techo-babble

A lovely critique of the evangelical atheists from the wacky Jews over at Jewcy.com:

Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens are not wrong. Religion is often ugly and irrational, and the sins of religious people are often a function of what they believe. But we part ways with Dawkins and his fellow atheists when they argue that the root of the problem isn’t extremism, but belief itself. In this, fundamentalists and atheists are not much different. Historically, those religious extremists who make unyielding truth claims for their own specific beliefs—say, that God is One, or that God is Triune, or that there is no God but God—respond to threats to those claims by trying to destroy other faiths. Equally dogmatic atheists, who believe that religion demands, even of its most liberal adherents, at least a basic belief in God, respond by demanding the end of faith itself.

We see it all differently. Religion need not start with belief, but rather with an understanding that encounters with holiness in the world demand—and have always demanded—a metaphorical structure to contain them and give them meaning. In other words, religion should take its myths seriously, but not literally, with the self-conscious awareness that behind these stories are actual worldly encounters with something amazing and often terrifying. In making meaning of what we perceive, religious myths bring us together. And when belief takes the back seat, moral innovation, the best that religion has to offer the world, can become the final measure of the virtue of faith.

To read the whole article go here.

There is a lot of material in the open source religion story. It is going to take me a while to digest it all. While scanning to get the gist of the sections and content I came across the text quoted below. What caught my eye was the reference to Detroit (my hometown area). More importantly, this section elucidates how religion can be found almost anywhere. Though I am not religious myself, I too see religion in unlikely places; even, for instance, in the evangelical atheist movement, which I have occasionally argued is a kind of religion.

 When people set out to record a day’s reflections outside the walls of organized religion, the first thing many people noticed was the exterior of those walls. “You can’t help but see the walls,” wrote team member Wayne Baker, recording a whole array of houses of worship that he passes in his daily commute to the office. “You pass them everyday, a continuous reminder of the presence of religion in our lives.”
From noting such physical walls, it’s just a little leap to perceiving the cultural walls of religious tradition in other forms.
Team member Beckie Supiano noticed the prayer candles and incense for sale at a grocery store in Chicago—tangible evidence of widespread religious practice. Then, she also spotted a personal shrine maintained by the shop’s Indian owners–evidence that such religious artifacts are put to use in the neighborhood.
Leaping even further, team member David Cohn suddenly perceived the ritual of a graduation ceremony in a new way: “The calling of names, one by one, so people can be applauded by friends and family, receive a certificate and walk off the stage again. Oh my gosh! It was my Bar Mitzvah all over again, I realized. Granted there was no chanting. But Dean Lemman, dean of Columbia’s journalism school, was essentially acting as the rabbi—head of the ceremony, who as the head of this institution was granting people their masters degree—and pushing them into ‘adulthood.’”
Once one’s vision expands, spiritual walls are everywhere.
On his Day Outside the Walls, team member Tim Moran, a freelance journalist, covered a press conference at a venerable Michigan landmark, the stately Detroit Athletic Club. Arriving that day, he noted that the DAC is “another form of temple, this one to the world of business and success.” And, even the press conference with automobile-industry experts took on spiritual forms. “In the upper room, there’s communion of sorts among those dedicated to the religion of cars. Apostles of design are being quizzed mildly by the Pharisees of the press.”

For six weeks, 40 brave volunteers from across the U.S. met in a special online forum on “Open Source Religion” to talk about their deepest beliefs and, along the way, their respectful curiosity wound up defying the old warning about never discussing religion with strangers. The volunteers ranged from atheists to evangelicals, Methodists to Muslims, young students to aging scholars. As their emails crisscrossed the continent, the forum members moved from exploring their own spiritual yearnings to talking honestly about their anxieties over religious conflict in the world.

You can find the full story here.

Evangelical atheist is a concept I use to describe a kind of atheist, more visible in recent years, who takes an active or aggressive stance in their atheism. This quiz mentions militant and angry and while the aggressive atheists conjured to mind by those epithets are certainly included in my conception of evangelical atheist, it is also broad enough to include the always genteel Richard Dawkins.

I believe that evangelical atheists and evangelical Christians share an attitude toward other people which in my view damns them both. I have argued elsewhere that evangelical atheists are often just as guilty of zealotry as evangelical Christians. Richard Dawkins thinks that scathing criticism is well accepted in popular discourse and to hold criticism of religion to a higher standard is hypocritical. I think Dawkins is wrong in his assertion that scathing criticism is lauded. Rather, I perceive people searching for more tolerant and thoughtful public discourse. But the zealotry common to both evangelical Christians and Evangelical Atheists is not my point here. Something else had been bothering me. Something rancid lurked at the edges of atheist rhetoric on truth and science and better ways of knowing the world. It was like an unpleasant smell whose source you can’t quite locate and, though I caught the same malodorous whiff every time I read atheist rhetoric, for a long time I couldn’t pinpoint the source. That is, until I read a review of a new edition the Malleus Maleficarum in TLS. It didn’t surprise me, in the end, that a review of a fifteenth century witch-hunting guide triggered the epiphany.

A few weeks ago grooveadam posted a link to a Sam Harris satire piece which turns several apologists of religion into apologists for witchcraft. No doubt Harris intended to make the religious apologists look silly but, to me, it just seemed weak. After all, people practice wicca here and now. The Harris piece reminded me that sometime in the past I read that the line between magic and science is not as clear as one might think. I don’t mean the high technology of today, if taken back hundreds of years, would look like magic. Rather, what I read implied the line between magic as a way of explaining the world and science as a way of explaining the world is blurry. Though I can no longer recall where I read that idea, it was sufficiently surprising that it has stayed near the top of my head ever since. After seeing Harris flippantly use witchcraft as a foil to belittle religious apologists I resolved to learn more about religious-magic-science paradigms. I felt one step closer to finding the source of the atheist stink.

A trip to britannica.com’s article on magic led me to a bibliography. A quick trip to amazon.com and I had Jacob Neusner’s Religion, Science, and Magic: In Concert and In Conflict and Stanley J. Tambiah’s Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality winging their way to me.

I hadn’t a chance to crack either of the books open when I read Ronald Hutton’s June 29, 2007 TLS review of Christorpher Macay’s new edition of the Malleus Maleficarum. The following passage from Hutton’s review made the source of the atheist stink clear:

“Stuart Clark has demonstrated, admirably, that to condemn medieval and Early Modern demonologists for their teachings is largely beside the point; what scholars need to do instead is to understand the internal logic and rationality of their thought-world. This is, after all, most of the thrill of being a cultural historian, or a social anthropologist: of making explicable the alien and the baffling in human behavior and reasserting a common humanity.” (Emphasis mine)

Evangelical atheists, like evangelical Christians, deny the humanity of their opponents. They deny the humanity when, as Dwarkin does, they smugly proclaim they are right and everyone else is wrong or delusional. They deny the humanity of their opponents when, as Sam Harris does, they seek the destruction of their opponents thought-world. This then is the central way in which evangelical atheists are like evangelical Christians: both groups believe their view is the one true way. The evangelical atheists are perhaps more dangerous for they often don’t recognize the degree to which their view too rests on faith. As Nietzsche wrote: “But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And what gives you the right to consider such a judgment true and infallible? . . . science also rests on faith; there simply is no science without presuppositions. The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.” (The Gay Science, 1882)