Did I Learn Anything from New Atheism?

From about 2012 to 2014, I spent a lot of online time with New Atheists and the people they argue with. I've written quite a lot about it on this blog.

When I first heard that there was a group called the New Atheists, I assumed I was one, because I am an atheist, and the time was now. 

 

But very quickly I found that I had some serious differences with the New Atheists. At first I pointed out a few things, assuming that people would be enlightened, and would thank me for the info. But that didn't happen. It happened much more often that New Atheists would assume I was a Christian, because I disagreed with them, even though I disagreed about something other than existence of God. 

In retrospect, ironically, no doubt I too prematurely assumed this and that about a lot of people with whom I disagreed on this or that religious topic.

Then for a while I feuded with the new Atheists, and constantly attempted to point out that one could be an atheist, without being anything like these guys. 

Then, finally, I figured out that I didn't have to waste any more of my time on them. I just had to stop seeking them, stop joining their Facebook groups, essentially, and it would be almost as if I had never met any of them. They could be Wrong On the Internet, and I was capable of just letting it go. And none of them would hunt me down in order to continue our disagreements.

As soon as I found the New Atheists, I found other people, whom I assumed to be Christians, who claimed that New Atheism was a religion. This claim greatly irritated me at first. Then, after a while, I realized that New Atheists do share many traits with conservative evangelical Christians, which is unsurprising inasmuch as many or perhaps actually most of them were born and raised in conservative evangelical Christian families. 

But I still resisted thinking of any form of atheism as a religion. Now I don't know. I have come to accept that the term "religion" is defined very broadly by some people.Much more broadly than I ever have. And, as I have pointed out on this blog, words mean what people use them to mean, whether you or I like that those words are being used in those ways, or not.

It is hard to express how much of a shock and a disappointment the New Atheists were to me. But in retrospect, I have to admit that I had a lot in common with them in 2012. Now, I hope, I have shed at least a few of their bad habits. 

For example, like most New Atheists, I thought of monotheistic religion as the belief in the existence of an anthropomorphized creator of the universe. Polythesim, I believed, differed in that it had multiple anthropomorphized supernatural beings. The first time someone told me the Buddhists were atheists, I assumed that if there were any atheist Buddhists, they were Doin' It Wrong, and that the Buddha and other beings were worshiped as immortal beings, much as in Hinduism.

I was wrong. Buddhism is a whole different religion than Hinduism, and I basically knew doodly-squat about it, despite having read Nietzsche.

One particularly obnoxious tendency of the New Atheists, which they share with many fundamentalist Christians, is that they regard their viewpoint concerning religion to be the most important thing in the world, and they are always sharing it with people who never asked them to. 

So did I, before I met them. Now I don't. I think it was rude of me to do so. Over and over again, in my attempts to debate with the New Atheists, I pointed out that the question of whether or not there was a God or gods could be thoroughly answered in a few seconds, which left a Hell of a lot of other things to talk about. I finally took an obvious lesson from what I myself was saying. I have become somewhat less pushy and rude, I hope, when it comes to expressing my views on religion. Especially that one particular view, on the existence of a deity or deities. Which leaves a lot of other things having to do with religion which can be discussed. 

The New Atheists sometimes also refer to themselves as the Brights. They believe that they are smarter than believers. But a lot of them are just as stupid as can be. Hopefully, after the horrible experience of spending so much time with them, I am now less likely to prematurely judge people, based on that one theistic question, or on any other over-simplifying basis.

Jesus, Yeshua

I just read... something. I could go off on various tangents describing it, and get even more worked up than I am, but why? It was... I suppose it was a message which was meant in a very positive way. I suppose it's possible that it was meant in a very positive way. I could go all negative and denounce them as hucksters as if I were a New Atheist, but why? Especially when I'm already getting way too upset on linguistic grounds?

They're fine with the conventional English forms of Sophia, Mary, Magdelene, Sarah, Anne, Brigit, Avalon, Ireland, Joseph, Michael, Catherine, Hilda, Cathars and Templars.

But they have to say Yeshua instead of Jesus. Well, what if I just say "Joshua" and "garbled translation," and "Jacob" and "James" while I'm at it?!

 

Or maybe if I quote from a very silly Wikipedia article entitled... "Yeshua."

"The 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, which was made in Aramaic, used Yeshua as the name of Jesus and is the most well known western Christian work to have done so."

Now, while I certainly have a bone or two to pick with Mel Gibson, him calling Jesus Yeshua in The Passion of the Christ is not one of them. Anybody want to guess why? I'll tell you why: because the whole film was in Aramaic and Latin. You see? You see where I'm going with this? Am I all alone here? They didn't just change one word. They changed all of them.

It would be remiss of me if I ended this rant without mentioning that some people who are much better at Latin than I am, are very upset by what they see as the way that Gibson screwed up the Latin in The Passion of the Christ. I know some people who are rather advanced in Aramaic, but, so far, I haven't heard their opinions of the film. Maybe they'll have something to say about the sequel. That's right: there may be a sequel. Jim says Mel just sent him the third draft of the screenplay. The Passion of the Christ 2: This Time, It's Personal.

Nuanced Discussion of Electric Vehicles

A few years ago, I dabbled in discussions about atheism versus religion, and about whether or not Jesus ever existed. Some of my participation in these discussions can be seen on this blog. I quickly became frustrated by the general nature of these discussions: on one side were New Atheists whose attitude is nicely summed up by the sub-title of one of Christopher Hitchens' books, Religion poisons Everything, and on the other side were believers out to denigrate any and all expressions of religious doubt and/or doubt about the existence of the historical Jesus. They mostly weren't actually discussions so much as flame wars. I soon had enough.

Recently, dipping my toe into the waters on public discussion of Tesla, Inc and its allegedly charismatic CEO Elon Musk, I've been very much reminded of those earlier flame wars. In this case, on one side are people who think everything Elon does (they often call him Elon as if he were their personal friend, and often act as Elon has personally, single-handedly accomplished every good thing ever done at Tesla, Inc) is pure genius, and pure blessing for all life on Earth; and on the other side are climate-change deniers and enthusiasts of internal combustion engines, without much in between. And I have absolutely no appetite for more flame wars. I'd rather see nuanced discussion.

I'm not 100% anti-Tesla. Far from it. I'm very excited to see that sales of electric vehicles are exploding worldwide. And outside of China, where they are building electric cars for domestic consumption at a rate which dwarfs the electric vehicle (EV for short) production in the rest of the world -- outside of Chine, far and away the best-selling EV in the world is the Tesla Model 3. The Model 3 is taking EV sales to an entirely new level, and I love that. I love that that huge battery which Tesla sold to Australia is actually working, contrary to the predictions of many. I love that Teslas are made with a high percentage of green electricity, and that many of their owners also operate them with mostly or all green electricity. There is a huge upside to Tesla, from my point of view.

