How New Atheists Can Make Even Someone Like Reza Aslan Look Bright By Comparison

You heard me, pardner: there's a feud a goin' on between Reza Aslan and the New Atheists, and I must take Aslan's side.

A lot of people, probably most of them Christians, heard about that awful woman who reads the diatribes posing as news on Fox News ask Aslan how he as a non-Christian could dare to write a book about Jesus, and naturally took Aslan's side. Maybe some of them first actually read something by Aslan after that interview and said, Hm, this guy isn't much of a writer, but still, between him and that lady on Fox, I'm totally on his side.

In a not dissimilar way, I and some other atheists have seen the Harris-vs-Aslan shitstorm gathering force, and been terribly unimpressed by Aslan, but still side with him immediately and unconditionally on topics of religion if it's a choice between him and Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.

Aslan has become famous with a supposedly nonfictional book about Jesus which is just as fictional as most supposedly nonfictional books about Jesus are. Like the authors of most of these books, Aslan has created a Jesus in his own image, or in the image of what he flatters himself to be. There's so little we actually know about Jesus that whoever writes an entire book about him, or even a book which long sections about him, has to make stuff up. Some of us, like me and Kazantzakis and Gore Vidal, have been honest enough with ourselves and the world to call these books what they are: novels. (And Kazantzakis' novel about Jesus, for one, is effin brilliant. Basically, he told the story of the Gospel of Judas decades before the Gospel of Judas was discovered.)



Aslan is no Kazantzakis and no Ehrman, but he's making a decent effort. Sam Harris is making a spectacle of himself. Aslan said that there is no relationship between religious texts and the lives of religious believers, and that was very silly, of course, but instead of acknowledging that of course he couldn't literally have meant that, the New Atheists have seized upon it and gone on an on and on about how ridiculous Aslan's statement is.

As opposed to making the slightest effort to understand what Aslan meant, which is that there are a wide variety of interpretations of the Koran, and a wide variety of beliefs and political positions among Muslims. Exactly the same way that they obsess on the few verses from the Koran or the Bible which cast Islam or Judaism or Christianity in the worst possible light, and ignore the rest of those books. (Let me take the opportunity to once again call BULLSHIT on the vast majority of New Atheists who claim to've read the Koran and Bible cover-to-cover.) Or the way that some of them reacted to Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist? by going on and on about some drawing of a bird in the Vatican and how that drawing supposedly exposed Ehrman as a fraud. That was bizarre, the way they went on about that drawing. I wish I could say it was atypical.

Aslan is attempting to point out the diversity in the actual lives of the actual more than one billion Muslims in the world, over the din of the New Atheists saying Oh there's some horrible stuff here in the Koran, Oh we've got to watch out for these Muslims, Oh, be very, very afraid -- a din which of course fits in very nicely with the islamophobic rhetoric of people like the aforementioned Fox News correspondent who asked Aslan how he got the nerve to write about Jesus without even being a Christian.

Of course Aslan pointed it out in a very unfortunate and clumsy way when he said that there is NO connection between the lives of believers and the texts of the holy books of those believers. Still, his point was against prejudice -- against assigning characteristic to Muslims because they are Muslims instead of looking closer and regarding them as the individual human beings they are. And that is a point which urgently needs to be made in our society which still suffers from so much prejudice against and fear of Muslims. Between Aslan's attempt to counter this prejudice and fear, and the New Atheists stirring it up, there's no question that any and every intelligent atheist must side with Aslan. In spite of the frequent facepalms over the clumsy way Aslan expresses himself, the message he expresses is far the wiser one. Stemming the tide of violence is far more urgent than whether or not someone believes in God. Identifying with and supporting Muslims fighting against extremism and Christians countering prejudice and fear is far more important than critiquing ancient texts.

And once again, New Atheists, if you're going to critique those texts, read the whole texts first. That's a bare minimum to have a chance not to look like fanatical fools. Don't keep telling me you already have -- like I keep telling you: I don't believe you. Show me you have, by saying something intelligent about the entire Koran or the entire Bible.

In The Reza-Aslan-Vs-The-New-Atheists Flapadoodle, I'm Rooting For Neither Side

What a bunch of idiots. On either side people are twistng their opponents' words and trying hard not to understand one thing about what their opponents actually mean. (Not that there's a tremendous amount, on either side, to be understood.) This isn't a debate, it's the forensic equivalent of pro wrestling, except that the wrestlers aren't even in on the scam.

