13 December 2006

The gateway drug to Stalinism

It seems to be very easy to tar any atheist as an inhumane communist. In addition to the exchange mentioned in my last post, it's a throwaway point in this opinion piece in NYT, by N.D.Kristof:

Granted, religious figures have been involved throughout history in the worst kinds of atrocities. But as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot show, so have atheists.


A slightly less grazing treatment by Rod Liddle in The Spectator:

By far the weakest part of The God Delusion is when Dawkins attempts to explain why atheistic regimes have far outdone religious regimes in their murderousness, their inhumanity. [...]

Isn't that the point, I suggest. That with one set of values removed, another will always fill its place? That if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled — and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves? [...]

By Dawkins's argument, the moral imperatives of 500 years ago were, de facto, right then — and wrong now. In the end, it leaves you without a real sense of right and wrong, merely a constantly shifting plane — and thus open to the malefactions of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot.


(Note the sly little insertion of Hitler, who won an election in a Christian country.)

Anyway, the presumption seems to be that not having a religion to which everyone is expected to conform will almost automatically lead to seduction by malevolent dictators. This sort of thing keeps popping up, so presumably it has some sort of resonance with people.

The best counter I've seen is Sam Harris:

(Who decides what is good in the Good Book? Answer: We do. Our moral intuitions are still primary. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to think that we get our basic sense of right and wrong out of scripture).


Presumably there is some feeling that having an Authority gives you the proverbial moral anchor. Which would be why Italy, being anchored firmly to the pope, has no problems with organized crime.

Maybe there's a sense that some types gravitate towards dogmatism, and that it's better for them to join a moderate church than a totalitarian movement. But really, are Dawkins or Harris against free speech, or for outlawing churches? Implicit in this is also that people with these inclinations won't just go for the most dogmatic community he can find, religious or not. Religions are tacitly presumed to be basically mostly beneficial.

As for "answerable to nobody but ourselves," it paints a picture of someone who makes himself out to be a god, rather than someone godless in an actual society. People in a society will develop norms, because this is a very fundamental feature of humanity. Any people, anywhere, will negotiate "social contracts" between themselves rather than just pulling random individual codexes out of thin air.

Anyone truly megalomaniac will easily think to pay lip service to the prevailing deity, if that is what it takes: on this note, check out Liddle's complete non-mention of Mussolini in his list of dictators. Mussolini has to be omitted, of course, as he exemplifies that totalitarian leaders can be quite perpendicular to strong religiosity.

10 December 2006

Lumping towards futility

This argument between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Dennis Prager, who is some warmongering radio talk show host, is of course unfruitful practically by definition, as it's on wether God exists.

Before you shout "next!", though, the back-and-forth seems to reveal one interesting thing, about categorizing. Somewhere about here, a familiar lumping-together rears its head:

Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters."


The salient thing about this, and the reason I'm even mentioning this discussion, is that Harris also lumps together, but in a different way. Prager, responding to the strategy "we are all atheistic about Zeus":

But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?


In the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. What on Earth does that even mean? It means that Prager is indignant at being lumped together with those false believers. Harris operates with a category 'religion' which contains, well, religion, and Prager has a big faceted category labeled 'true religion' ("Judeo-Christianity" and conformity) and a wastebasket of 'false religions and abominations' (everything else).

So Harris is in the same intellectual league as Stalin, because he's one of those, you know, those secularists. Regardless of the fact that Harris does not appear to be a Marxist-Leninist, nor a Stalinist.

01 December 2006

I can't seem to stop looking at this photo.