But that doesn't mean that I love everything Elon Musk does and says, or that I don't wonder whether he actually deserves billions of dollars a year in compensation, or that I don't worry that many Tesla owners and Tesla shareholders (are there actually any Tesla shareholders who don't own and drive at least one Tesla?) are giving way too much in return for what Musk gives them.

In between the Tesla cult members on the one side, who are not nearly concerned enough that Musk might be screwing them over financially, and the Tesla critics who have a whole bunch of facts completely wrong, asserting, for example, that electric vehicles are not better for the environment than those with internal-combustion engines (ICE for short), and that Teslas are made and operated with dirty electricity from the grid, and that demand for Teslas is about to dry up, among many other claims which are completely wrong -- in between is at least one other person besides me: Rich Benoit, Tesla owner and star of the successful YouTube channel Rich Rebuilds, on which you can see him repairing and rebuilding Teslas. Both his own Teslas, and those owned by other people who also have become frustrated by Tesla's normal way of servicing the cars they make.



Which is something which Tesla, Inc absolutely does not encourage people outside of Tesla, Inc to do. Rich says that he loves the Tesla company, but thinks that it can do much better in some areas -- like being much more like a normal car company which lets customers fix their own cars or take them to non-factory garages for repairs if they want to, the way people have been doing with every model of car for as long as there have been cars.

In other words: Rich has a lot of praise and also a lot of criticism for Tesla and is very open about both. A nuanced approach. How about that.

What is more completely Murrkin than workin' on yr car, or takin' it to yr local Mom-n-Pop gas station to get it fixed? Precious little! Hopefully Musk will relent on this subject soon. And if he doesn't, I predict that it will only help the sales of non-Tesla EV's. Lead, follow or get out of the way -- Elon.

The Jordan Peterson -- Matt Dillahunty Debate

Master charlatan and YouTube super-duperstar Jordan Peterson recently debated New Atheist and YouTube star Matt Dillahunty:



Dillahunty posted his reflections on the debate:



So, would I rather hang out with Peterson, or with Dillahunty? The answer is, no.

As you can see, Dillahunty got really hung up on one point during and after the debate, and since he's a New Atheist, it shouldn't be too hard to guess what that point was, because the New Atheists, all of them amongst themselves, only have one point: God doesn't exist.

I agree with the New Atheists on this point: I don't happen to believe that God exists, nor that gods exist. I don't agree with them about the importance of this point. For them, it's central to their existence: People believe in God, AND THEY ARE WRONG, AND THEY MUST SEE THAT THEY ARE WRONG! For me, the topic is exhausted after a few seconds' worth of discussion, and then there are ever so many other things to think about. But the New Atheists, they just can't let it go, they can't move on. Religious belief is the central fact in human life, the source of all trouble, and must be stamped out. Now.

Peterson, referring to myths and religion, points out that they are very important to people. I have to agree with him. It may actually be the one thing about which I agree with him. I can almost actually imagine Peterson and I having a pleasant conversation, if we stuck to this one topic: the importance of myths and religion in people's lives.

Dillahunty was not available for that conversation, because he immediately, and unendingly, hammered on that one single New Atheist point: "But it's not TRUE! God doesn't EXIST!" Geepers, thanks for mentioning that, Matt, because it may actually have been as long as five minutes since you last said it. Peterson points out that myth and religion are very important in people's lives. This is true. And it offers vast possible room for discussion. But first, Dillahunty has to establish that God doesn't exist.

It's a fact! he, along with every other New Atheist, insists. It's a fact that there is no God!

And I agree with Dillahunty that this is a fact. But there's another fact which Dillahunty, and Dawkins, and Harris, and Myers, and all the other New Atheists don't seem to grasp, or at least not in all of its dimensions and implications: the fact that there are billions of people who believe in God and who are just going to be -- at best -- annoyed by someone who won't shut up about their firm belief that He doesn't exist.

New Atheists: your refusal to just agree to disagree and talk about sumpin' else -- like, for example, the great meaning which religion holds in many people's lives, maybe in most people's lives -- or it could be another topic, like incredibly-heavy medicine balls, or cats, or food, or economics or anything else except your one point -- this refusal is not converting people en masse to atheism, have ya noticed that yet?

Time for Plan B.

Ancient History Deserves More Respect

In the following essay, I have used the terms "historian" and "Classicist" as if they were somewhat interchangeable. This may distress some historians and Classicists, to whom the distinctions between their disciplines are extremely important. To them, I apologize. Those distinctions are quite simply not as important to me.

Along with countless smaller shocks, three major ones have brought me to the conclusion that the study of ancient history is in a dire state of neglect:

First, a few years ago, I became aware of the New Atheists. One of the first things I learned about them was that their most prominent and well-respected member -- indeed, their widely-acknowledged leader -- is Richard Dawkins. I had read read two books about biology by Dawkins, The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale. I had heard about his more recent book The God Delusion but hadn't read it. However, I assumed, on the basis of the other two books, that it must be brilliant, and that any atheist movement with him at its head must be out there actively making a lot of good sense.

An atheist since childhood myself, I eagerly joined New Atheist communities online, but soon became very impatient with people repeating, ad nauseum, ridiculous memes such as calling the authors of the Bible "Bronze Age goat herders," or: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." I wondered when I was finally going to get to some well-educated New Atheists, when some of them besides me was going to try to correct some of the more dopey memes.

Then came the first of those above-mentioned three major jolts: I learned that those two memes and a lot of other oft-repeated New Atheist slogans were direct quotes of, or paraphrases from, Dawkins himself. I heard or read about Dawkins saying shockingly racist things in the guise of an enlightened critique of Islam. Dawkins, who'd called the Old Testament God "jealous and proud of it," but reserved most of his most poisonous comments for Islam, has never read the Koran, and never will, and is proud of that.

Despite the good advice of Alcoholics Anonymous, that when we assume we make an ass of you and me, I had assumed, on the basis of The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale, that Dawkins was incapable of writing a bad book or saying a horrid thing, although, in order to make this assumption, I had had to ignore a jarring clue right there on the first page of the first chapter of The Selfish Gene, "Why are People?" where Dawkins approvingly quotes GG Simpson to the effect that all attempts to describe human nature made before 1859 are worthless and should be ignored.

As a matter of fact, all sorts of eminently-sensible things written before 1859 point out the hazards of people telling you to ignore entire eras while simultaneously telling you non-stop about those very eras, about which they are proudly ignorant.

