open Democracy News Analysis - The end of postmodernism: on the “new atheists”, Tina Beattie - Comments

AG7 on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

AG7 — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:59:27 +0000

Postmodernism as a theory is a joke. You would be hard pressed to find many academic philosophers in the English speaking world who take postmodern "philosophy" seriously, because it is rather silly. It's not for lack of trying, but for lack of substance encountered when reading it.

But postmodernity as a description of our society is fair enough. The dirty little truth is not that rationality or truth does not exist, but that not everyone is rational. Liberal democracy is built on the belief that everyone is a rational autonomous chooser and that when we choose our governments, the overall decision will be rational, even if some of the participants aren't. This can no longer be believed, and the example of democratic responses to climate change by itself is enough to disprove it once and for all. If you don't like that, there have been and will continue to be innumerable examples of public feeblemindedness versus empirically established facts.

Postmodernity is what happens when a society tries to keep the forms of liberal democracy while at the same time avoiding confrontation with irrationality. It does this by pretending that reason doesn't really matter. Well, it doesn't work, and by extension, the kind of democracy we have does not work that well either. How can it, when a large section of the population lives in their own fantasy worlds? As long as our societies refuse to face up to the failures of democracy, we'll have to suffer more stupidity.

Luxury on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

Luxury — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:13:47 +0000

Has anyone seen the athiest ads being run on london buses, money for these ads was raised online and part funded by Dawkins, this is a panacea for the athiest movement.

ward williamson on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

ward williamson — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:31:20 +0000

Don't forget William Blake's great line about Christ's death on the cross: 'Behold, God is dead, Man is born.' Hitchen's, Dawkins, etc. have about as much spiritual depth as Paul McCartney. They fail to realize the Shakespearean dimension of the spirit not only behind the Gospel's insight into what it takes to break the cycle of satanic rivalry, i.e., the courage to not kill one's adversary but rather to lay down your life for them (and THAT IS REAL COURAGE, supernatural at that, that only people like King or Gandi or St. Paul realized in themselves), but also the the glimpse of life as lived based solely using the imagination. God is the imagination. Read Midsummer Night's Dream: all were changed miraculously.

SCENE I. Athens. The palace of THESEUS.

Enter THESEUS, HIPPOLYTA, PHILOSTRATE, Lords and Attendants

HIPPOLYTA

'Tis strange my Theseus, that these
lovers speak of.

THESEUS

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

HIPPOLYTA

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

Every truely imaginative person knows that God is a projection of something in ourselves that we can have access to if we can believe it. Dawkins' is all 'I'll believe it when I'll see it' of Theseus' 'cool reason'; the imagination is 'I will believe it when I see it.' Science is as close as we get to an accurate depiction of the world as we are going to get, but the human imagination is what saves our neck... continually throughout history. Now that is God. Read Blake who linked the spirit of democracy to the Holy Spirit that inspired Paine and Washington. Byron (another great one) rocks, not these blind guide atheists.
Of course Christianity is not the only religion with these insights. And I am glad someone is standing up against the senility of contemporary religion but they hardly sound the depths that such gigantic breakthroughs originally rose from.

Brice Timmons on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

Brice Timmons — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:56:00 +0000

Previously very long comment reduced to five points:

Brilliant thesis (inexplicably placed at the end of the article) that the pseudo-debate between religion and science is really a "smokescreen" obscuring the neither religious or scientific restructuring of society and political discourse is itself concealed by the bizarre incoherence and pointless rhetoric of the body of the article.
Article fundamentally misuses the term "postmodern" to include a very narrow group of "philosophers," many of whom might not be postmodern at all.
Article then falls back on a very basic postmodernist critique of capitalism.
Article is rhetorical in the extreme, using vague examples and equating isolated incidents to mass movements.
Author fails to disclose her own [...edit...] Catholic sentiments (see her CV for an overview), [... which would have increased transparency and an understanding of her perspective ... ]

jpcruz on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

jpcruz — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:56:03 +0000

What/Which god are you talking about?

Not logged in on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

Not logged in — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:56:04 +0000

Many people think that the act "belief" is personal. At the same time it is easy to forget or underestimate the fact that people are socialized in various ways through various channels into what to them is belief of no-belief.

That atheism from the vantage point of view of one's own conception of [Christian or any other] religion could be made a discourse theme, is to me nothing alarming, even if based on selected sources as the writer of the article commented on has done!

"Discourse" is of-course, in this case, not a perfect or the dry method most of those who comment on Ms Tina Beattie's paper would perhaps have wished to see, more-so when thinking about broad scopes of the "sociology" of science and religion, which the issues argued find their explanatory frames. I see her discourse in the two senses as follows: "set-ups", "metaphors", "configurations" and indeed elements of "narratives" also. Collectively, in my view these have made her interpret the world in the way she thinks is 'relative and special'. In that case, if readers find senses of incompleteness, it is partly, because discourses as a method also operate by 'exclusion and silence'. Whether weaknesses in commentators' attitudes above are motivated by the disproportions in subjectivity in relation to objectivity is a matter for those casting the first stones to seek to know a little more about what "discourses" could mean as a method of explanation [even in science]!

