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John Gray's "The Atheist Delusion" - Irish Times 20th March
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Atheism is class...you dont need to get up early on a sunday after a heavy night of drinkin!0
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Why are all you athiests talking about logical morality? As far as i knew it was based only on emotions, and loving everybody. On things like empathy.
Whenever I try to think of morality without an objective idea of right or wrong, it seems to me that it completly falls apart on an intellectual level, and only things like empathy hold it there.... or for example, loving the government, it's laws and all of society.
As far as "logical" goes with morality when explained by evolutionary terms, all that is logical would be to survive and propogate your genes. It's not exactly necessary to be a moral person to do that0 -
Not necessary, but advantageous.0
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It would be more advantageous to steal and kill as long as you didn't get caught by your fellow society members. You'd get alot more sex and food then. (stealing means you put less money into buying things and more into buying sex)0
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It would be more advantageous to steal and kill as long as you didn't get caught by your fellow society members. You'd get alot more sex and food then. (stealing means you put less money into buying things and more into buying sex)
Could you please explain why apes show empathy and have a sense of community with each other?0 -
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For the same reasons we do. Apes live in communities, which helps them all out, if they killed each other it would damage themselves because then the would be more susceptable to predators....... etc0
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For the same reasons we do. Apes live in communities, which helps them all out, if they killed each other it would damage themselves because then the would be more susceptable to predators....... etc
Then you see the biological reason for why we don't go around stealing and killing each other en masse (Within defined communities). But as the saying goes, theres always one.0 -
I am saying, this may have been all well and good...... for apes. But us enlightened evolved humans can do these things whilst avoiding any reprucusions. We are entitled to live amongst society whether or not we treat others nicely or not, it's ridiculously easy to break the law without being cought, and mssively advantageous too. What's more, what reason have we to be nice to societies other than our own? what reason have we to give money to charity? (by we i refer to people with morality based on empathy).
here's an example, you feel more empathy for a dog dying in your street than for the zillion africans dying in africa..... or something of that vein, I mean I'm sure we'd all be bowled over with pity if we were actually living amongst them
P.S i was asking for logical reasons, not biological ones0 -
P.S i was asking for logical reasons, not biological ones
I merely replied to:As far as "logical" goes with morality when explained by evolutionary terms, all that is logical would be to survive and propogate your genes. It's not exactly necessary to be a moral person to do that
Sorry, I don't know where I got that idea from...I am saying, this may have been all well and good...... for apes. But us enlightened evolved humans can do these things whilst avoiding any reprucusions.
What is an enlightened, evolved human? Why don't the rules of nature apply to homo sapiens?We are entitled to live amongst society whether or not we treat others nicely or not, it's ridiculously easy to break the law without being cought, and mssively advantageous too.
I don't see how behaving this way could be 'massively' advantageous. Expand.What's more, what reason have we to be nice to societies other than our own?
Well, we as humans don't exactly have a good track record on that one. But then again, neighbouring groups of the same species don't exactly get along either. Its about scarcity of resources.what reason have we to give money to charity? (by we i refer to people with morality based on empathy).
People giving to charity isn't a selfless act, not all benefits to oneself can be measured by monetary means.here's an example, you feel more empathy for a dog dying in your street than for the zillion africans dying in africa..... or something of that vein, I mean I'm sure we'd all be bowled over with pity if we were actually living amongst them
Exactly, but because they are so far away, and the dog is dying in front of you, you would obviously feel more pity for the dog. Because it is tangible, it isn't some image on a screen that you feel detached from. If you saw a human dying next to a dying dog, I'm sure most people would tend to the human first. Except for members of PETA, perhaps.
:pac::pac:0 -
TheInquisitor wrote: »Atheism is class...you dont need to get up early on a sunday after a heavy night of drinkin!
Oh wow. I don't even think like that any more...
There...there aren't people who would get up early to go to mass when they're hung over even though they don't want to...right...?0 -
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I am saying, this may have been all well and good...... for apes. But us enlightened evolved humans can do these things whilst avoiding any reprucusions. We are entitled to live amongst society whether or not we treat others nicely or not, it's ridiculously easy to break the law without being cought, and mssively advantageous too. What's more, what reason have we to be nice to societies other than our own?
A society where everyone was going around stabbing each other in the back (metaphorically), would never be very stable. Trade and commerce could never be prosperous in such an environment. In fact would any organisations at all be able to exist where everyone entirely mistrusted everyone else.0 -
Well ... yes perhaps 'massively' was naught but crafty exaggeration.
