I have been very interested recently in the veritable flood of books coming out sprouting an atheist manifesto. Authors such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray seem to be competing for who is the more accurate atheist, or who can ‘crucify’ – for want of a better word – organised religion the best.
Even though I am not an atheist, in my blogroll I have two very famous ones, Bill Maher from the US and Phillip Adams from Australia, so I am never far away from the latest in atheistic thought. However, even though I believe the abovementioned purveyers of godlessness have some good points to raise, I am also critical of them, and it has nothing to do with Allah, God, Yahweh, Vishnu or Jesus.
What these three gentlemen are ‘preaching’ is that there is no God, and that we are silly buggers if we swallow the nonsense. Christopher Hitchens’ latest book ‘God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’, looks at how religion can control everything we do, and in essence, can poison us and everything we touch.
“In Belfast, Hitchens saw locals terrorised for “no other reason than membership of another confession”. In Belgrade, he’d seen Croatian Roman Catholics slug it out with Christian Orthodox Serbs. In Beirut, a suicide bomber’s severed head stared at him in the street outside the French embassy. And so on….Rather than target one weak point hard, Hitchens goes hard at them all: faith is condemned as an overrated virtue; the holy texts are a sham; religious metaphysics are false; intelligent design is foolish; and, best argued of all, religious people are very, very dangerous.”
Religion can be a very scary thing if it dominates ones life and dictates ones actions. This has happened many times throughout the course of history. Christians in the deep south of the United States would hang you from the nearest tree if you said Jesus was a fruitcake. Extremists in the Islamic community will either deal you a death sentence or bomb whole sections of the community if your religious views don’t gel with theirs. Take the recent news coming out of Iran:
“Iran’s toy market is being inundated by models of Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter and the young must be protected from their harmful cultural effects, the nation’s prosecutor general was quoted as saying….Mr Dori Najafabadi’s comments came in a letter to an Iranian vice president, urging measures to protect “Islamic culture and revolutionary values”.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/27/2228540.htm
Hitchens and the others, even from just a simplistic view at a synopsis of the books on offer, make some valid points. What worries me, however, is the cocky arrogance that I have seen displayed from Dawkins, Hitchens, and the likes of Bill Maher. Part of their criticism is that religious nutters hold to their fundamentalism and this is what makes them dangerous. But what I think is dangerous is a level of arrogance that treats an innocent, simple living religious follower like he or she is a moronic, mindless fool. There is nothing wrong with a point of view, but please, let people believe what they want. Take task with the more extreme actions, not with the innocent day to day events of a local church, temple, mosque or synagogue. Arrogance and superiority only breeds contempt.
Religion does poison everything, but so do overconfident negative observers of the world.
Enjoy your day.
January 3, 2009 at 4:22 am
Immanuel Kant is for Michel Onfray one goog Phi
losoph. For me is Immanuel Kant one Idiot, and
Michel Onfray didn`t understad the Wisdom of
Philosophie. Immanuel Kant was assured with the
Bible, he was a Pietist. He loved the Bible to
much. Nietzsche, he needed the gloves for the
Bible to read.
It is a big diference between Kant und Nietzsche
and for Michel Onfray is Kant first Philosoph,
and after comming Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx…
Atheist!