In contemporary world, it makes much sense when she writes, and I quote "Unless we are attentive to these subtexts, our discussions about religion risks being vehicles for unacknowledged prejudices and historical animosities which can only serve to fuel conflict in these 'uncertain' times". It is indeed very "pacifist" if we take a little pain and shut our egos to reason and understand! This is no less a discourse portion from an observer of world events, seeing our world system itself groaning! There is no doubt that, when emotions are taxed directly some observers get frightened to the point that other realities have to be invented to counter-balance, which boils down to the point that many occupants of our planet are either directly or indirectly frightened - the result of which is value inventions and counter-inventions! There is an element of the "scientific" in the process, but how do we eliminate what seems to be chaos - and arm of the "paradoxes she refers to] in it?

I am a Finnish citizen, but originally a Nigerian and an African. Although I said belief is personal, it would seem that it is relatively more personal for many Africans, no less shown, for example, by the ongoing debates in the Anglican Church, in which a Nigerian Bishop proposes a 'responsible' stand! Ms Beattie might have reasoned the interrelated worries in other ways, but let me once again quote her "Our modern understanding of religion is informed by a post-enlightenment approach in which science, reason and progress have replaced religion as the organizing focus of western life...." It is not unusual for people to 'think' antique! Is the idea of chaos above distorting to or not to make observers of world events skeptical? By right people react and perceive them as consequences differently getting out of proportions - people fear run-away-inflation in the economy. In politics and the management of world events many are asking where secularism and moral values are: how distant or near they are - even though human society is basically imperfect? Is it a fair or unfair question -expression of emotion?

Fortunately or unfortunately, philosophical issues on which discourses of the kind border on, do not always find easy consensus, especially in a scattered forum like the one we are operating. Still letting loose the discourse is a class-room access to the scattered public. Our world has produced so many technically-minded people, which could make it hard for Ms Beattie meanings to sink in properly. None-the-less, it is fine of her to agitate for "more amicable and creative dialogue between scientists and theologians" - that science and religion are reconcilable and sufficiently pluralistic! One needs to go a little more through Einstein's moral concerns to eventually have reasonable degrees of respect for the fear about what science, if poorly managed can do in war. The institutionalization of science, as a process by which science becomes a democratic policy object of the modern states, can alley some fears if the society and world environment are 'active' enough in the Amitai Etzioni's sense of that world. Open democracy and world public opinion are both sine-qua-non, it certainly does seem.

Many a time, especially for some sensitive social scientists or analysts, the pressure mounts making it easy to forget the power of what the habituation of democracy means. On this ground, I fail to agree with Ms Beattie on the theme of the "death" of democracy. There could be moments of fluctuations (ups and downs similar to trade circles"), even so I believe that its mechanism is sufficiently flexible to weather the storms albeit out of and in balance from time to time. The type of balance we hope democracy operates on is not 'static' but flexible. Again my rebut to our dear Martin Luther King on the theme of "what to die for" I would rather counter-balance it with his writings about "the strength to love", not at all different from 'God is love and hope'.But we have to remember that 'belief' is personal to judge less that we are not judged.

Lawrence Efana [Finland]

deteodoru on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

deteodoru — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:49:09 +0000

WHY BERLINSKY'S FUNDAMENTALIST ANTI-SCIENCE SOPHISTRY PISSED ME OFF

I read Berlinski's article in COMMENTARY, "The God of the Gaps"...

(for full text)
http://dakowski.pl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=494&Itemid=48

...on , ironically, the very night of my Easter-- the most important day of my religion, for it is then that Jesus is believed by us to have proven that HE indeed is the Son of God; and so we utter in greeting each other: "Christ has arisen"; to which we respond: "He truly has arisen." Unfortunately, our theologians could neither get together on the date of Easter, except once every few years, for our fellow Christians, nor on the date of Passover for our fellow Jews. Thus, it is here, in what is the key method of science, MEASUREMENT, that there is a Biblical flaw in our faith-- MEASUREMENT...the stuff Berlinski's bank account is made of.

Berlinski is not only arguing for doubt in Darwinian evolution, but he is also INSISTING on the certainty of GOD in man's image (the true logical sequence, for we all have seen man but few if any saw God). In doing so-- to this believer-- he reads and sounds like an adolescent sophist on a Baptist high school debating team (or is it Regents University?) as he bases his case on snip and cut quotes from defensive and angry scientists and singles out for his rage fellow adolescent sophist Christopher [what a nice Christian name] Hitchens. The latter has been the darling of the neocons and their ideological "World War IV" in the Middle East, but I guess not for Berlinski, the man of God in man's image ideology...or is he also a neocon?