Well, you can see how these stereotype "evil capitalists" prosper due to certain moral flexibility. And we can prosper in the same way. For example, instead of paying for your bottle of coke, steal it. Instead of giving the wallet(that you found on the floor) to the lost and found, keep it. Instead of being a nice friendly business man , use underhanded tactics etc (like holding back cures for cancer etc. but i realise that that stuff is probably a crock of ****, but we are all aware of this stereotype, the "evil capitalist" and these fellows certainly prosper). Instead of working and contributing to society, mooch off the government on the dole
Simalirily to how natural selection has taken a change direction with respect the the traits it likes to pick, so has empathy taken a different function in this over crowded world.
Empathy is really most effective when making us help people, in front of our faces, but in today's society stealing from some centra isn't going to leave any mark one your conscicene. And with a bit of reasoning, you could probably commit some more serious crimes provided you reason them out properly to fix your conscience. (crime and punishment springs to mind)
There are plenty of people over in africa helping the poor. Take mother tereasa for example. Now I'm not saying people with a morality based on some set of written rules help these africans out more. Just that they have more of a reason to, where as the subjectivist has none really. In fact it would be silly for him to send his money there (unless it were expedient for him, like to impress some girl or something).
P.S there is no shortage of resources, what with the eu grain mountain (or wherever that mountain is, they might also have butter mountains but I sound ridiculous here, the point is there is lots of food)
P.S.S Yes if everyone did it, it would not work, and this is also for me something which is an interesting philosophical topic. None the less, the few who do do it, prosper massively. But today there are too many people blobbed together to catch them out in any effective way0 -
I notice nobody has pasted the second article. Here is it.Anti-religious zealotry will not eradicate religion. But it may prompt it to assume grotesque forms, writes John Gray.
CONTEMPORARY OPPONENTS of religion display a marked lack of interest in the historical record of atheist regimes. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand scale, but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do with their ideology of "scientific atheism" - what was wrong with their regimes was that they were tyrannies. But might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom?
It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "religion is poison", would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies. It is true he was worshipped as a semi-divine figure - as Stalin was in the Soviet Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what happens when atheism becomes a political project. The invariable result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical means.
Something like this occurred in Nazi Germany. Richard Dawkins dismisses any suggestion that the crimes of the Nazis could be linked with atheism. "What matters," he declares in his book The God Delusion, "is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does." This is simple-minded reasoning. Always a tremendous booster of science, Hitler was much impressed by vulgarised Darwinism and by theories of eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of materialism. He used Christian anti-Semitic demonology in his persecution of Jews, and the churches collaborated with him to a horrifying degree. But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history.
Nowadays most atheists are avowed liberals. What they want - so they will tell you - is not an atheist regime, but a secular state in which religion has no role. They clearly believe that, in a state of this kind, religion will tend to decline. But America's secular constitution has not ensured a secular politics. Christian fundamentalism is more powerful in the US than in any other country, while it has very little influence in Britain, which has an established church. Contemporary critics of religion go much further than demanding disestablishment. It is clear that he [ Dawkins] wants to eliminate all traces of religion from public institutions. Awkwardly, many of the concepts he deploys - including the idea of religion itself - have been shaped by monotheism.
AC Grayling provides an example of the persistence of religious categories in secular thinking in his Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West. As the title indicates, Grayling's book is a type of sermon. Its aim is to reaffirm what he calls "a Whig view of the history of the modern West", the core of which is that "the West displays progress". The Whigs were pious Christians, who believed divine providence arranged history to culminate in English institutions, and Grayling too believes history is "moving in the right direction".
No doubt there have been setbacks - he mentions Nazism and communism in passing, devoting a few sentences to them. But these disasters were peripheral. They do not reflect on the central tradition of the modern West, which has always been devoted to liberty, and which - Grayling asserts - is inherently antagonistic to religion. "The history of liberty," he writes, "is another chapter - and perhaps the most important of all - in the great quarrel between religion and secularism."
The possibility that radical versions of secular thinking may have contributed to the development of Nazism and communism is not mentioned. More even than the 18th-century Whigs, who were shaken by French Terror, Grayling has no doubt as to the direction of history.
But the belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism. Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal - a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species.
In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.
Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it. This is what Nietzsche did when he developed his critique of Christianity in the late 19th century, but almost none of today's secular missionaries have followed his example.
One need not be a great fan of Nietzsche to wonder why this is so. The reason, no doubt, is that he did not assume any connection between atheism and liberal values - on the contrary, he viewed liberal values as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that reason. In contrast, evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms - rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them.
Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only the French writer Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of departure. In some ways, Onfray's In Defence of Atheism is superior to anything English-speaking writers have published on the subject. Refreshingly, Onfray recognises that evangelical atheism is an unwitting imitation of traditional religion: "Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy." More clearly than his Anglo-Saxon counterparts, Onfray understands the formative influence of religion on secular thinking. Yet he seems not to notice that the liberal values he takes for granted were partly shaped by Christianity and Judaism.
