist and very much a product of the ‘rationalist’ Enlightenment, I find this argument hard to follow. Perhaps it is belief itself that is under fire, but, since we don’t know everything and cannot predict the future, we couldn’t function without beliefs of some kind or another, so, again, the argument becomes unfollowable.
since we don’t know everything and cannot predict the future, we couldn’t function without beliefs of some kind or another
I think the problem is a confusion in the minds of the Dawks over the words ‘atheism’ and ‘secularism’. Atheism is the conviction that God does not exist and may legitimately be advanced as an argument. As a cause, however, it has become intolerant and as much of an absurdity as anything advanced by theists – hence my comparison with the Tea Party. The Dawks are at their most absurd – and cultish – when they claim their belief is a sure sign of high intelligence, calling themselves The Brights, a label derived from Dawkins himself. The point is that atheism is emphatically not the same as secularism which I take to be the belief that liberal society should not be organised according to specifically religious principles. It is perfectly possible, therefore, to be a religious secularist – Christ, for example, was when he said ‘Render unto Caesar’.
I can see that being a Dawk makes more sense in America where religion can become oppressive, specially when candidates like Rick Santorum are circling, but, even there I find the idea futile and irrational. Religious oppressors – Christianists as Andrew Sullivan calls them – are being blasphemous in Christ’s own terms and they should be dealt with as such.
For the record, I, because I don’t know everything, am an agnostic. What could be more ‘rational’ than that?
13 Responses to “Dealing with the Dawks”
Leave a Reply
- The Ecstasy of Bedford Park
- The Mormons and Liberty Valance
- The Bad-Good and the Good-Bad
- Compassion, Chris Huhne and Twenty Years of Respect
- Christmas Continues
- American Guns
- Cruel Jerks
- Thou Shalt Not Cover Thine Ass
- The Resistible Rise of the Corporate Con Artist
- The Prig Imperiale
- Melvyn Bragg: The Mark of the Mother
- The Future According to Google
- Osborne’s Tears for Thatcher
- Tom Waits: Growling Through the Grain
- Bedford Park: The Enchanted Suburb
- The New Ritual of Dying in Public
- Museums: The Price of Free
- Rage Against the Machines
- Mohsin Hamid: Help for the Dislocated Self
- Tony Versus the Philistines
10 January 2012 at 3:41 pm
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I’d be a dog, a monkey or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational…
(The Earl of Rochester, “A Satire Against Reason and Mankind”, opening)
I don’t get the Dawks cult either. Surely the need to belong to a society called The Brights is a sign of deep-seated intellectual insecurity.
10 January 2012 at 10:04 pm
There is no confusion in my mind about the distinction between atheism and secularism, and Dr Dawkins has done a much better job than I could of promoting both and explaining why he thinks it’s important to do so and why he feels that religion is in fact harmful. The UK is still a long way from being secular. I think we might be the only country in the world where a church can appoint people to an otherwise democratic government.
It’s easy to poke fun at secularists, but perhaps if you lived in a part of the country where you had to pretend to be religious to get your children into a good (and government-funded) school, your views might change.
@J.Marles: I don’t think the name “Brights” was chosen to imply intellectual superiority. They had to call themselves something and just wanted to choose a term without negative connotations that could include lots of people with widely differing beliefs. “Rationalists”, “humanists”, “sceptics”, “non-believers” or “infidels” don’t really work.
11 January 2012 at 1:29 am
I used to be an atheist and wanted very much to eliminate the notion of God through reason. I eventually argued myself to a standstill, however, and falling into a somewhat vanquished reverie I realised that you can’t use science to validate science without presupposing what you are trying to validate. Something from nothing can’t have any scientific explanation, and is thus fundamentally supernatural.
The sceptical response is to say, “Well if you assume that God needs no cause, why assume the universe needs one?” My response would be pantheistic: God and the broader universe are synonymous and eternal, and the finite cosmos we observe is a whimsical/contingent emanation of both.
The fact that the cosmos exists is testament only to its existence not to the possibility of its existence. We can only judge possibility according to a naturalistic standard dictated by the cosmos itself. Thus, we might say that with a coin heads and tails are possible results because they are implied by the state of the prior context ie the coin itself.
How can we infer anything about the cosmos from its ‘prior context’ of perfect nothingness? Clearly nothingness implies no cosmos so strictly the cosmos is not possible in any naturalistic sense, it is in fact impossible by that standard.
An impossible cosmos which actually exists? In my view it’s God’s way of letting us prove our common divinity by means of an epic joke.
11 January 2012 at 9:43 am
‘Oh those crazy atheist extremists! How dare they try and force rationalism, science and reason on the rest of us!’
It seems to be in the nature of their argument for ‘The Dawks’ to create whole regiments of straw men and squadrons of Aunt Sally’s. Benedict XVI, whom I think we can all agree is ‘religious’, argues that a faith that hasn’t been founded on reason and the use of the rational mind is a false belief based on sentiment.
As for science……….I know the new tactic is to imply some perennial conflict, but the clear historical truth is that the belief of Christians that the universe was intelligible and subject to consistent, eternal and unchanging laws gave the impetus for the scientific explosion that took place in the West or, as it used to be called, Christendom.