The second major shock came from Stephen Greenblatt's inept book The Swerve, which claims that Poggio was solely responsible for saving the text of Lucretious from oblivion, that Lucretius was solely responsible for rescuing Epicurian philosophy from oblivion, and that Epicurian philosophy, via Lucretius, via Poggio, ushered in the Renaissance and the modern world, three ridiculous assertions. After having heard so much praise of the book that I finally decided I had to read it for myself and see if it was as bad as it descriptions of it sounded, I found that it was actually worse. The shock was not that such a bad book was written, nor that it was a bestseller. There are books far worse on the bestseller lists all the time. The shock was that this book had won so many awards and gotten such high praise from so many people who, I would have thought, were well-educated.

Or should I say: these people are well-educated, of course they are, and the shock was in perceiving how small a role a knowledge of history could play in a good education.

And most recently, the third shock came when I learned that the story of Christians having willfully destroyed the great library at Alexandria had been passed along, and perhaps greatly popularized, by Carl Sagan on his TV series Cosmos.

Thanks to people like Dawkins and Sagan, the general public is now in touch, to some degree, with cutting-edge science. That is an immense and laudable achievement. But very often, cutting-edge scientists, working at the West's greatest universities, are not in touch with the bullet-points of the current study of history. (I don't know whether historical illiteracy is as widespread in the science departments of the great non-Western universities, and I won't pretend as if I know. Dawkins does enough of that sort of pretending for himself and me both.)

I believe that history is every bit as important as science. I can't prove this as directly as a scientist explaining climate change and what can be done about it, but perhaps I can persuade the reader to give it some thought. (Some readers won't need much convincing: for instance, if they're familiar with one of the non-English languages which call history a science.)

Science deals with how things work, and history with what happened. If we don't know what happened, we're in no position to know how things work, or to know much of anything at all. If we're satisfied with any old account of Greek philosophy, or ancient libraries, or the Renaissance, or with a version which matches our political agenda or the axes we wish to grind, then, in effect, we're content not to know what happened. There are specialists working full-time on uncovering these subjects, uncovering them figuratively and also literally in the case of the ancient libraries, and if we don't consult them and see what they've made of the texts and other artifacts of the times they study, before we ourselves make pronouncements on related subjects, then we're acting very much in the spirit of Richard Dawkins and GG Simpson and Stephen Greenblatt and Henry "History is bunk" Ford.

(That seemed much more impressive in my head before I actually wrote it down. But perhaps it's a start.)

What can historians themselves do in order to introduce more of their work into the public consciousness? There's one thing I can think of, which the historians might very much not want to do: they might become a little less polite. How have most Classicists reacted to Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve? With one of the most fearful weapons in their arsenal: they mention Greenblatt's name more seldom. If one has become familiar with the community of Classicists and their mores, this shunning is chilling indeed. To the general public, however, it's almost entirely as good as imperceptible, and there's almost no way of learning that Greenblatt's assertions do not conform to the findings of current research. The few who've ventured further outside of the ivory tower in Greenblatt's case, to plainly state the distance between The Swerve and current scholarship, are solitary needles in the haystack of rapturous reviews of The Swerve by laypeople. And then there are those Classicists who've written reviews of The Swerve which are negative, but so polite that to many laypeople they may seem positive.

(We could make a game of this, and see which readers can guess which very famous Classicist I have, in a searing rebuke, deliberately avoided mentioning in this essay. But how would we discuss this? Not publicly, surely not.)

There are non-specialists selling millions of books, scientists reaching television audiences of tens of millions, who sometimes get things entirely wrong when it comes to ancient history or ancient texts. If historians and Classicists want to do anything about this, they might not have to become rude, but they will certainly have to speak up much more emphatically. The historians and Classicists who work on the same campuses as scientists who are wont to spread public misconception on historical topics could, perhaps, be so bold as to speak to those scientists about such things. Perhaps even face-to-face and out loud.

They could ask to be heard. They deserve to be heard.

Stephen Greenblatt and New Atheism

It took me a while, but I finally noticed the link between a recent source of aggravation, Stephen Greenblatt

and his profoundly misinformative and hugely popular book The Swerve,



and that earlier source of annoyance, those avid consumers and champions of misinformation, the New Atheists.

I had separated myself from the New Atheists. It was amazingly easy to do: I simply stopped seeking them out, and, to my amazement and immense relief, I rarely came across any of them any more. There was a whole big wonderful world out there which was almost entirely free of them. Almost.

New Atheists are atheists who believe that religion is the source of most or actually all of the world's problems, and who constantly talk and write about religion in this vein while being very careful never to learn anything about it. The classic example is Richard Dawkins, who is constantly going on and on about how Islam is the greatest threat to the world, and has never read the Koran and never will and is freakin' proud of it. New Atheists are constantly discussing a fictitious story about early Christianity and the creation of the Bible, while being very careful never to read more than a dozen or so verses of the Bible specially selected for their awfulness, or to learn anything about the ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity and the Bible first arose. They live in an echo chamber, only "learning" about the ancient Mediterranean world from each other, distrusting any and all actual experts.

I don't know whether Stephen Greenblatt is a New Atheist or has even heard of New Atheism, but how could New Atheists not love Stephen Greenblatt and his book The Swerve, which is so full of inaccurately hostile denunciations of Christianity?

I don't mind denunciations of Christianity -- I've written a few myself -- but I greatly prefer those which are factually accurate. Like this one, a positively furious book-length denunciation of Christianty which cuts much deeper than any New Atheists have dreamed of doing, although it is much less clumsily broad than their attacks: Der Antichrist,



written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had been appointed a full professor of Classics at the University of Basel at the astonishingly young age of 24. He was very well-versed in the literature of the ancient world in which Christianity and the Bible arose. At age 44, writing Der Antichrist, Nietzsche referred often to the New Testament in the original ancient Greek, although he found the Greek New Testament to be very badly-written, and reading it to be a very unpleasant experience. Nietzsche never was interested in taking the easy path, or so his writings make it seem. He was a scrupulous author, concerned, to a very unusual degree, that the things he wrote made sense. He wanted to make sure that his book about Christianity contained no inaccurately hostile denunciations, only accurate ones.

Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist in 1888, an extraordinarily productive year for him as a writer. (Was he hurrying because he felt the end of his sanity approaching?) This one book was written between the 3rd and the 30th of September, and then he went right on to other things, until the 3rd day of January, 1889, when he went suddenly, thoroughly and permanently insane, perhaps from the effects of a decades-old case of syphilis overpowering his brain at last. Or perhaps he went mad from exasperation at so many people who spoke and wrote on the topics he cared about, without bothering to be well-informed. Like the many people who've been glad to discuss Nietzsche with me, who've never read anything Nietzsche wrote. (What on Earth did they suppose they were discussing?) Like Greenblatt and the New Atheists, so eager to discuss things like Medieval monasteries and atheist philosophy, and so determined not to learn about them. What do they actually imagine they're talking about?