The key liberal theorists of toleration are John Locke, who defended religious freedom in explicitly Christian terms, and Benedict Spinoza, a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic. Yet Onfray has nothing but contempt for the traditions from which these thinkers emerged - particularly Jewish monotheism: "We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God," he writes. "But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people." Here Onfray passes over an important distinction.
It may be true that Jews first developed monotheism, but Judaism has never been a missionary faith. In seeking universal conversion, evangelical atheism belongs with Christianity and Islam.
In today's anxiety about religion, it has been forgotten that most of the faith-based violence of the past century was secular in nature. To some extent, this is also true of the current wave of terrorism.
Islamism is a patchwork of movements, not all violently jihadist and some strongly opposed to al-Qaeda, most of them partly fundamentalist and aiming to recover the lost purity of Islamic traditions, while at the same time taking some of their guiding ideas from radical secular ideology. There is a deal of fashionable talk of Islamo-fascism, and Islamist parties have some features in common with interwar fascist movements, including anti-Semitism. But Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists.
Islamist techniques of terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.
The influence of secular revolutionary movements on terrorism extends well beyond Islamists. In his book God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens notes that, long before Hizbullah and al-Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered what he rightly calls "the disgusting tactic of suicide murder". He omits to mention that the Tigers are Marxist-Leninists who, while recruiting mainly from the island's Hindu population, reject religion in all its varieties.
Tiger suicide bombers do not go to certain death in the belief that they will be rewarded in any postmortem paradise. Nor did the suicide bombers who drove American and French forces out of Lebanon in the 1980s, most of whom belonged to organisations of the left such as the Lebanese Communist Party. These secular terrorists believed they were expediting a historical process from which will come a world better than any that has ever existed. It is a view of things more remote from human realities, and more reliably lethal in its consequences, than most religious myths.
It is not necessary to believe in any narrative of progress to think liberal societies are worth resolutely defending.
No one can doubt that they are superior to the tyranny imposed by the Taliban on Afghanistan, for example. The issue is one of proportion. Ridden with conflicts and lacking the industrial base of communism and Nazism, Islamism is nowhere near a danger of the magnitude of those that were faced down in the 20th century.
A greater menace is posed by North Korea, which far surpasses any Islamist regime in its record of repression and clearly does possess some kind of nuclear capability. Evangelical atheists rarely mention it. Hitchens is an exception, but when he describes his visit to the country, it is only to conclude that the regime embodies "a debased yet refined form of Confucianism and ancestor worship". As in Russia and China, the noble humanist philosophy of Marxist-Leninism is innocent of any responsibility.
Writing of the Trotskyite-Luxemburgist sect to which he once belonged, Hitchens confesses sadly: "There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb."
He need not worry. His record on Iraq shows he has not lost the will to believe. The effect of the American-led invasion has been to deliver most of the country outside the Kurdish zone into the hands of an Islamist elective theocracy, in which women, gays and religious minorities are more oppressed than at any time in Iraq's history. The idea that Iraq could become a secular democracy - which Hitchens ardently promoted - was possible only as an act of faith.
In The Second Plane, Martin Amis writes: "Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally."
Amis is sure religion is a bad thing, and that it has no future in the West. In the author of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million - a forensic examination of self-delusion in the pro-Soviet western intelligentsia - such confidence is surprising. The intellectuals whose folly Amis dissects turned to communism in some sense as a surrogate for religion, and ended up making excuses for Stalin.
Are there really no comparable follies today? Some neocons - such as Tony Blair, who will soon be teaching religion and politics at Yale - combine their belligerent progressivism with religious belief, though of a kind Augustine and Pascal might find hard to recognise.
Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise. In the 20th century, when it commanded powerful states and mass movements, it helped engender totalitarianism. Today, the result is a climate of hysteria.
Not everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence. There is the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically. Nobody should be allowed to curtail freedom in these ways, and no religion has the right to break the peace.
The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come.
Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.
John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia will be out in paperback in April (Penguin)
© 2008 The Irish Times0 -
pfff, all that stuff about nazi's and mao was done years ago by Keith ward, and even then he said it alot better too. This guy has a kinda bitchy tinge to his writing too, I don't like that.........reminds me of the writings of those zealous athiests he was talking about0
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I notice nobody has pasted the second article. Here is it.
Its funny the way he seems to use "atheism" and "science" almost interchangeable.
"Richard Dawkins dismisses any suggestion that the crimes of the Nazis could be linked with atheism. "What matters," he declares in his book The God Delusion, "is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does." This is simple-minded reasoning....But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history."
There is a lot wrong with that paragraph, but what most stuck out was at the top he is talking about Dawkins' simple minded reasoning that atheism doesn't influence people to do bad things, and at the bottom he is discussing scientific categorising.0 -
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