So, they're fighting about the Koran and its relationship to terrorism. On the one hand Aslan says that there is no relationship when we're talking about people who scream verses from the Koran as they commit acts of terrorism. On the other hand there are over a billion Muslims, and perhaps as many as 30,000 men in ISIS, and the New Atheists constantly talk as if those 30,000 were representative of the whole billion, interrupted by frequent protestations that they're doing nothing of the sort. Lately it's become fashionable to accuse any and all of their opponents of being "dishonest" and "cowardly." I think the real cowards are keeping their heads down and hoping that the New Atheists will simply go away, as most people do most of the time when confronted with raving lunatics.

An anonymous post on Richard Dawkins' website asserts that:

"Aslan insists that approaching these holy books the way most people approach most books — by reading the words on their pages precisely as they are written and assuming that the author actually meant what he wanted to say — is somehow 'unsophisticated.'”

The irony of this accusation coming in the midst of a diatribe accusing Aslan and Ben Affleck of making bigoted, racist statements about Muslims, simply because they said that the Koran was not the only source of Muslims' motivations for their actions, must be striking for almost anyone but a New Atheist. (Affleck is the only individual mentioned in this post I don't consider to be an idiot. I think he's very smart. So's Maher, but he has some dumb friends. Okay, so that's a total of 2 smart people, Affleck and Maher.)

"As my friend Christopher Massie points out: 'The conclusion that disproportionate numbers of intrinsically violent and misogynistic people reside in a certain region of the world could not be more bigoted or racist.'”

It also couldn't be further from anything that either Aslan or Affleck ever said, but you're off to the races already.

"Here’s the thing: there is good reason to believe that neither Aslan nor Affleck is racist or bigoted."

Well, of course. And it'd be a shame, wouldn't it, anonymous blogger, if people thought you had accused either Aslan or Affleck of bigotry or racism simply because you said that things they said were racist and bigoted.

Nonsense Doesn't Matter Except That It's Everywhere

I wouldn't care much about Reza Aslan or his new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazarethexcept that, imitating Salman Rushdie and the Ayatollah Khomeini, Aslan's book was propelled to nationwide-#1-bestseller status in the wake of a stupid Fox News interviewer asking him how dare he, a Muslim, write about Jeebus. History has repeated itself as farce: Rushdie, a brilliant writer,was lifted to superstardom because religious fanatics were under orders to assassinate him; Aslan, a mediocre writer, has become a superstar because a Fox talking head said something hilariously stupid even by the standards of Fox. Aslan isn't stupid, but he's very, very far from writing as well as Rushdie, and his book is the 7-bazillionth example of the Jesus-as-Rorschach-test genre: we're all pretty much familiar with the New Testament Jesus; New Testament scholars, from Albert Schweitzer through John Dominic Crossan to Aslan, expand upon and/or depart from the basic familiar narrative and incorrectly label their work nonfiction. Not only did Nikos Kazantzakis write a much better Jesus story than those other three, he also called his version what it is, a novel.

I wouldn't care much about the assertions that the entire story of Jesus is copied from other myths, except that it's everywhere and it's proponents are every bit as resistant to discussion as any religious fanatic. List a dozen or so substantial variations from the myth of Oedipus, or Dionysis, or Hercules, or Perseus, or Osiris, or Theseus, or Prometheus, or Romulus, or Lucifer -- if you know any of those myths it's not hard to come up with a dozen ways in which the story of Jesus varies from each one of them -- and ask the turnip smugly smiling as he says that the Jesus story is 100% copied to respond to your objections to his thesis, and he'll respond as if he didn't hear your challenge at all, and chide you for not having read his favorite mouth-breathing author's book-length rant about how they did too steal it, and conclude that obviously your faith (doesn't matter a lick to him if you're an atheist) is obviously threatened by having come into the truth he's layin' down, and -- well, I'm sure you've met idiots yourself and know what they're like. The ones claiming that Jesus' story is 100% STOLEN -- they like to use the word "stolen" -- and that the Bible is a game of Telephone, these morons wouldn't matter much except that there are so many of them. (The story of the fictitious manuscript in the the preface to Umberto Eco's Il Nome Della Rosa --now THAT is a tale of a game of Telephone, which, although fictitious, will surely delight anyone who actually knows anything about the transmission of texts originating in the Middle Ages or earlier.)

Dan Brown wouldn't matter to me a bit if he hadn't sold hundreds of millions of copies of his silly books crammed with factual errors often taken for facts, in part because Brown insists they are facts when he isn't covering his ass by pleading that his books are just fiction.

Idiots who don't get that humans are warming the climate or who don't care wouldn't bother me if they weren't numerous enough to elect public servants.