Alas, at his best, Berlinski only reiterates the need for philosophical supervision of science....and, presumably of mathematics, applied or contrived, to which I say AMEN, bravo! Here, here-- yes indeed, evolution NEEDS very much philosophical supervision-- alas, here Berlinski can quote no contrarians for none exist among scientists. And most certainly, as a neurobiologist myself, ALL BRAIN SCIENCE DATA needs severe philosophical scrutiny. For that God gave us Gerald Edelman and many, many other older sages of science who no longer litter the libraries with data but philosophically extract ideas from that of others.
Yet, I urge Berlinski to heed the caution of neurophilosopher William Calvin and be weary of the "janitor's dream" of fundamentals ridden particle physicists in the basement trying to conjure up what goes on in the penthouse of the brain where love, hate and ejaculation are enrapturing. No, Mr. Berlinski, nerves do not "twitch," but they depolarize and conduct current. And what they do in assemblies we can barely mathematically model as theory rather than fact. Right now, evolution of the mind, like the Big Bang, is all models in search of falsification tests, much like the theory of eleven universes by a very attractive Harvard theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall. She may be a lot cuter than Darwin ever was, but offers no less a theory in search of falsification tests. Though science is really the inverse of a cancer test: you can't be sure about cancer until a test comes out positive and about science except when an experiment comes out negative, these are not dreamed up, as Berlinski would have us believe in ignorance. Since all these branches of science are incomplete works in progress, should we settle for "God" as a totem blocking their path to adventurous scientific investigation?

Berlinski's vague amorphous God cloud substituting for science is the Old and New Testaments as FACT. That may be fine for the neocon materialists in their quest to "re-establish" Israel (meaning: "defier of God") in Jerusalem as Zionist kings of the Middle East (what else could they ask for in their waining years now that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin-- the Three Who Made A Revolution of their youth are all dead?) but it fails to define a moral compass for mankind, given that the Bible makes us all look like nothing but circumcised apes vs. the uncircumcised apes.

Neurobiology is a young and maturing experimental science, a term Berlinski failed to consider in his epiphany against it. Evolution is actually history helped with clues from genetics, another young experimental science. Decades from now genetics may be able to tell us what are the chances that Berlinski may go mad; but certainly now it cannot tell us if he is mad...Does that mean we should stop research into the neurobiology of madness and just leave him to clergy instead? We tried that for centuries and all we got were exorcises, Freud and Lewis!

Berlinski's COMMENTARY article is a fraud because it slanders as anti-God the very science that makes no pretensions of knowing anything about God. Yet Berlinski asserts God's divine dominion and that we are made in His image as if he knows best because his revelation came to him upon eating mushrooms or something (he gives us no clue).

Berlinski fails-- nay, AVOIDS-- answering the question: is there ONTOLOGY without ONTOGENY? No, Mr. Berlinski, no Amazonian Indian has, as far as I know, lived a full life in the jungle AND THEN moved on to Cambridge to write a learned and literate PhD thesis on civilization from bottom up and from top down. And, no closer has Berlinski come to a chimp than I to Jesus, so there's little he can say with authority-- other than Chomsky's hypothesis based on "think experiments"-- about the chimp's non-verbal vs. Berlinski verbal type cognition. Again, BEING IS ACQUIRED through a neotony of prolonged maturation-- there is no ontology without ontogeny-- not necessarily a capriciously God given one for the circumcised but rather one acquired by nature-nurture interactions developing into intelligence.

I can't admire Blinks's faith, given that it is a payed-per-word assault on Hitch en's attempts to make a living selling books. Both come off looking like a not too interesting boxing match between two blind fighters. But I do resent the game the noons played ALLEGEDLY (???) on behalf of Israel, exploiting the so-called "Christian Zionists" whom the noons laugh at privately as "dumb gym." The dumb noons don't realize that the domestic agenda of these gos is a Christian-- of their kind only-- America that would eventually deny Blinks and his Nikon fellows citizenship unless they suddenly find Christ. In my old age I was planning to be a philosopher too like my beloved Edeline and Calvin, not to put myself at risk hiding Jews in my armories from the Hagee-ilk Inquisition. That's why I find Berlinski and the neocons and their World War IV ideology so outrageous-- as a scientist, as a Christian and as an American by choice, not chance.

I hope Berlinski's faith in God eventually saves him from the high probability scourge of Alzheimer's better than can our neuroscience to date. As for me, I still think God would rather I research the damned disease rather than just pray wishing that He not inflict it on me but on my pesky neighbor instead.