11 January 2012 at 10:13 am
[...] Appleyard vs. The Dawks Like this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in Random & Useless and tagged agnosticism, atheism, belief, faith, militantism, radicalism, reason, religion, secularism, what ifism. Bookmark the permalink. ← pop corn [...]
11 January 2012 at 10:39 am
“I don’t think the name ‘Brights’ was chosen to imply intellectual superiority. ” Pull the other one.
11 January 2012 at 12:50 pm
The problem isn’t with belief, but with believers. When people get hold of a “truth”, shared with a group of people they like, they also start seeing the world in terms of the in-group/out-group dichotomy. Survival, for our ancestors, depended on staying within the group and not being cast out, thus differences of “belief” and even the willingness to entertain new ideas and possibilities, becomes deeply threatening to the sense of personal security. People get violent – and feel justified in their violence – when faced with perceived threats, as nebulous as such threats might seem to outsiders.
So atheists, by playing with their negative belief as a positive, might end up perpetrating, or advocating the perpetration of, the very crimes against “common human values” that they perceive as a fault unique to the religiously inclined. Fear, negativity, the drawing of battlelines, and the promotion of a sense of present threat, all feed into potentially dangerous in-group mythologising.
Most people in any social group don’t see themselves as dangerous to others, just as most people going to a football match don’t expect to be a part of a riot.
11 January 2012 at 1:00 pm
This is a brilliant post with brilliant comments. What’s bang on for me is that ‘the movement’ is about a complete lack of recognition of what can be known, it’s epistemological hubris. Science is not to be vilified, as any real scientist (and not ideologue like Dawkins) will understand that the empirical process itself is reducible to a priori unempirical assumptions for starters. Empiricism is also not built to measure anything outside it’s own method, so if you believe in it as the sole measure of things it becomes a dogmatic tool that says nothing else is valid or exists.
I hope that makes sense.
I’d also agree with J. Marles about ‘Brights’. ‘The Selfish Gene’ has implications too; whether Dawkins realises it or not, language is revealing and powerful.
12 January 2012 at 3:25 pm
One could say that agnosticism is the only honest position, for everyone. Suppose a man talks with a god, has met a god – he could just be insane and if he is honest he would admit that the out & out loonies who think they are Jesus are just as certain, so certainty is no validation. However, he would most likely also feel so sure, of his inner experience, that to pussyfoot about saying “of course I may be insane” would strike him as dishonest, when in fact he is as sure of this inner experience, as i am that is a sunny January afternoon in Munich (which it is, where i am). i may be mistaken but to qualify every statement with a mincing “it is possible i am insane or deluded, and i am in fact in Manchester” comes to seem preposterous.
Perhaps one could make an analogy and say that just as “it is a sunny January afternoon in Munich” is not true for Richard Madeley, in the sense in which i am using it (that is, to say “this is my world at the moment”), because RM is not in Munich right now, so other inner certainties may have an implicit frame. Without this frame they make no sense, hence the arguments.
i understand a man who simply asserts that of which he is absolutely convinced, whether this is “there is no God” or the obverse. However, it must be understood within a certain frame. When i read these Dawkins- like fellows asserting this & that, it seems to me they have no idea that what they say only makes sense within an implicit frame. One could argue that philosophy is an academic waste of time but i would at least HOPE that someone who has read some philosophy, and thought a little, wouldn’t make statements like “Jesus Christ is God and this can be proved because the Bible says so and the Bible is the word of God, so it must be true”, or “there is no God and you are all paedos”.
12 January 2012 at 8:36 pm
[...] Plutonian Drug Coil – Bee Has The Photos ~~~~~~ The Links: The Struggle For The Soul Of Israel Dealing With The Dawks The Indonesian Pyramid Homeland Is Watching You Tweet! Ten 100-year predictions that came true [...]
18 March 2012 at 4:27 am
One essay (and an entire website) as to why what is being promoted at the Reason Rally should be supported, and why Andrew Sullivan is correct in his assessment of the right-wing Christian religionists.
http://tpjmagazine.us/adams29
21 May 2012 at 4:47 am
One cannot determine the erroneous nature of any specific ideology, whether it be communism or theology, based on solely the historical impact it has had. Stupid people do stupid things and the question then becomes ‘what is the greatest enabler?’ to these stupid things, and in opposite, ‘what is the greatest disabler?’. Clearly logic and reason hold priority over illusion and delusion, and this is why both a Christian community and a communist community are both dangerous in their own way – they subscribe to falsehoods and reject reality. The historical effect is not directly correlated to the nature of these falsehoods, and is affected by a number of environmental factors, making it inappropriate for comparison.
Historically, ideologies based on fiction presented as fact have been the most harmful.
6 September 2012 at 2:19 am
I don’t care much for atheists feeling I’m an idiot for believing and I don’t care much for theists telling me that I’m going to hell for not believing. The problem here is, basically, people who think they should be able to tell me what to think, and that I’m an idiot for not agreeing with them. Assholes, all.