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The Portable Atheist: A Great Holiday Gift
I have yet to start reading Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great and here he is again with a new book wittingly titled, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. Here's a description from Amazon:
”From the #1 New York Times best-selling author of God Is Not Great, a provocative and entertaining guided tour of atheist and agnostic thought through the ages–with never-before-published pieces by Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
“Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices–past and present–that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) God/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, you'll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and scientific inquiry, including generous portions of the words of Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Albert Einstein, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and many others well-known and lesser known. And they're all set in context and commented upon as only Christopher Hitchens–“political and literary journalist extraordinaire” (Los Angeles Times)–can.”
This book is a collection of wisdom (atheistic) nuggets from philosophers, scientists, and modern thinkers of our time. Looking forward to adding this to my New Atheists library :)
Here's a video of Hitchens promoting his book on the Joe Scarborough program. I don't know why Joe Scarborough is afraid for his kids to read this book though. It's an unwarranted fear from an intelligent guy whom I admire from time to time. Ah, well.
But as much as I admire the audacity of Hitchens, his Atheistic bias is too strong and partial for me. So I suggest that you balance your holiday stockings with this classic book edited by Ken Wilber: Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists.
I think that these two books, taken together, are guaranteed to give readers a healthy cognitive dissonance that they need during the holidays. So stuff your fluffy stockings, wisely :)
December 4, 2007 at 02:59 AM in Religion, Science | Permalink
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For years I took the Counterpunch.org view of Christopher Hitchens: a blasphemous ex-Leftist windbag with a serious drinking problem. But thanks to your blog and a few other sources, I've begun to take him a lot more seriously. I am really surprised, actually, by the publication of "god is Not Great", if not delighted. While I agree that it is a good practice to hold for consideration opposing views -- and Wilber is certainly one of the more articulate proponents of the theistic view of things -- I don't think you've given the Hitchens/Atheist milieu enough room to state its case. There is certainly enough "cognitive dissonance" WITHIN atheism to keep one's mind busy for years. Just the study of Spinoza alone -- whom Hitchens dubs a "near perfect philosopher" -- could inspire within us an entirely new understanding of virtue and morality which needs no recourse to the religious maxims of the past.
Either way, the real difference between the Wilber and Hitchens (who professes a belief in the transcendent and the "numinous" btw) positions on religion is a tactical one: would it serve collective human interests better to a) use the "conveyor belt" approach, or b) root out and destroy all religious idea-viruses before they can breed and mutate the next plague? The role of moral instruction, in the latter view, would be taken on by a reconstructed "rational religion" as advocated by Harris and others. Is it easier to inculcate this into the youth, or to raise them on tradition and hope the literalistic and warlike aspects of the sacred texts do not come back to haunt us?
Big questions. Either way, I'll be reading this book and others like it during the, ahem, CHRISTmas break.
Posted by: paul s. | Dec 5, 2007 1:49:04 AM
Fellas,
Good discussion.
Paul: while I agree that there is a difference on the question of the political implications & strategies of the two groups (conveyor belt vs. "rational" religion). But I don't think that is the "real" difference.
For one, Wilber's defense of the mythic worldspace (not theism imo as you said) and religion more generally has to do, I think, with its inculcation (in very small pockets no doubt) of techniques of spiritual liberation.
Hitchens may believe in a transcendent, but what does he mean by that? Does he just "believe" it, has he experienced it, how does he understand it, does he have a practice that helps one enter that space? I wonder how he interprets Spinoza---you could say more, but I'm guessing his numinous is probably more immanent and reading Baruch's Nature as nature. But I could be wrong there. And what would his version of "totally" perfect philosopher be I wonder?
But that aside and to the 2 strategies you I think laid out well. I'll just be talking about Hitchens (though some of it bleeds over to the others). What's wrong in my mind with the Counterpunch view is that while he may be an ex-leftist, he is still a Trotskyite. Just a democratic one now as opposed to a socialist one as formerly. By that I mean, he is for perpetual revolution and believes (and belief it surely is) that the prime cause of human alienation being exterior realities (religions in this case, not alienated labor).
And this to me is an important point. The historical resonance and backdrop to the idea of a reconstructed rational religion is the Marxist ideology of the engineered "new man."