Daniel E. Teodoru

jim willmot on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

jim willmot — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:24:39 +0000

Her lecture was one long apology for magical thinking and then she quote-mined Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens to paint them as intolerant bigots. Her main point was that religion offers a way to transcend the mundane, to appreciate beauty. No mention of truth, no mention of the atrocities committed in the name of faith. She blamed the holocaust on Hitler's atheism (she called it neo-paganism) which seems totally dishonest since, as a Christian reader, she should know that it was centuries of Jewish hatred, inculcated by Christians (e.g. Martin Luther's Jews and Their Lies), that led to the holocaust, not just the policies of a madman. I would agree with her that most people of faith practice a benign form of comforting, wishful thinking. What she fails to see is that only when people stand up to the powerful myth-making zealots does enlightment and progress occur. She said she knows of Catholics in Africa that do in fact, hand out condoms, therefor one shouldn't criticize the Vatican. Her apologitic behavior seems cowardly to me...a way to get paid by the faith industry for helping them maintain heir hold on morality. The sacred cow is sacred no more Ann...people are finally exposing religion for the fraud that it is since we no longer have to fear burning at the stake, stoning, banning from public office, ostracism, etc. The term "militant atheism' is a way to sell her book...she blasts the Four Horsemen for speaking the truth and then cries that people of faith are being viciously attacked. Not one word did she utter of child rape, arranged marriages, fatwahs, polygamy, etc...just the tired apologies for organizations that make her feel good while listening to a choir. As Voltaire said, "Religion began when the first rogue met the first fool." Beattie is playing both roles, rogue and fool, and wants us all to keep going along with her silly game of religion because it results in more good than bad. As Lennon said, "Just give me some truth."

wardsten on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

wardsten — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:24:53 +0000

"If we are to understand this phenomenon and its social and political implications, then we must go beyond the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist extremists."

Are these the same Atheist Extremists that take such violent offence at the USA adopting the motto "One Nation Under God" or that in the UK Anglican bishops have seats in the House of Lords that they write books and do lecture tours?
Heaven save us if their become really militant and utilize their comfy chairs...

xvi10 on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

xvi10 — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:54:39 +0000

When this article brackets Dawkins & Harris, who have never raised a finger to anyone or threatened to so, in the same category as suicide bombers you know that facts and reasonable argument have gone by the board in favour of the sort of rigid idea the author criticises.

GordonHide

spamgreg on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

spamgreg — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:14:08 +0000

Tina Beatty did a good paper here.

There is a big flaw though : Adolph Hitler was not an atheist at all, he was a Christian, and an ancient child of choir at that. Several proofs :
- In his book there is no trace of atheism. In no speech or writing did he reject religion.
- In 1932, just 2 months after he came in power, he signed a "concordate" with the Pope and Protestant heads, giving many rights to the Catholic and Protestant churches of Germany : for example, priests are directly paid by the german State since then.
- The horrible Waffen SS elite troops had written on their belt buckle "Gott mit Uns".
- The Nazis tried to exterminate primarily Jews and Slaves. They placed Slaves just above Jews in their stupid "scale" of "races", and assassinated 20 millions of them. That corresponds to two religions (judaism and orthodoxy), so they had obviously religious motives for their murders.

By the way, all forms of fascism were connected to christianism :
- The Pope Pie 12 did never talk against Hitler nor Mussolini nor general Franco ; Franco was extremely christian, his regime type is called "national-catholic".
- There were Cardinals in several south america juntas supported by the USA.
- All fascisms were seen by the West as the antithesis of communism : christian, capitalist, hierarchical.

