Atheism

As so often, we close our religion desk coverage for the week with the new atheists kindly supplying the entertainment, today via a polite atheist at Salon: Richard Dawkins’ moralizing atheism: Science, self-righteousness and militant belief – and disbelief Books by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens as well as Dawkins (they have been dubbed the ‘four horsemen of the non-apocalypse’) argued that religious faith could or should be brought to an end. Dawkins made himself the cheerleader of the ‘new atheists’ when he set up the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science to hasten the day. His book The God Delusion makes the argument at length, but it is his frequent sulphurous outbursts on Twitter that better Read More ›

Sometimes the name of a book is just waaaaay cool, and King Alfred’s Book of Dooms takes the prize. But that (while showing that I am not totally immune to the coolness factor  😉 ) is besides the main point. The main issue is that for several weeks now, we have been dealing with radical secularism and its agenda for law, the state and justice. Especially, in light of the triple challenge of state power, lawfulness and sound leadership: What is justice, what is its foundation, and — where Alfred the Great and his Book of Dooms come in — how was this emplaced at the historical root of the Common Law tradition that the law and state framework of Read More ›

Closing our religion news coverage for the week, we have Steve Pinker on faitheism. Readers may remember Pinker from this: A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as “dignity,” “sacredness,” or “social justice.” … Here he is on the dangers of “faitheism” (a Jerry Coyne coinage): The backlash against the New Atheists has given rise to a new consensus among faith-friendly intellectuals, and their counterattack is remarkably consistent across critics with little else in common. The new atheists are too shrill and militant, they say, and just as extreme as the fundamentalists they criticize. They are preaching to the choir, and only driving Read More ›

It’s not news that there is a persistent (and widely promoted) perception that Intelligent Design is little more than Creationism in a cheap tuxedo suit, an attempt to dress up a Christo-fascist, right-wing, theocratic agenda as though it were legitimate science, fraudulently stealing the prestige of science. (For people who believe this, science . . . in Richard Lewontin’s tellingly self-refuting phrase . . . is as a rule viewed as “the only begetter of truth.”  [NB: this is a philosophical claim about accessing truth and warranting it, not a scientific one; so, such scientism falsifies itself and tends to cause self-reinforcing confusion and polarisation.]) So pernicious is this insinuation or allegation, that if we are to clear and de-polarise Read More ›

Camilla Paglia: Salon: You’re an atheist, and yet I don’t ever see you sneer at religion in the way that the very aggressive atheist class right now often will. What do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for faith? Paglia: I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, “Glittering Images”, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.” It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I Read More ›

We wouldn’t have believed it possible. Trust a celebrated Darwinian atheist to bring it off. And so now here (Huffpo): Outspoken atheist writer Richard Dawkins took to Twitter this week to air concerns about the status of women in Islam. Needless to say, his unsolicited advice to a religion of 1.6 billion people didn’t sit well with many. It shouldn’t sit well. The status of women in Islamic regions is a disgrace in the eyes of the world and everyone knows it, including all decent Muslims. So why do we need an outspoken atheist to point it out? Dawkins pointed to child marriage, female genital mutilation and other atrocities in some countries as evidence of Islam’s inherent bias against women. Read More ›

Carpathian, sadly but predictably, in the face of remonstrance has continued his attempts to support ghettoising, stigmatising and silencing the voice of the Christian in public; making himself a poster-child of a clear and present danger to liberty in our time. For example: >>Religious activities should all be private. Any prospects for religious conversion should be invited to listen to the message from that faith but the message itself should be a private affair. There are parents who may not want their children exposed to certain religions or religious teachings and that barrier to religion should be considered a fundamental right and honored by all faiths.>> Of course, conveniently (by redefining faith into an imagined projected blind fideism) such implicitly Read More ›

John Paul Pagano, geek on Twitter, asks, Can someone finally take conservatorship of Richard Dawkin’s Internet access? Please? in relation to Dawkins’ tweet: A pleasure to be invited to @JulianAssange_’s birthday party in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he is confined. Julian Assange? WikiLeaks founder. I (O’Leary for News) would like to know what is so wrong with WikiLeaks? Why shouldn’t there be more transparency in government? I await the day someone starts shovelling through the steaming pile here in Ontario (province, Canada). Maybe our modest investment here in getting Dawkins set up with a Twitter account is paying off.  Like, for actual results, it beats the elevator shoo! story. 😉 Thoughts? Follow UD News at Twitter!