And what should I do about it? Simply avoiding New Atheism certainly has been comfortable. But maybe, ultimately, as thoroughly atheist as I am, I can't be completely comfortable just sitting back and watching religious forms of stupidity be replaced by equally stupid atheist ones. Maybe, as sweetly tempting as it is, I'm just not as Epicurean as that.

Gee, I hope this doesn't drive me completely and permanently mad.

Hell

What is the evangelischer Kirchentag, which was held a couple of days ago in Berlin, and at which Barack Obama met with Angela Merkel? I don't really know for sure, except that I'm sure we don't have anything exactly like it in the US.

I got the impression from the news that the Kirchentag was pretty laid back in general.

This guy was there, and he does not seem laid back:

His sign reads:

"A warning to all drunks, liars, party animals, drug freaks, adulterers, porn freaks, masturbators, whores, thieves, abortionists, magicians, gossipers, hypocrites, homosexuals, greedy people, idolators, feminists, false Christians, atheists, pagans: Hell awaits you!"

Thanks for the heads-up, Buddy!

Clearly, that sign represents a minority view among Christians today. The thing is, though, for most of the history of Christianity, it was not a minority view, it was mainstream. You could get into a lot of trouble for saying that anything on that list was not going to be punished by an eternity of torment in Hell.

As I've pointed out before on this blog: many Christians today, most of them, have beliefs which are entirely at odds with the beliefs of Christians in earlier eras. Which makes me wonder why they still keep calling themselves Christians.

I'm not upset enough about this to go around waving signs of my own. That would be the New Atheists. In fact, my experiences with New Atheists have made me a lot more tolerant of religious believers. New Atheists have removed all doubt from my mind that whether or not a person has religious beliefs is NOT a reliable indicator of that person's intelligence.

Still, this huge contradiction between the great majority of today's Christians (and adherents of other faiths) and the history of Christianity (and the histories of those other faiths) is -- really quite something.

Someone saw that picture above and remarked that John Paul II said there was no Hell.

John Paul II didn't say that. I'm pretty sure not even Pope Francis has said anything like that yet.

But Christians, a lot of them, busily revise the history of Christianity, rather than deal with the contradictions between their beliefs and the history of their religion. And, again, it's exactly the same with other religions today.

Yes, progressive Christians, I get that you're entirely different than that guy with his hateful sign. And I'm not going to get up all in your faces about the things on that sign, but it's still the very plain truth that THAT is traditional Christianity, and that you guys are making it up as you go and still, for some reason, calling it Christianity.

And I get the reasons, too: There's a Hell of a lot of tradition and inertia here besides all that stuff on the guy's sign, and a lot of good stuff, and billions of people can't be expected to suddenly just dispose of one of the centrals aspects of their lives.

Still. It would be nice to hear more often that this good stuff is based on nonsense. As opposed to refusing to face that the nonsense ever existed, and insisting that none of the stories in the Bible were taken literally before 19th century America, and all of that recent nonsense.

It would be nice.

Irish Police Investigate Old Boring Person For Blasphemy

I see headlines saying that Irish police have investigated Stephen Fry for blasphemy.

He's being investigated because a clergyman asked him on a TV show what he would say to God if, against all of his expectations, he were to find himself at the Pearly Gates, and he replied that he would say to God,

"How dare you create a world in which there is such misery? It’s not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"

If Fry were actually to end up going to prison for blasphemy, it will be a tragedy comparable to Oscar Wilde going to prison because some aristocrat was deflecting attention away from his poof of a son who'd had an affair with Wilde.

But he won't go to prison, assuming that this article by The Explainer is accurate. It says that the most that could happen to Fry is that he would be fined 25,000 Euros.

That would hardly be a tragedy for Fry personally, unless he's spent every cent he's ever made. He very likely makes 25,000 Euros a day, between all of his movies and TV shows and books, and he's been making enough money for long enough that 25,000 Euros is probably just a chuckle to him.

If it establishes a precedent and encourages Ireland to prosecute poor atheists, that's quite another story.

If this case causes Ireland to finally cease to prosecute blasphemy as a crime, that would be very good.

If Fry somehow engineered all of this so that there would be a huge amount of publicity around a blasphemy trial, causing Ireland to finally stop persecuting blasphemy as a crime, then that was brilliant. I don't think that's what Fry did, but if it is, then major congratulations are in order.

Now: it's getting harder and harder to remember all the way back to when Fry wasn't completely tedious. So Fry's mad at God? I'm not mad at God. You know why? BECAUSE GOD DOESN'T EXIST! I accuse Fry and all the rest of the New Atheists of atheisting improperly, of giving atheism a bad name and making the general public think that all atheists are horrible and boring. It's gotten so bad that many atheists are denying that they're atheists, calling themselves skeptics or nonbelievers or some other thing which means exactly the same as atheists, just because they don't want to be associated with Dawkins and Fry and Harris and Ricky Gervais and the rest of those idiots and bores.

But I would never want to see anyone be convicted of a crime just because they were boring.

Not even if they were as boring as that quote above by Fry, or as boring as Gervais' movie The Invention of Lying.

Vegans and Atheists

I assume that most vegans are pleasant and intelligent people with great senses of humor. However, I do not have any direct evidence to support this assumption.

I just assume that, just as Dawkins and Harris and Myers and (from beyond the grave) Hitch are making us (atheists) all look bad, so the humorless, self-righteous and just generally stupid among the vegans, because they make so damn much noise, are making vegans in general look bad. Surely you've heard something along the lines of: "I'm a vegan, and the joke you just told offends me because[...]" and the remark ends with something other than "[...]because I'm a humorless stiff."

There are few atheists who are constantly jumping up and down and yelling, "Hey! HEY! I'm an atheist, and I hate the way that the New Atheist keep talking about historical topics without bothering to learn about them first, and I've actually read the Koran, and I don't think we all should be afraid of Islam. Muslims are pretty much just people like others," and so on and so forth. In fact, I may be the only one.

Likewise, there are few vegans jumping up and down and yelling, "Hey! HEY! I'm a vegan, and I have a sense of humor! You could even tell me a joke about vegans and I'll probably think it's funny. Especially if it's a joke about those vegans everybody hates because they have no sense of humor! 'Everybody' meaning 'including almost all vegans', cause Duh!"

I assume that almost all vegans are like that, even in the absence of the jumping up and down and yelling.

The alternative would be to assume that a sense of humor actually is dependent upon ingesting animal protein and fat.

A Short Manifesto

Whether or not someone believes that God or gods exist is much less important to me today than before I met a lot of New Atheists who proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that atheism is no guarantee that a person is even a little bit bright. I'm pro-environment, pro-multi-culture, pro LGBT rights (which are just human rights, no more and no less), I'm in favor of universal health care and helping homeless people and refugees. Where people stand on issues like those is much more important to me than their religious beliefs. And despite what some New Atheists and some right-wing Christians will try to tell you, a person's religious beliefs or lack of them is no indicator of where they stand on any of those issues.