srheywood on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

srheywood — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:22:25 +0000

The incoherence of the "new atheism" can be explained as follows. Its central idea is that there is no reasoning or evidence to confirm the "God hypothesis," so you have to reject the hypothesis. Let's assume this is right. (In fact there is no "God hypothesis" except in scientific atheism; God isn't a hypothesis to many believers because they aren't pretending to play their understanding by the rules of objective scientific research, so the whole idea is arguably a straw man, but we'll be generous.) Now take a typical statement by Richard Dawkins - say the opening sentence of "The Selfish Gene:" "Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence." Or the bit in "The God Delusion" (p. 368) where he (not unreasonably) argues that it is wrong for anthropologists to tolerate or excuse Inca human sacrifice, since it was one of many examples of abuses by the religious, such as modern terrorism and so on. If you treat these statement as hypotheses, they fall down just as spectacularly as the God hypothesis. In fact, the "coming of age" one doesn't even get as far as constituting an intelligible hypothesis. What can it possibly mean for intelligent life as a whole to "come of age"? Sure, it's poetic and visionary, but so is John's gospel. Similarly with Inca human sacrifice. Judging by reason and evidence alone, there's grounds for saying it's distasteful to modern sensibilities, or extremely violent, or methodologically fallacious, but there's no basis for saying that it's morally wrong. What's the objective, repeatable, empirical test for moral wrongness? There isn't one. From such examples I conclude that the central "new atheist" polemic hasn't got any firmer basis in objectivity, science, reason or evidence than belief in God. Whatever it is about God that's getting their goat, it clearly isn't his logical, rational or objective fallaciousness, because half the things they themselves say about human sacrifice being wrong and intelligent life "coming of age" don't have any basis in objective reason or evidence either. In fact, religious belief and the "new atheism" (which seems to be about as new as, say, Lucretius) are alike in that they are grounded in a subjective rather than an objective view of reality. Basically, when Dawkins complains about Inca human sacrifice, all he can ever really say, to back up his view that it's wrong, is to testify to his subjective (and basically incommunicable) understanding of its appalling, outrageous wrongness, and hope to evoke a similar sense of outrage in his readers - which won't work unless his readers are already predisposed to agree with him, because if they aren't, he's got nothing to fall back on reason- or evidence-wise at all. Effectively, he's just pointing to Inca sacrifice and saying, "Of course it's wrong," and trusting his readers to say, "Yes, obviously it is." In his own terms, he's just trying to help another meme along on its way by shouting it a bit louder. Which, I suppose, is OK as a way of proceeding, but Dawkins seemingly can't admit that this is the way he's going about it, apparently because this is the same method that the religious rely on when they testify to the existence of God: they just shout about him. The religious (or many of them) have a subjective (and basically incommunicable) understanding of God's existence - religious experience, as it's known. Then they go around saying, "Of course he's there, can't you see it?" because there's little else they can say, and occasionally others, possibly those who are predisposed to such things, say, "Oh yes, I can see it too." The mirror-image of this process comes from the "new atheist" Christopher Hitchens, whose book opens with a personal account of a directly experienced understanding of God's non-existence. He may be right, but either way it's an account of direct subjective experience, and objective science and reason have nothing to do with it. I'm not for the moment commenting on whether either Dawkins or Hitchens or their religious opponents are or aren't deluded in their respective subjective understandings. God may be a delusion. So might the idea that there's anything intrinsically wrong with human sacrifice. In this post I'm not committing myself! What I'm saying is that the same subjective method of understanding and argument is being used by all parties in the debate, but one distinctive thing about the "new atheists" is that they are claiming to use an objective method which they aren't in fact using, except as a stone to throw at the religious in the ongoing war of the glass-house-dwellers. Whether or not there really is a God, that strikes me as self-evidently incoherent. I may, of course, be talking a load of old cahoonies, but if there's a flaw in this argument no-one's pointed it out to me.

egon1lancaster on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

egon1lancaster — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:03:44 +0000

As world views go, rationalism achieves success when it uses a procedure (deductive or inductive) to explain phenomena. These processes are tools for inquiry and not ideologies. When atheism represents itself as "rationalism" this is mere boast as if associating with "rationalism" it improves its credibility. Reason is in the procedure, not in the worldview. Analysis of a problem does not stop with my interpretation because there are many others. This is what Tina Beattie means by the ambiguity of contemporary thought. I agree with her. Imagine how many interpretations one could reach regarding the emergence of language among "Homo sapiens." So what does it mean to be "rationalistic" about how humans acquired language? The notion of reason must be expanded to include just about any interesting hypothesis. There's no proof which one is right. There are theories and poetries about how things might have been (and still are). What science and religion share is the ability to go forward in rational darkness. There are microscopic and astronomical mysteries that lead to many interesting conclusions. A leap of faith is very reasonable attitude toward the bulk of the unknown.

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:12:17 +0000

I think the article went off course and became emotional and preachy -- like some religions. The author was correct to identify the dogmatism of the "new atheists", and correct to indicate a broad concern for interdependency. But I was hoping she would really lay out an explanation for their aggressiveness in real political terms. Instead, she wound up with a blame-the-West-first diatribe that isn't founded in reason and common sense. Most of the world doesn't live under capitalism. It lives under various forms of near-feudalism, or state communism, or oligarchy, or many other kinds of systems that are nothing like the capitalism of liberal Western societies. And if the people in these states suffer exploitation or environmental degradation, it's first and foremost at the hands of their own governments, not because of some putative voracious imperialist West or "North". This strikes me as a very Western-centric piece. For example, when the author says, "Thus the current phenomenon of religious extremism must be understood in the context of the widespread failure of secularism and the modern nation state in their inability to challenge deprivation and injustice," she can't account for the failure of all kinds of very large states like India, or Brazil, or Saudi Arabia or Russia that indeed do have important religious roots if not state religions, that can't be held up as "secularised and modern" in the way Western states can, and yet suffer deprivation and injustice -- and not due to some sort of excess of liberal democracy. It's China that is rapidly on its way to becoming the major global warmer; it's Russia that is making other countries energy-dependent on its oil and gas. So much for those evil secular Western states, eh? Then, she goes after them with hammer and tong: "Faced with the combined forces of western military and economic power, disenfranchised and alienated groups begin to see the West as the primary source of global injustice and moral corruption." Well, except...how did "the West" create the disenfranchisement in Russia or China or India or Nigeria? The sufferings of the populations have more to do with kleptocratic bureaucracies and misrule than "the West" which in fact is nowhere to be found outside the capitals. Moral corruption is residing alive and well in each one of these types of large barely-modern states -- it can't be blamed on the West, so the West is merely a displaced, surrogate target, because the task of confronting undemocratic states is too hard and too dangerous. I think the trouble with the ferocity of the "new atheists" is really about anger and frustration with their inability to make their own secular humanism a compelling ideology to spread virally to people who seem more easily won over by various fundamentalisms. They aren't able to gain followers, and are in a crisis. Ultimately, I think what religion does give human beings is a sense of the open-endedness and mystery of life which is not all explained by man himself, and not at all constrained by the constraints of humanity. The atheist has to hinge his belief system on the as-yet-unproven doctrine of the improveability of man, a doctrine that has proven as elusive to demonstrate as the doctrine of an eternal God.

