Cenk Uygur on militant atheism and Islamophobia

There has been some attention lately in the progressive media to the Islamophobia promoted by outspoken atheists like Bill Maher and Sam Harris.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has a half-hour interview here with Muslim religious scholar Reza Aslan on the topic, Reza Aslan - Bigotry, Fundamentalism and Neo-Atheism in the Media 10/13/2014:

Digby in QOTD: Reza Aslan Hullabaloo 10/14/2014 links to an interview by Jesse Singal with Aslan, Reza Aslan on What the New Atheists Get Wrong About Islam New York Magazine 10/14/2014. Aslan says there:

This is going to sound odd to say, but probably nothing, because when you are dealing with that kind of level of certainty, whether you are talking about a religious fundamentalist, or an atheist fundamentalist, which is precisely what someone like Sam Harris is, it’s really a waste of time to try to argue either data points or logical reasoning, because they have already made up their mind and it becomes kind of useless to have that kind of conversation.

Digby is somewhat surprised by the Islamophobia coming from atheists.

I'm tempted to attribute the Harris/Maher kind of Islamophobia to the kind of testosterone poisoning that women have sometimes encountered in the "skeptical" movement that debunks pseudo-science and attracts science-minded atheists. Skeptic star Michael Sherman, the Founding Director of Skeptic magazine and a longtime monthly columnist for Scientific American, has been accused of being a nasty twit (and worse!) in his behavior toward women. He also has a fondness for Friedrich Hayek/Ayn Rand type "Utopian-free-market economics (which isn't exactly reality-based).

Rand herself was also very much an atheist, to the embarrassment of her fans like Paul Ryan. But that didn't stop her from being on the bandwagon of Cold War opposition to Communism, which was routinely and prominently condemned for its "godlessness" - which Rand presumably shared.

I can't help but think that some of the atheist Islamophobia is based on ideological affinity. If you're an atheist who loves the Republicans for being free-market, damning Islam is a way to identify with them on something religious without claiming to be Christian. There's also some ideological piggy-backing on the politics: Christians are likely to dismiss atheist arguments directed against the *Christian* God. But if you show religion is evil by criticizing the barbarian Moon God Allah and his fanatical brainwashed polygamous beheading followers, you might get a hearing among conservative Christians.

Juan Cole writes about Maher and Harris in Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s Muslim Problem Informed Comment 10/07/2014:

Maher’s and Harris’s charges against Muslims in general are ridiculous. Neither one has ever lived in a Muslim-majority society or knows the languages or cultures. They just retail invidious calumnies second-hand. Almost anything polemicists like Sam Harris say of Muslims can be said of others; i.e. they are just describing the human condition, unfortunate as it often is. In the 1990s an ABC poll showed that 10% of Americans sympathized with far right wing white supremacist groups like the Michigan Militia. My recollection is that polling showed that a significant proportion of Chinese sympathized with the 9/11 attacks and to this day only a third think al-Qaeda committed them (i.e. it wasn’t viewed as a fundamentalist act but as an anti-imperialist one [this point of view is execrable; I'm just reporting it]). Note that in this last instance, the attitudes have nothing to do with religion but rather with nationalism/ imperialism, a binary pair that explains the world much better than religion/atheism. The same statistics, if glibly given by Maher or Harris for Muslims, would damn the latter and their tradition; but what about the Chinese? Is Communist-Capitalism or the Confucianist heritage to blame here?

Atheists and Islamophobia

Religion needs the challenge of atheism. At least if we're going to have a democratic, pluralistic society where religious institutions continue to play a meaningful part.

Some atheists, I'm guessing most of those who think of themselves as atheists, have either rejected religion for some more-or-less rationalist, philosophically materialist worldview. Or they just feel no particular emotional attachment to religion. Sigmund Freud comes to mind as someone who consciously took a materialist worldview and was highly critical of religion but also took it seriously and treated it with more respect than many religious people do.