I'll admit that I tend to think of theology as worse than useless, but I've read enough philosophy to know that theology and philosophy aren't synonymous, even though many theologians and New Atheists seem to disagree. I think that studying history and philosophy is as important as studying science, and for similar reasons. (And history includes the history of religions, plural.) I like Nietzsche's statement (he was a philosopher, kiddies) that life without music would be a mistake. All the arts do is make life bearable. Many New Atheists are very strong in science, but they tend to cultivate the antagonism between science and the humanities, and that antagonism is very unfortunate -- and only a few centuries old, and much more pronounced in the US than in, for example, Germany. Milton wrote about science and Galileo wrote sonnets, and of course there was Leonardo da Vinci. You don't have to choose between science and the arts; in fact, it's very unfortunate when anyone is antagonistic toward one in the supposed name of the other.

How To Keep New Atheists From Annoying You

A few years ago I wrote on this blog that I had become so annoyed by New Atheists that I was considering converting to a religion, converting insincerely, just to spite them. And I meant it, I was considering it. But some time after that I found a very effective way to deal with the annoyance New Atheists caused me: I stopped hanging out with them. It is much easier than I had imagined to almost completely avoid them. Nowadays, every now and then a New Atheist will cross my path, but I don't engage with him -- almost always a him -- and pretty soon he's gone again.

Turns out they're not everywhere. Not even close. What a relief!

I have a lot less admiration for Bill Maher and Ricky Gervaise and Stephen Fry than I used to, because of their New Atheist tendencies. The last time I saw Fry on screen was in an Internet video of him debating with some churchman or theologian, who asked him to imagine that Heaven was real and that he had died and found himself at the Pearly Gates: what was the first thing he'd do? Fry immediately said that he'd ask God why He allowed suffering, launching into a very bitter and detailed description of some of the more horrible examples of suffering. And I thought to myself: Really! You find out, against your belief of what is possible, that Paradise is real and exists forever and ever, and the first thing you will do is complain. At that instant, I was completely done. The last ember of my patience for this kind of thing was ground out. I saw no reason at all to prefer Fry over the British churchman or theologian glowering angrily at him as he went on angrily about suffering and Why didn't God stop it. I just saw two angry, unreasonable old men, bitterly arguing about non-existent things, wasting their time and the viewer's time. It was as if I had come all the way down to the bottom of the slide which started at the top when I first heard there was this group called New Atheists, and was so excited, assuming that they were like me.



I have better things to do.

At least Fry and Gervaise still act, and Bill still often talks about things other than religion on his show.

And I still know of no atheist movement to which I can belong. But maybe that's not so bad. I'm not so annoyed at religion any more. I'm still an atheist, but now I have had extensive, exhaustive, thorough proof that atheism does not prove, at all, that a person is Bright. If you believe in God, that means that you and I disagree about one thing. We might agree about thousands of other things. Experiencing New Atheists up close day-in and day-out for years has left me much less bothered by religion, and much less inclined to make moderate believers responsible for the atrocities of the extremists. The moderates and I are both against the atrocities. I don't have to be a dick about less substantial things. Any more.

Before I met the New Atheists, I thought that there was a lot to say against religion. I'm not completely sure about that anymore. Seems like the New Atheists say five minutes' worth of stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

There might be much more to say against religion. It's just that none of the New Atheists seems at all likely ever to stumble over any of it.

There is definitely quite a lot to say about religion, simply because it encompasses great portions of the lives of billions of people over thousands of years all over the world. I can have all sorts of rewarding discussions with people about religion. I can discuss religion for a long time with someone without having a clue whether they believe in anything supernatural or not. But if it's been a long and rewarding discussion, I know that the person I've been talking to is neither a fanatical fundamentalist nor a New Atheist.

Mein Beileid, Deutschland: Auch Ihr Habt Jetzt New Atheists

Ich sehe einen Link nach der Jungen Welt: Leute wollen Lutherstrassen umbennen, weil Luther war ein Juden- und Frauenhasser.

Jein: war er. Ich bin gar kein Fan von Luther.

Aber wieviele Strassennamen muesste man aendern wenn Judenhass und Frauenhass als Grund dazu ausreichte? Wieviele beruehmten europaeischen Maenner der letzten 2000 Jahren waren NICHT sexistisch und antisemitisch?

Ja, es ist gut, wenn man sich an die haesslichen Seiten Luthers erinnert. Und Juden- und Frauenhass war nur zwei von gar vielen haesslichen Seiten von diesem duenkelhaften, kruden spaetmittelaelterlichen Monch, dem das Christentum seiner Zeit gar nicht christlich genug war. Waere noch besser, wenn man, zb, sich auch erinnern wuerde, wie weitverbreitet solches wie Judenhass und Frauenhass zu Luthers Zeit waren. (Obwohl der damalige Vatikan, gegen den Luther wetterte und wuetete, mE sehr viel weniger haesslich als Luther war. Dieser Vatikan unter Leo X und anderen Paepsten war einer der Hauptmotoren der Renaissance.)

Aha: ich habe auf dem Link geklickt: Atheisten ­fordern[...] Auch ich bin ein Atheist. Gar viele von uns sind Atheisten. Aber Gott sei dank (regt Euch ab, es ist bloss eine Redensart) sind nicht alle von uns solche Atheisten von Beruf, die sich so sehr ueber Geschichtliches aufregen und dabei so herzlich wenig Geschichte kennen. Pfui Teufel! (Redensart!) Hier in den US wollen sie die Zehn Gebote aus oeffentlichen Raeumen bannen, und sie verlangen, dass Islam "seine Reformation endlich haben." Dort in D, wo es unmoeglich ist, so wenig ueber die Reformation zu wissen als dass mein einen islamischen Luther herbeiwuenschen koennte, wollen sie Lutherstrassen wegschaffen. Nutzlose Narren hier wie dort.

Schopenhauer, Twain, Nietzsche, Russell und Sartre, um einige zu nennen, waren Atheisten, aber sie waren auch vieles mehr.

Schopenhauer war leider sexistisch und antisemitisch, aber er war auch vieles mehr. Nietzsche uebernahm Schopenhauers Sexismus, ueberwand aber seinen Antisemitismus, und tat noch vieles mehr. Aber diese Grauzonen in Menschen erkennen und diskutieren, das viele Trotzdem und Sovielalsauch in auch den Besten unter uns, solche Subtilitaet war nicht nach Luthers Geschmack, und sie ist gar nicht eine Eigenschaft der Atheisten, die jetzt verlangen, dass Lutherstrassen umbenannt werden, weil keinen sinnvolleren Gebrauch ihrer Zeit ihnen einfaellt.