bobynairn on "The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy"

bobynairn — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:34:08 +0000

There is, as we must recognise, only the natural world and the human brain is part of it. And so is one of its functions, consciousness, which we can call the mind. Religious belief lives in the mind, only in the mind and it is particular and unique to each mind. The child is not born with religious belief but learns it from the church, sect or cult et cetera. There it prospers in some, stimulated by the imagination. Descarte, a scientist, desperate to find some evidence that God existed, and unable to find Him in the natural world, found him in his thoughts, declared them to be the real world and famously said "I think therefore I am". Others finding the natural world gives them life that is nasty, brutish and short, hope that religious belief will lead them to a happier place after death. There are a thousand and one reasons for belief, which is to hold that something is true for which there is no evidence. That 'something' lives in the mind, and only in the mind, togther with belief. I prefer to live in the natural world, it's all that there is, and might be a limitless expanse of sub atomic energy particles. No gods though, unless you wish to call a particle 'God' !

The end of postmodernism: on the “new atheists”, Tina Beattie

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:40:46 +0000

The Economist recently published a colour supplement titled "In God's Name: A Special Report on Religion and Public Life" (3 November 2007). The accompanying leading article included a rueful admission: "The Economist was so confident of the Almighty's demise that we published His obituary in our millennium issue." There is an almost palpable sense of discomfort at a leading international journal finding itself confronted with the unexpected resurgence of religion as a newsworthy topic which merits serious debate.

Tina Beattie is reader in Christian studies, Roehampton University, England. Among her books are God's Mother, Eve's Advocate (Allen & Unwin, 2002) and New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (Routledge 2005). Her website is here

Tina Beattie's latest book is The New Atheists (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007)

Also by Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:

"Pope Benedict XVI and Islam: beyond words" (17 September 2006)

"Veiling the issues: a distractive debate" (24 October 2006)

"Religion in Britain in the Blair era" (10 January 2007)

"Religion's cutting edge: lessons from Africa" (14 February 2007)As the article points out, much of this can be attributed to the upsurge in various forms of religious extremism during the last thirty years, and the recent atheist backlash by bestselling authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. If we are to understand this phenomenon and its social and political implications, then we must go beyond the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist extremists. We need to explore some of the complex underlying reasons for the persistence of religion after a century in which it more or less disappeared from view in western politics and public life, and was banished by totalitarian communist regimes.

The wrong argument

We might begin by recognising that the concept of religion is misleading, so that our discussions become mired in misrepresentations and over-simplifications. Our modern understanding of religion is informed by a post-Enlightenment approach in which science, reason and progress have replaced religion as the organising focus of western life, but the word "religion" also has connotations associated with 19th-century western imperialism. The word derives from the Latin religio. It has had different meanings through Roman and then Christian history, but it acquired its present meaning during the quest for objective, scientific knowledge and colonial conquest which together shaped modern British history.

During the Victorian era, new "sciences" such as anthropology and ethnology developed in order to study the "primitive" peoples and societies whom Europe's empire-builders encountered in their travels. Enthusiasm for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution meant that the study of religion came into being as a way of ranking and studying other cultures in comparison to the defining norm of western civilisation, by scholars who believed that the white western male stood on the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder. The word "science" also changed its meaning during the 19th century, from a generic word used to describe all forms of knowledge including theology and philosophy, to one more narrowly focused on an objective, rationalist approach to knowledge based on empirical evidence alone. That is why the nature of the current confrontation between "science" and "religion" is so problematic, because we are dealing with two slippery concepts which come freighted with a deeply ambivalent historical legacy.

The 19th-century confrontation between religion and science was largely fuelled by a power-struggle between men of science and men of God, most of them members of the Victorian ruling classes. Whereas the clergy and the Church of England had previously ruled the roost of English public life, in the mid-19th century the dynamics of power shifted, and scientists began to wrest much of the authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry and values. But just as this "war" masked a much more amicable and creative dialogue between scientists and theologians in a society which was still largely Christian in its beliefs, so today the attempt to portray the relationship between science and religion as one of irreconcilable conflict is a distortion of a more pluralist intellectual and religious environment.