But some atheists are also creeps. And some of them are conservative creeps. That's the point that Frederick Clarkson makes in We Have A Better Story To Tell Talk to Action 03/31/2013, in which he discusses an article by Nathan Lean:

Lean's article for me, underscores the problem of a false narrative that continues to pervade our national discourse: The notion that being non-religious or secular is inherently progressive. This narrative continues in large part because the religious and political Right has been so heavily invested in it.

The narrative has been so powerful and pervasive that it can be hard to remember that the Left is not now, nor has it ever been entirely non-religious and the Right has certainly never been entirely religious. Never. There has always been a Religious Left, although like any other sector it has had its ups and downs. And there have always been non-religious conservatives. Always.

The Nathan Lean article to which he refers is Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia Salon 03/30/2013. Conservative polemical claims about the religion of Islam offer an obvious temptation to American atheists. They allow them to make arguments against Islam that resonate with many Americans and extend the criticisms of Islam to religion in general.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Lean writes, "The New Atheists had found their calling. The occasion was, for them, a vindication — proof that modernity, progress and reason were the winners in the post–Cold War era and that religion was simply man's play toy, used to excuse the wicked and assuage fears of a fiery, heavenless afterlife as the punishment for such profane deeds."

For [Sam] Harris, the ankle-biter version of the Rottweiler [Richard] Dawkins, suicide bombers and terrorists are not aberrations. They are the norm. They have not distorted their faith by interpreting it wrongly. They have lived out their faith by understanding it rightly. "The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge," he writes in "Letter to a Christian Nation."

That may sound like the psychobabble of Pamela Geller. But Harris’s crude departure from scholarly decorum is at least peppered with references to the Quran, a book he cites time and again, before suggesting it be "flushed down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal."

Dawkins, in a recent rant on Twitter, admitted that he had not ever read the Quran, but was sufficiently expert in the topic to denounce Islam as the main culprit of all the world’s evil: "Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter and verse like I can for Bible. But [I] often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today." How's that for a scientific dose of proof that God does not exist?

This is an ecumenical ground on which the village atheist can ally with the backwoods bigot. Or, as Lean puts it:

Where exactly Dawkins gets his information about Islam is unclear (perhaps Fox News?). What is clear, though, is that his unique brand of secular fundamentalism cozies up next to that screeched out by bloggers on the pages of some of the Web’s most vicious anti-Muslim hate sites. In a recent comment he posted on his own Web site, Dawkins references a site called Islam Watch, placing him in eerily close proximity to the likes of one of the page’s founders, Ali Sina, an activist who describes himself as "probably the biggest anti-Islam person alive." Sina is a board member for the hate group, Stop the Islamization of Nations, which was founded by anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer and which has designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Tags: atheism, islam

Review of Klassische deutsche Philosophie (8): Georg Forster, militants and atheists

Adolf Freiherr von Knigge (1752-1796)

Part 8 of a review of Wolfgang Förster, Klassische deutsche Philosophie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung [Classical German Philosophy: The Basic Lines of Its Development] (2008)

Förster more briefly discusses radical-democratic philosophers like Adolf Freiherr von Knigge (1752-1796) who wrote about the French Revolution and criticized the negative effects of extreme maldistribution of wealth. Johann Benjamin Erhard (1766-1827) was a radical democrat of Jacobin leanings who favored redistributing wealth through land reform and having a democratic state hold the social accumulations of capital.

Förster highlights several atheist/materialist thinkers. Georg Chistoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) was a physicist who promoted English empiricism in Germany, though he later took an Idealist/Kantian approach to the relation of Subject and Object while nevertheless taking an atheist position. He wrote, “Gott schuf den menschen nach seinem Bilde, das heißt vermutlich der Mensch schuf Gott nach dem seinigen. (God created man after His own image – that probably means that man created God after his own image.)”