Overcoming Bad Mental Habits

Western civilization: 2000 years ago, although the mass of people were in some senses less free than they are today -- for example, as many as 15% of the people in the Roman Empire, and as many as 40% of the population of Italy, were slaves -- still, most of them, even the slaves, were somewhat freer than we are today to speculate about religious matters.

That freedom of discussion began to go away as Christianity began to take over in the 4th century, and by the end of the 5th century, like the Roman Empire's territory in the West, it was almost completely gone.

Western civilization had adopted a very bad idea: that there was only one true religion and that no-one was allowed to have any other opinions about it. We in the Western world began to shake off this intolerance of discussion of religious things in the 17th century, and we're still shaking it off.

As Christianity has faded, capitalism has grown. As there was with Christianity before, there is very little tolerance for people (socialists) who say that capitalism is a bad idea. There is constant discussion about what kind of capitalism is best, much as the Western universities were once dominated by discussions of what kind of Christianity was best, but to say that capitalism itself is something which must be overcome is still today a lot like saying several centuries ago that Christianity itself was nonsense: it's bad for a career in business or politics.

Now I want to make it as clear as I can that I did not just say that capitalism is a religion. I said that I saw a similarity in the development of the two and their places in Western society in two different eras. But they're not the same thing.

If I point out that a cat and a dog both have fur, I am not saying that a cat is a dog or that a dog is a cat. That would be ridiculous.

But a lot of Christian theologians have said that capitalism is a religion. Other people have said it too, but it seems to be very common among the theologians to say that this or that thing which is not a religion, is a religion. Karl Barth said that everyone has a religion and that therefore everyone is a theologian of some sort.

Theologians are constantly saying completely nonsensical things like that. It seems to me that they have to say all sorts of nonsensical things in order to sustain religious belief, or, more precisely, in order to impede clear thought about religion.

Capitalism is not a religion. Neither is socialism, or golf. But because we in the Western world have become so inundated with theological nonsense and so used to it, many of us fall for absurd notions such as that a way of doing business or a sport can be a religion.

Clear thinking about religion tells us that, although it may have been very useful in the past, and may still serve many functions today, its major premises about supernatural creators and guardians and eternal reward and punishment and so forth, are all unsound.

Similarly, and once again I am by no means saying that capitalism is a religion, clear thinking about capitalism tells us that it has many shortcomings among its basic premises, and that we can do better. Capitalism is dog-eat-dog. It rewards sociopathological behavior. It is deeply, inherently unfair.

It is not particularly unusual for me to say that I am an atheist. It's becoming more and more common for people to just come right out and say that they're atheists. And we're not all extremely pugnacious and unpleasant about being atheists, the way that the New Atheists are. We're getting closer and closing to the level of religious tolerance which existed in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, when it was taken for granted that anyone was free to say want they wanted about religion and to believe and practice as they wished, and it was considered quite rude to denigrate anyone else's religion and insist that one's own was the only correct one.

They may be very many people today who believe that it would be best if society were organized so that everyone contributed to the well-being of all according to their abilities, and was cared for by all according to their needs. That's socialism. Capitalism and socialism are incompatible. Almost all of us are part-capitalist and part-socialist: part-capitalist because we have to be in order to survive within the capitalist system which dominates the world today; and part socialist, because we're decent human beings. There are very few people who are purely capitalistic all the time. They are awful, disgusting people like Donald Trump and the AIDS medication douchebag. But they are following the rules of capitalism very strictly: buy lo, sell high, put off payment as long as possible, don't let your effect on others even enter into your thoughts -- and because they've followed these rules so consistently, they're very rich. Very rich, loathesome sociopaths. The AIDS medication douchebag was always smirking in court and during interviews because he knew he was following the rules of capitalism. What's clear neither to him nor to most of the people nauseated by his behavior and smirk is that following the rules of capitalism all the time makes you a disgusting person.

Not all investors are the same, of course. Not all extremely wealthy people are the same. Not all capitalists are capitalists all of the time. Different billionaires get their billions in very different way, and do very, very different things with their billions. If Bernie Sanders grasps that, he's trying very hard to make it seem as if he doesn't. Prejudice is forming opinions about someone based on their membership in a group, rather than regarding them as individuals -- even if that group is the group of billionaires. Some billionaires are socialists to a very great degree, whether Bernie can grasp that or not, and whether the part-socialist billionaires realize it themselves or not.

"Antisocial" means both that you're against socialism and that you're an unpleasant person. "Social" means the same thing in both cases, and also in the case of the term "sociopath." Exactly the same. If you're an investor and you take actions which will tend to extend the life of the petroleum industry and hinder the growth of green energy, because you calculate that it will make you more money, you're a sociopath -- and a perfectly good capitalist. Watch the money shows on TV: the effect which investments will have on others never enters into the conversation unless someone has made a calculation that "green stocks" will make more money than others. On the money show this is all completely out in the open. Nobody's even the slightest bit embarrassed about ruining things for other people. The effect on other people is 100% beside the capitalist point of why they're there.

Capitalism = getting more and more money for yourself. Socialism = making the world a nicer place: cleaner air and water, fewer starving people, etc.

And none of that is exactly rocket science, but very few people are willing to face what they're able to understand about socialism and capitalism, the same way that very few people were able to face the fact that the stories in the New Testament made absolutely no sense, and that is was absurd to base all of society on them, although that, too, was quite plain to see, if one would but look.

Heute Auf Facebook Geblockt

Einer, der erklaert -- waehrend Krieg tobt und Kinder verhungern -- dass Halbaermelhemden fuer Maenner "verboten" seien. (Waehrend hungrige Kinder modische Kleider in Sweatshops naehen.)

Zwei, die einen Video von Philipp Moeller, einem deutschen New Atheist posteten. 77 Posts zum Thema New Atheists. Und hier der 78ste: es ist schrecklich, dass jetzt Deutschland seinen eigenen New Atheism entwickelt: Leute, die -- ganz aehnlich Modetyrranen und Moechtegern-Modetyrannen -- sehr wenig bis nichts zu sagen haben, und es unaufhoerlich sagen. Leute, die vollzeit, berueflich, neben jede Menge Quark auch das sagen, was sich in ein paar Minuten sagen laesst: "Es gibt kein Gott oder goetter oder Geister." -- Entschuldigt mich bitte. Von wegen Minuten, das laesst sich leicht in 3 Sekunden sagen -- und grosse Menschenmengen die ihnen dabei zujubuln und sie genial nennen. Als ein eigentlicher Genie kraenkt mich letzens besonders.

Noch jemand, die denselben Video postete, blockte ich nicht, weil ich mit ihr seit 15 Jahren oder mehr befreundet bin. Aber es ist erschreckend: eine kennt mich seit 15 Jahren und begeistert sich immer noch fuer solches. Soviel Zeit, so wenig Wirkung!