Many scientists see no fundamental conflict between science and faith, and some argue that quantum physics challenges any attempt to maintain a strict distinction between scientific and philosophical or theological knowledge. Some scientists - such as the head of the human-genome project, Francis S Collins - have converted from atheism to Christianity as a result of their scientific research. Many members of the scientific community have sought to distance themselves from the self-publicising polemics of Richard Dawkins and his fellow "new atheists", for they see the fact that Dawkins in particular has become so dogmatic and ideologically driven in his militant atheism as a betrayal of the very scientific values which he claims to represent.

The attempt to stage a war between religion and science - whether fuelled by religious or scientific fundamentalists - is part of the problem and not part of the solution with regard to the times we are living in. If we seek to preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of public debate - in Britain and the United States especially - concerning the role of religion in society.

With regard to debates about Islam, we must recognise how the portrayal of Muslims as violent fundamentalists still resonates with those 19th-century beliefs that white westerners are inherently superior to their savage and barbaric counterparts in other cultures and religions. Also lurking within the media treatment of religion today is a masked anti-Catholicism, for that too has been a feature of modern societies such as Britain and America whose values have been largely shaped by Protestantism. Unless we are attentive to these subtexts, our discussions about religion risk being vehicles for unacknowledged prejudices and historical animosities which can only serve to fuel conflict in these uncertain times.

The limits of rationalism

One way to understand the current crisis in values and beliefs is to situate it in the context of late modernity or postmodernity, when the democratic and scientific values which emerged in the various intellectual and political revolutions of the 18th century are disintegrating. Today, we face a world of complexity and plurality which some find exhilarating in its freedoms and opportunities, but others find terrifying in its lack of certainties and truths.

The term "postmodernism" is associated with Jean-François Lyotard's book, The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979, but the era of postmodernity had its genesis in the aftermath of the second world war, when all the values which had sustained modern western societies for two centuries were in meltdown. How could visions of progress and the civilising power of reason survive two world wars and the Nazi genocide? How could science provide answers to human suffering, when it had provided us with such a devastating capacity for destruction and killing?

This uncertainty has increased as the full implications of the 20th century have dawned upon us. Never in human history did so many people slaughter one another in the name of so many ideologies and visions of progress, all of them informed by a post-religious secular ideology - whether it was the quasi-paganism of Nazism or the atheism of the Soviet Union, China or Cambodia. If the Enlightenment signified the liberation of western societies from the tyranny of religion and theocratic rule, we discovered in the 20th century that the cruelty of God-fearing societies might be rivalled only by that of godless societies.

Although the new atheists are dogmatic in their refusal to accept that line of argument, it remains the context in which we must situate our reflections on the crises confronting us at the beginning of the 21st century. Those with greater historical sensitivity and philosophical insight than Dawkins know that the gulags, Hiroshima and the gas-chambers have cast a pall over western memory and consciousness, and we are right to distrust the forms of knowledge and the political systems in which such violence was able to take root and grow.

Contrary to what many people hoped, scientific rationalism did not deliver us from the evils of violence, war and hatred, nor did religion wither and die in the glare of the scientific gaze. Instead, religion has revived in virulent new forms which are parasitic upon modernity, for religious extremism is informed by the same ahistorical and literalistic understanding of truth which informs scientific approaches to knowledge, with their shared resistance to ambiguity, doubt and complexity in the quest for meaning. In both cases, the poetic and holistic wisdom of past generations - much of it embedded in religious traditions - is set aside in favour of an aggressive and one-sided dogmatism which ruptures the fabric of human life in its communal and creative dimensions.

But if modernity created the conditions in which religious and scientific fundamentalisms took root, it is postmodernity which has created the kind of volatile social environment in which these opposing forces encounter one another with potentially explosive violence. While postmodernism destabilises all claims to truth and creates a widespread mood of doubt and scepticism, it also creates a cultural vacuum in which every form of extremism and identity politics can flourish, while sapping us of the collective vision and energy needed to challenge corrupt and unjust political structures.

One of the great myths of postmodernism is its celebration of the death of the "meta-narrative", its paradoxical claim that the only universal truth is that there is no universal truth. But this is a lie, for never has humankind been so dominated by a single meta-narrative as it is today, when global capitalism threatens to eliminate every other narrative and every other meaning from human life. While the histories and traditions which have bound people together and conferred upon communities a sense of meaning and belonging are under siege from all directions, a relentless and inhumane system of global economics is sweeping away the last vestiges of human dignity and hope for those who are exiled, exploited and commodified by the wars, corruptions and burgeoning inequalities which our economic system brings in its wake. This is the context in which we must situate our reflections if we want to ask why so many people are attracted to rigid and dogmatic forms of religion.

A fury for certitude

Mark Juergensmeyer, in his fine study of religious violence, Terror in the Mind of God (2001), argues that religion is rarely in itself a cause of war and violence, but it can provide a potent moral justification for violence as a form of resistance to perceived injustices and inequalities. Thus the current phenomenon of religious extremism must be understood in the context of the widespread failure of secularism and the modern nation state in their inability to challenge deprivation and injustice. Faced with the combined forces of western military and economic power, disenfranchised and alienated groups begin to see the West as the primary source of global injustice and moral corruption.