Other atheist thinkers covered by Förster include Johann Heinrich Schultz (1739-1823), Karl von Knoblauch (1756-1794), August von Einsiedel (1754-1837), Karl Ludwig von Knebel (1754-1844), Andreas Riem (1749-1807), the “left Kantian” Karl Heinrich Heyden reich (1764-1801), Ernst Platner (1744-1818), Christian Gottfried Selle (1748-1800), Friedrich Carl Forberg (1770-1848) and the anonymous author of Philosophische Geschichte des Abergalubens, herausgegeben von dem Verfasser des Hierokles.

Generally the German atheist philosophers’ work focused on several points:

• They were influenced by French materialists though Förster says little about those links. Those ideas were certainly “in the air” during the lifetimes of these thinkers.

• They tended to be attracted to the ideas of freedom associated with the protagonists of the French Revolution.

• They saw religion as a key and even indispensable tool and ally of the outgoing feudal social and political order.

• They were oriented toward a materialist outlook on nature.

• They played an important role in developing freedom of speech and religion by insisting on the right to advocate atheism.

• They emphasized defensively that atheism was perfectly compatible with morality and good moral conduct.

• They pointed to wars like the Crusades and the 30 Years War of 1618-1648 as examples of the great harm religion can do.

Andreas Riem asked rhetorically:

War es die Aufklärung oder die Täuschung, die wenigstens achtzig Millionen Menschen durch die Schärfe des Schwerts, die Pestilenz des Krieges und die lodernden Flammen des Scheiterhaufens vertilgte?

[Was it the Enlightenment or the Deception [i.e., religion] that exterminated at least 80 million people by the edge of the sword, the pestilence of war and the blazing flames of the stake?]

Karl Ludwig von Knebel argued that the soul and body cannot be considered as separate substances. The spirit is dependent on the physical brain. Humanity, he declared, “in seiner ersten Grundanlage nichts Anderes als ein Their, und keine sener gestigsten Vollkommenheiten könnten Staat finden ohne diese Grundlage (in its fundamental basis nothing but an animal, and none of its highest manifestations could take place without this basis).” Human intellectual qualities are the result of development, he argued, not a divine spark planted by supernatural intervention.

Förster summarizes August von Einsiedel’s materialistic theory of perception: “Alle Objekte der Erscheinungswelt erzeugen nach Einsiedel bestimmte Nervenfibern im Gehirn. (All objects of the world of appearances, according to Einsiedel, produce particular nerve fibers in the brain)”.

Johann Georg Adam Forster (1754-1794)

Förster devotes a chapter to Georg Forster and the German Jacobins, among whom he includes Joseph Görres (1776-1848), Johann Andreas Georg Friedrich Rebmann (1768-1824), Heinrich Christoph Albrecht (1763-2920), Heinrich Würzer (1751-1835) and Georg Conrad Meyere (1774-1816), Wilhelm Koenemann (1751-1794), Andreas Riedel (1748-1837) and Franz Hebenstreit (1747-1795). He calls Georg Forster’s basic Jacobin principle the idea that government belongs by right to the people as a whole, which was most definitely a revolutionary idea in America and Europe in the late 1700s and for a long time thereafter.

Georg Forster became famous for his book that he did with Captain James Cook, the 2-volume A Voyage Round the World (1777), which is considered a classic of travel literature. A careful and realistic observer, Forster’s added notably to the European understanding of „primitive“ cultures. Forster objected to the romanticizing of the Noble Savage by Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers. A professor of natural history, beginning in 1778, Forster was also a careful observer of the French Revolution and believed that similar social conflicts and tensions would produce a European-wide revolution against the old feudal order. Forster, our author Wolfgang Förster notes, was the first to publicize Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), his impassioned response to Edmund Burke’s attacks on the French Revolution, in which Paine defended both the French and American Revolutions and the democratic principles they represented.