With a lot of help from Christians for Darwin (This story should have run yesterday, but Father’s Day took priority.) A reader writes to remind us of a recent book, doubtless forgotten in the current silly season of new atheist claims, a Pulitzer-winning history of America during the period 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America,1815-1848: The quotation proved the perfect choice, capturing the inventor’s own passionate Christian faith and conception of himself as an instrument of providence. As Morse later commented, the message “baptized the American Telegraph with the name of its author”: God. [footnote omitted] The American public appreciated the significance of the message, for biblical religion then permeated the culture in Read More ›

As was noted yesterday, psycho-social cascades can often create a locked-in, socially mutually reinforcing perception in a society at large or in a polarised sub culture, that can continue indefinitely. Regardless of true facts and duties of care to fairness. This is why the wedge document canard is particularly pernicious in and around discussions of intelligent design and the design inference. Especially, when it is joined to the further canards that ID is creationism in a cheap tuxedo, and that “intelligent design creationism” represents a right wing, antidemocratic, anti-science, anti-progress, totalitarian theocratic conspiracy. This toxic caricature often goes so far as to suggest that design theory was created as a way to evade the force of US Supreme Court rulings Read More ›

It is worth pausing to pull up more from the rich motherlode of the Kuran-Sunstein Stanford law review article on opinion and reputation cascades, to help us understand what has been going on: >> the probability assessments we make as individuals are frequently based on the ease with which we can think of relevant examples.‘ Our principal claim here is that this heuristic interacts with identifiable social mechanisms to generate availability cascades—social cascades, or simply cascades, through which expressed perceptions trigger chains of individual responses that make these perceptions appear increasingly plausible through their rising availability in public discourse. Availability cascades may be accompanied by counter-mechanisms that keep perceptions consistent with the relevant facts. Under certain circumstances, however, they generate Read More ›

Today, I must postpone my intended next FTR, but I believe we will find very useful,  the Olin Foundation paper as captioned, with abstract: >>Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation Timur Kuran* and Cass R. Sunstein**An  availability  cascade  is  a self-reinforcing process  of  collective  beliefformation  by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that givesthe perception  increasing plausibility  through its rising availability in publicdiscourse.  The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational andreputational  motives:  Individuals endorse  the perception partly  by  learningfrom  the apparent  beliefs of  others  and partly  by  distorting their public  re-sponses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance.  Availability entrepre-neurs–activists  who manipulate the content of public  discourse-strive  to trig-ger  availability cascades likely to  advance their agendas.  Their availabilitycampaigns  Read More ›

It is appropriate to pause a moment to reply to RTH at TSZ: >>your FYI / FTR posts are a bad idea. Here’s why: By not allowing criticism to be directly attached to them you are not proceeding in the most intellectually honest way. You keep relinking to them so criticisms have to be redrafted after every ‘reboot’ You post on a blog that censors, edits and even DISSAPEARS whole commenters. No rationale or many times even acknowledgement is given by the moderators. The above are hallmarks of dogma, not honest inquiry. If your ideas are good, they’ll hold up under scrutiny. Exposing them to pointed criticism may help you refine them.>> The central problem with this is that it Read More ›

Closing our religion coverage for the week, as so often, with the new atheists, we note an op-ed in the New York Times asking for a theology of atheism. (It must be new atheism because the old-fashioned atheism didn’t ask for a theology, by definition.) Here: I’d come for Sunday Assembly, a godless alternative to church founded in London in 2013. A cheerful woman with a name tag stood and promised a crowd of about 40 people “all the fun parts of church but without any religion, and with fun pop songs.” The band led us in secular “hymns” like “Walking on Sunshine” and “Lean on Me.” The day’s guest preacher, a Ph.D. candidate from Duke, described his research on Read More ›

In a current UD News thread, we see how Megan Fox at PJ Media reports: >>If you want to know why people dislike atheists, it’s because they’re thoroughly dislikeable. And if you should find yourself on the wrong side of atheists, like I did by simply posting a video [–> perhaps, this] of myself walking through the Field Museum in Chicago asking questions about evolution — a topic many still view as controversial — be prepared to have to go to the police and file reports of harassment and cyberstalking. You are not allowed to question the gods of the atheists, namely Darwin and the scientists who bow at the altar of Darwin. If you do, you’ll face nothing but insults, Read More ›