Aus der Sicht der Modetyrannen sind die meisten New Atheists Modesuender. Wenn die zwei Gruppen aufeinderquatschen koennten, und den Rest von uns verschonen!

Theology

Seen in an Internet meme:

"God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God." ― John Shelby Spong

God is just more thing people have created, and the main purpose of theology going back hundreds of years at least, and probably thousands of years into the past, has been to keep people confused about that very thing, to insulate them from that uncomfortable insight. A few years' worth of contact with New Atheists has left me much more sympathetic with people who just wish to be left in peace to continue to go to their churches, mosques, synagogues and other temples, but I still have just about no patience at all with theologians. Go ahead and worship God if you want to, just don't try to tell me that it makes sense to do so. (And let's not forget those who actually don't believe in God anymore, but still attend religious services for other reasons: for the music and art, or because their friends and family are there, or what have you. Our society's discussions about religion are not nearly open enough yet for us to have any idea how many people might be in this category)

I don't want to pick on most people any more for going about their religious habits and rituals, because it's just mean. The main reason people believe in God or gods is because it is comforting to do so. Subjecting the idea of God to real, honest scrutiny, and seeing that it just doesn't make sense, can be very painful. It certainly has been very painful to me. And if the leading alternative to belief, for the rank and file believers, is something no better than New Atheism, then in some cases it may be better, kinder, just to leave the rank and file alone.

Moving from the rank and file believers to the theologians, the official and unofficial representatives of the world's religions and those who rebel against those representatives, but have in common with them that they spend their entire careers studying and describing an omnipotent Being or beings which don't exist, which means that they're very free to just make stuff up as they go -- many of them, perhaps most, can be placed in one of two camps: firstly, there are those who also believe, and who use their studies to keep themselves blissfully confused as they keep their flocks confused; and secondly, there are those who do not believe, perhaps have never believed, but who see what a glorious scam it can be to exploit beliefs which are so widespread, beliefs which are at one and the same time so powerful and so fragile. In the first case you've got the blind leading the blind; and in the second case you've got shepherds more interested in shearing their sheep than in protecting them. Neither case is good.

And besides their congregations, those who seek out what they have to offer, there is the question of how much they will continue to interfere with those of us who aren't buying what they're selling. We pay lip service in the US to the concept of separation of church and state, but we're far from actually achieving that separation. One thing which is even farther from being achieved is the separation of church and academia, which leads to non-fact-based approaches to biology and climatology and history and every other field of inquiry.

Well. Here we are again where we've already been so often. The insistence on fact-based approaches to biology and climatology is gaining public support because it's becoming more and more obvious that we're going to need such approaches in order to survive as a species. When it comes to disciplines such as history, the interference of theology is much less widely understood, and therefore much more ingrained and tenacious. Two or three centuries ago, theologians absolutely controlled almost all of the universities in "Western civilisation." Since then, science has done a somewhat better job of freeing itself from that domination than have history and philosophy. Indeed, there is still a lot of crossover between theology on the one hand, and history and philosophy on the other. This has led some New Atheists to throw out the babies of history and philosophy along with the theological bathwater in which they sometimes swim, which in turn has led to a lot of New Atheist stupidity. See posts labeled new atheists in this blog. Religion doesn't poison everything, it hasn't been free of benefits, but it has crunked up a lot of things as well.

13th-Century Translations Of The Bible

On the first day of July, 2011, I published a post quoting a dispute I had with a couple of other people over some 13th-century translation of the Bible about which they claimed to know. I googled 13th-century bible translations and found some interesting things, but nothing having to do with 13th-century translations of the Bible. I googled "13th-century bible translations" and got 0 hits. 0 also for "13th-century translations of the bible."

Without quotation marks around the search terms, search results occur with references to the Cathars, and to their demands, in opposition to the Catholic Church, for vernacular translations of the Bible -- the opposite of what the idiots in the 2011 Wrong Monkey post claimed to know about, translations made by the Catholic Church. Maybe that's what the idiots had in mind. As I said, I've found references to demands made by the Cathars for translations of the Bible. I'm still looking for actual translations of Biblical texts made during the 13th century.

Someone claimed on Wikipedia that King Dinis of Portugal (1261-1325) translated a part of Genesis into Portugese, a translation which since has been lost.

On Wikipedia. I haven't so far been able to find any mention of this anywhere else.

Here we go: 13th-century Spanish translations: La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, a Spanish account of travels in the Holy Land, appeared early in the 13th century and contained Biblical passages in the vernacular. And was suppressed by the Council of Tarragona in 1234. And then a complete Castilian Bible appeared under the reign of the renowned scholar and patron of scholars, Alfonso X, King of Castile, León and Galicia from 1252 to 1284.

I could be wrong, but I don't think this is what the idiots were thinking of back in 2011. I think it was more like this: some New Atheists overheard something somewhere about King James having some Bible verses altered in the King James Bible to suit his political ends. Without first bothering to learn which verses these were or how or why they were altered, they took this assertion of politic-religious mendacity and ran with it, put it through their New Atheist echo chambers and games of Elephant, and by the time these particular idiots met me, they thought they had learned about Bible translations (into what language or languages?) made by the Catholic Church (by whom in the Catholic Church?) to suit the Church's agenda (in what way?), and without even posing any of the question in parentheses there, let alone answering them, they thought that they had blown the lid off of an historical scandal.

Something like that. This is what many New Atheists do, which they think is studying history. The way they tend to react to people who actually know something about the historical topic they think they're discussing, is illustrated by they the way they behave toward me in the Wrong Monkey post from 2011 linked above. I for one am not getting paid nearly enough to put up with that sort of treatment. Why would actual historians want to hang around for it, when some of us actually appreciate what they do? I wonder how Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson get treated when they try to talk to Bill Maher about vaccines.

It's stupidity. Stupidity isn't merely ignorance, it's the dogged determination to remain ignorant.

Bill Maher: "Islam Needs A Reformation"

One thing which made me tired of the New Atheist movement was the unrelenting tendency to equate Christianity with fundamentalism, Islam with ISIS, etc.

And, as I've mentioned before on this blog, there's the very unfortunate combination of constantly talking about religions with not knowing very much about them, not studying their history, which pretty much amounts to not studying human history in general. Again last night on "Real Time," Bill Maher -- who is not all bad, and who started off the show in a very knowledge-based way, talking to an environmentalist and saying, quite accurately, that climate change is the world's #1 political issue at the present time, because if we don't deal with it it will kill us all -- said not for the first time that Islam needs a Reformation.

Spoken like a New Atheist who knows squat both about Islam and about the Western Christian Reformation. (Western Christian: the Orthodox and Syriac and Armenian and Coptic and Ethiopic Churches weren't involved in the Reformation. It all happened among Catholics.) For one thing, there is no one thing which Islam needs because Islam is very far from being one unified entity. (Although I'm sure that one thing most Muslims would appreciate is if people like Maher would learn more about them and pontificate about them less.)