When the city of Mainz was seized by the French in 1792, Forster became a representative of the city’s new republican government to the central government in France. German forces re-occupied Mainz while Forster was gone, and he spent his final months in revolutionary Paris, where he died in 1794. He wrote a detailed account of the events in Mainz, called Darstellung der Revolution in Mainz (1793), which he was unable to complete before his death. Förster describe Forster has having conceived a humanistic concept of the French Revolution.

I find it intriguing that Forster contributed in his scientific work in important ways to the debate over slavery, which Forster opposed. Although full-blown pseudo-scientific racism would develop in the early decades of the 19th century and be enthusiastically embraced by the slaveholders of the American South, in the late 18th century the scientific attempts to study the difference between races was new. Forster argued for the essential equality of all peoples. He contended that arguments for racial superiority, such as that advanced by the anthropologist and philosopher Christoph Meiners, “dienen nur der Legitimierung kolonalistischer Ausbeutung und Sklaverei (served only the legitimating of colonial exploitation and slavery)", in Wolfgang Försters summary.

I was curious enough about Georg Forster to read a couple of his essays. One was “Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen“ (Something more on the races of humanity) published in Der teutsche Merkur in October and November 1786. Forster was responding to two article published by Immanuel Kant in the Berlinische Monatsscrift in 1785 and 1786. The basic dispute between the two had to do with whether humans had evolved originally from a common source, which was Kant’s argument, or whether it was more likely that humanity evolved separately in multiple locations (Forster). This dispute is by no means settled even today.

One of Forster’s arguments was clearly mistaken. He contended that skin pigmentation depended on climate and that contemporary Africans who come to cooler climates will acquire a lighter skin pigmentation. No doubt that the phenomenon of Africans becoming lighter over time was true in the slaveholding regions of the American South. But it wasn’t because of the climate.

And Forster’s essay is not free of particular prejudice against the physical appearance of black people. But he was arguing in 1786 that there was essential biological equality among the various races of humanity, a more egalitarian position than even the great apostle of democracy and anti-slavery advocate Thomas Jefferson ever accepted. And this essay drips with the scorn Forster held for the hypocritical, self-interested claims of the slaveowners.

His "Leitfaden zu einer künftigen Geschichte der Menschheit" (1789) reflects Forster’s focus on understanding the development of human history in a materialistic sense intimately connected to the physical development of humanity.

Among other “German Jacobins” that Förster describes, Georg Friedrich Rebmann is notable for his emphasis on the social component of freedom, in contrast to the classical liberal emphasis on formal/legal equality with a minimum government role in restricting the freedom of capitalist business enterprises. In Vienna, Andreas Riedel and Franz Hebenstreit represented similar radical-democratic, social-levelling outlooks.

Tags: atheism, georg forster

Village atheism

This advertisement has been running on blog ads for as long as I can remember there being blog ads. I haven't seen the whole film and probably won't, because the advertising and the trailers make it sound like a complilation of typical "village atheist" kinds of arguments. Those are the kind that take an adolescent delight poking fun at the beliefs of the devout without bothering to much know what they are talking about themselves.

Secular historians don't generally question the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a human being. And Christians who don't maintain some kind of "literalist" view of the Christian Scriptures also don't try to argue that there is secular historical proof of supernatural actions on his part, nor of the Resurrection. But the preservation of sayings and stories about Jesus, wrtitten down in the form that we have them within decades of his life and based on what for oral traditions were very recent events, are themselves persuasive secular historical evidence that the man Jesus existed and was a religious teacher with a strong core following.

For most Christians, understanding the "signs and wonders" of Jesus as reported in the Gospels and the Resurrection itself, the core event for the Christian religion, as spiritual events that neither require nor are subject to historical proof in the sense of battles or dynasties in the ancient world is not a problem. Biblical literalists find it problematic. And "village atheists" seem to think the lack of historical evidence should be as much of a problem as fundamentalists see it to be. But they are not dealing with Christianity as most of the religion's practitioners experience it.

Tags: atheism, jesus christ, jesus of nazareth