Also in openDemocracy on Europe's struggles with and over faith

Patrick Weil, "A nation in diversity: France, Muslims and the headscarf" (25 March 2004)

Gilles Kepel, "Europe's answer to Londonistan" (24 August 2005)

Tariq Modood, "Remaking multiculturalism after 7/7" (29 September 2005)

openDemocracy, "Muslims and Europe: a cartoon confrontation" (6 February 2006) - a symposium

Roger Scruton, "The great hole of history" (11 September 2006)

Michael Walsh, "The Regensburg address: reason amid certainty" (20 September 2006)

Faisal Devji, "Between Pope and Prophet" (26 September 2006)

Ehsan Masood, "British Muslims: ends and beginnings" (31 October 2006)

Faisal Devji, "Epistles of moderation" (18 October 2007)

Olivier Roy, "Secularism confronts Islam" (25 October 2007)

From this perspective, religious zealotry can be interpreted as the other face of the metropolitan fancy-dress parade which constitutes the consumerist lifestyles of postmodern urban elites, reflecting as they do the banality and homogeneity of a global market which is no respecter of boundaries, cultures and traditions. Instead of freedom we have choice, and instead of values we have labels and lifestyles. We citizens of the western democracies have become solipsistic consumers indifferent to the squandering of our hard-won freedoms and rights by governments for which terrorism has become a byword for ever-more draconian strategies of surveillance and control.

As democracy withers and the political forum is colonised by the suave-speaking mediocrities of the soundbite era, as blatant self-interest on the part of the world's most powerful nations becomes an excuse for every kind of collusion in the politics of corruption and violence, we in whose names the battles are being fought have allowed our horizons to shrink so that we see no further than the nearest shopping-mall. And we are the privileged ones, the citizens whose security merits any injustice, any violation of human rights, against the immigrants, fanatics and foreigners who threaten our vacuous existence. Should we be surprised that some of them are declaring war on us?

For many others, it is religion - particularly in its more dogmatic forms - that offers a potent alternative; those drawn to it include people both disenfranchised from the beginning because they are too poor or too oppressed to participate in the postmodern shop-fest, and people who are afraid of what they perceive as the moral meltdown of modern western culture. In these forms of religion, people can find certainty instead of confusion, clear rules instead of ambiguity, tight-knit communities instead of shifting and transient relationships; and all this is presided over by a wrathful male God who hates all the things they hate - particularly gays, feminists and libertarians of every description - and who sanctions violence in order to keep His values safe from corruption.

What vision of democracy?

On 9/11, the postmodern condition met its nemesis. When Osama bin Laden's suicidal supporters selected their targets, they were selecting symbols which represent the west's economic, military and political hegemony with all its corrupted values and degenerate politics. Living as we do in the swirl of history which followed that event, we lack the critical distance to assess its impact and evaluate its consequences. However, the shift in western attitudes from the laissez-faire pluralism of postmodernity to the more hard-edged antagonism of cultural commentators such as Dawkins, AC Grayling, Polly Toynbee and other guardians of secular truth has to be understood in that context.

If sufficient critical distance is not possible, it is possible to say that since 9/11 we have gone beyond the postmodern condition; and that what we do next will determine whether we discover in our new circumstances the abyss of a violent nihilism and war without end, or the beginnings of a new and hopeful flourishing among peoples in harmony with our natural environment, which is our only hope of redemption. The latter would require that we recognise the awesome responsibilities which come with our much vaunted values of freedom, democracy and human rights. In the era of war without end in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the contrast between the protests of the public and the indifference of its leaders (as after the huge worldwide demonstrations of February 2003) is a stark expression of how these values are routinely traduced.

The most pressing question confronting us lies here: how to respond to the slow death of democracy. The recent confrontation between religion and science is in this context a smokescreen which is distracting us from much more urgent political and intellectual issues. It allows the secular intelligentsia to hide behind a convenient and inflated - where not fabricated - myth of religious extremism which masks from us our own complicity in the murder and mayhem by which western global supremacy and our own privileged status within that are now maintained.

The Buddhist monks of Burma have shown us that religion is not always the enemy of freedom. Sometimes it can inspire very great acts of courage in the name of democracy and human rights. If religions have too often sanctioned killing in the name of God, they also have the capacity to instil in their followers the understanding that sometimes, there are values worth dying for. Let us listen to the silence of those - for now - defeated monks. In our noisy and increasingly violent defence of freedom, we must ask ourselves what vision of democracy inspired them to protest in peace and to die in hope. I think it was Martin Luther King who asked: "If there is nothing you are willing to die for, is there anything you have that's worth living for?" The postmodern condition gave us nothing to die for and nothing to live for, but it seems to have given us a great deal we are willing to kill for.

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