For another thing, an atheist who calls for a religious Reformation knows squat about the Reformation. The leaders of the Reformation, Jan Huss, Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, were much more pious and rigidly literalist and grimly fanatical than the Catholic Church around them, not less. Hus wore a hair shirt and trembled his whole life at the memory of how as a youth he had had a couple sips of wine and played a few games of dice. Before he invented Lutheranism, the Catholic monk Luther traveled to Rome and was outraged by how secular and worldly and non-Biblical the Church in Rome had become. And when some peasants misunderstood Luther's break from the Catholic Church as a call for them to rise up and free themselves from their feudal masters, Luther wrote to those masters and urged them to kill the rebellious peasants like dogs, which they did. Jean Calvin, besides giving the world the doctrine of predestination, was also an avid hunter and burner of witches, and the Puritans who hung and crushed dozens of witches in Salem in the 1690's were largely Protestant in their theology.

That was the Reformation: the hardcore nuts among the Catholics breaking away from the main Church because it wasn't hardcore enough. Protestantism has changed quite a lot since it began, and diversified so much that it's difficult to define the entire group of Protestants in any meaningful way, and there have been some ironic changes, such as that way that the Congregationalist Church, which used to be the witch-hunting Puritans, is now one of the most liberal and free-thinking of Christian denominations. But that was the Reformation.

What does Islam need? Well, different Muslims need all sorts of different things. One thing which I think would benefit all people, Muslims, Christians, atheists and others, is if history were more intensively and rigorously studied. That would tend to decrease the frequency with which people said clueless, unhelpful things, like Bill Maher saying that Islam needs a Reformation.

New Atheism: Because Thinking Is Hard

75 years ago, the most prominent exponents of atheism were Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. Today it's Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. Then, English-speaking atheists watched No Exit and read The Stranger, or at least pretended to have read it; today, New Atheists repeat Hitchens' would-be bonmot "religion poisons everything" and think of ways to insult religious believers with Facebook memes, and pay for billboards which are basically identical to those memes.

I suppose it's risky to actually try to understand people with whom one disagrees. What if one eventually understands so well that one no longer disagrees and becomes one of them? Why look at good things which some religious people do in the name of religion, when it could make things look more complicated than the memes showing clergy who are thieves and child molesters, and congregations who are blind, fearful, obedient, fleeced sheep? Yes, there are some clergy and some congregations who are like that. But others are somewhat different. Some New Atheists definitely do not want to talk about religious believers who do not fit their favorite stereotype, whether it's Christian congregations who actually use most of the collection-plate money for charity work instead of Super Fly lifestyles for the clergy; or Muslims who actually are peaceful and opposed to terrorism; or Muslims who do not advocate subservient roles for women, and actually don't torture, misfigure or kill women who are assertive; or whatever doesn't fit their pet stereotypes.

I agree with the New Atheists that belief in God or multiple gods is mistaken. I agree that this belief can have many negative effects. But I also think that New Atheism is having many negative effects. I don't think we're going to overcome religion by sneering at it. I don't think "We're all atheists -- I just believe in one less God than you do." is brilliant; on the contrary, everytime I see it on a sign someone's holding at a rally or on a billboard or a meme I just go: Uhhhhhhh, (That was a sound of disgust) that again? I really cannot imagine a Christian or a Muslim finding it clever, much less convincing. And of course Hindus and other polytheists are liable to feel both disgusted and slighted, treated as if they don't exist or don't matter.

How many minds are actually being changed by simpleminded garbage like that, or like holding up a sign next to someone holding up a sign with a religious message saying "FUCK THIS GUY", or a meme showing a collection plate and a caption comparing Christianity to a family of children paying their abusive father not to punish them, or the popular message "YOU KNOW IT'S NOT TRUE", etc? It all seems to me like a lot of people agreeing with each other and slapping each other on the back.

Eh. Maybe that's what they need, if they come from abusive fundamentalist backgrounds and have never before felt safe expressing disbelief, and never before met others who don't believe. Maybe they have a lot of hurt to get out of their systems, and need a place where they're allowed to vent.

See what I did there? I made an attempt to understand people whom I loathe for the constant stream of nonsense they produce. Because if we never understand them, how are we ever going to have any clue about how to interact with them in any way which is at all productive?

And, on the off-chance that someone is reading this who was one of those atheists who badly needed to know that there were others, who needed to escape from an abusive religious home; but now agrees with some of my critique of the New Atheist scene, which is beginning to annoy him or her, and wants to get a bit deeper -- welcome. There are a few others like us: atheists disenchanted with the New Atheists. I don't know whether we yet have a name, which we can use to distinguish ourselves from the New Atheists, to make it clear that we're not with them, that we realize "religion poisons everything" is a bit of an oversimplification, etc. I have suggested the name Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheists.

The New Atheist Approach To Anthropology

This (an actual quote from a real-life person) is what passes for a theory of the origin of religion in the New Atheist echo chamber this month:

"that fine line, or moment (period maybe) in history where we went from hunter-gatherers to settled civilized people, seems to me that certain people took advantage by creating stories etc to put themselves in positions of power. that's the answer, these people cut themselves off from what went before, they invented something and now they won't let go"

Oh. Okay. So now we know. (Good thing YOU didn't invent anything.)

Travel In California

A Facebook friend wrote about how Unitarians, Quakers and Buddhists travel to San Luis Obispo and asked what other ways there are.

TRAVELER: Do you happen to know how I can get to San Luis Obispo?

NEW ATHEIST: Who CARES?!

TRAVELER: Um... Actually, I do, I'm trying to get there.

NEW ATHEIST: Why don't you ask your GOD to take you there?! *laughs and high-fives other New Atheists*

TRAVELER: Um... Actually, I don't believe in God --

NEW ATHEIST: -- Oh yeah?! Then how can you stand to take your nice little pleasure cruise down to Saint -- whatever it's called, when the world is being tyrannized by superstition?!

TRAVELER: Uhhh... Actually, I'm driving, not taking a cruise.

NEW ATHEIST: It sounds like it was named after some Catholic anyway. What's going on, are they having some child-molesting festival in Saint Whatever? *more laughter and high-fiving among the New Atheists*

TRAVELER: Um... Actually, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a building there, and I'm studying archi --

NEW ATHEIST: Who CARES?!

TRAVELER: Um... *runs away*

NEW ATHEIST: People like that are just getting in our way!

OTHER NEW ATHEISTS: In our way!

NEW ATHEIST: People like that are lukewarm!

OTHER NEW ATHEISTS: Lukewarm!

NEW ATHEIST: A guy like that still lets religious leaders tell him what to think.

OTHER NEW ATHEISTS: What to think!