In which case, given that one I think has to develop through mythicism no matter what, which mythicism is better? The most brilliant critique of the New Rational/Atheist Man might be South Park (2 part episode Go God Go) where Cartmann channeling Buck Rogers gets frozen into a future where because of Richard Dawkins, the world is run by warring factions of atheists who murder one another because they have differing answers to the "great question"--namely what should they call themselves. United Atheist Alliance? United Atheist League?
They even damn and bless one another with the word "science." Is this re-created religion just going to be more of the same?
It is part and parcel, philosophically, of J.J. Rosseau. Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. If only those chains were lifted, then the native purity of humans would emerge and lead us to live in total harmony. Religion here as the prime chain.
When that ideology acceded to power in the Jacobin side of the French Revolution, then a Picture of Goddess Reason was hoisted atop Notre Dame and immediately they went about murdering priests and nuns, or forcing them to perform sex acts on one another in public upon pain of death for refusal. [This event is also partly the fault of the Catholic Church for wedding itself far too closely with the aristocratic regime. So that when that regime was overthrown, the religion went with it. Still, the horrors remain].
This rational religion, in other words, is seeped in myth. Not myth being the problem, but as with the traditional religious side, myth not recognized as myth but taken to be the truth.
Hitchens, being a naive Trotsky-ite, is free to believe that if religion were thrown off, we would all sing kumbaya or whatever. I don't mind that, particularly in the United States where freedom of religious worship (or non-worship) and the non-establishment of any religion (including a rational one) is guaranteed by constitutional law.
But more darkly, Trotsky never wins out. Humans do not want the New Man. So a Stalin has to be found, to engineer socially the new human from above. With an un-democratic, illiberal, "scientific" elite who imposes their ideology on the masses. Brutally. The religions have owned the mythic sphere for a long time (and for a long time to come), and in order for a Rational Mythicism to takeover worldwide on a large scale, it would require a great deal of bloodshed. The gulags multiplied by ?
Now of course, that is not what Hitchens (and Harris) are advocating per se.
Although Hitchens supported the Iraq War precisely for his democratic Trotsky-ite reasons (aka neoconservatism=dem. Trotsky): to impose democracy from top-down. And his naivete about humans once freed from their external bondage living in peace, showed itself yet again, with his inability to predict (as anyone with any knowledge of the history of Iraq easily did) the subsequent chaos and civil strife. Rather than admit his own ignorance/bad judgment, he simply blames it all on evil Islam. But he never answers the question why the pure people keep wanting their chains of oppression. Since he does not (it seems to me) admit deeply the evil within the human heart, the potential for it anyway, then it is always projected out into the exterior world and systems.
If the New Atheist crowd wants to have Rational Religion clubs at college campuses or whatever, that's cool. They will always be a small percentage, and its a free country (the US).
The point about the totalitarianism is for other places. Particularly Europe which has a history of such blood-stained political experimentation.
As a slippery slope, creeping secular authoritarianism, let me give an example from Vancouver, where I live now. The gov't has zoned the city core so that new no houses of religious worship may be built (that would include a Rational Religion Temple I suppose).
More disturbingly, a local church here got in trouble with the city government because they (the church) were giving out food freely to poor and homeless. The city objected (and nearly shut down the operation I think under threat of a fine) on the grounds that "it was not the job of a church to feed the hungry."
The Integral Political question for me is not primarily the conveyor belt. I'm fairly skeptical of people actually wanting to change. The more important issue I think is how to create a situation where the worldspaces can not be destroying/attacking one another. Either from below towards above or vice versa.
Given that globalization is feeding a religious rise (not destroying it as was theorized by many), this is an absolutely vital question in my mind.
Even if the rational religion (so-called) gets off the ground, it doesn't answer the question of how the mythic sphere deals with the rational sphere. Or "rational religion" at any sphere relates to (I guess it's non-rational?) religion on the same plane.
It just pushes the question back one more step. Given the tendency to concretize around a worldspace, given (I believe) people have a right to be wherever they choose within the confines of the public law, then how do we conceive of a different political order that both takes into account the differing spheres AND not becoming infused with an authoritarian streak, non-transparent, and un-checked in power.
Steve McIntosh's new book has some ideas on that front. Supposedly one of Wilber's Terrorism books does. And I've heard Don Beck very generically talk about levels of democracy. But so far they are, for me, still at a pre-beginning stage.
Peace bro.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Dierkes | Dec 5, 2007 10:44:24 AM
