New Atheism and Your Probs With It, If Any

[vanlose kid]

more new atheist wimpiness and mendacity.

Atheism and Violence


Atheists who lay claim to the intellectual inheritance of the Enlightenment have traditionally presented religion as intolerant and the cause of much avoidable violence, and atheism as the best strategy for a maximally tolerant and violence-free world. However, the history of atheistic states (especially the ex-Soviet Union) has tended until recently to encourage a more sober assessment by atheists of the relationship between atheism and violence than was hitherto assumed. The leading philosophical atheist Michael Martin, for example, speculating in 1989 about the likely consequences of a widespread growth in atheism globally,[1] stated his belief that there would 'probably' be fewer wars and less violence than there is now; however, he also acknowledged (evidently with the still existent USSR in mind) 'the danger that if atheism became widespread, as it has in the Soviet Union and in other countries of the world, it would become the functional equivalent of a state religion with the suppression of theistic minorities'. Martin notes that this is 'not a necessary consequence of widespread atheism; but it is of course a possibility'.[2] Martin furthermore notes that not only is there no necessity for a religious society to exercise suppression of religions, but that 'there are good moral reasons for avoiding it'; however, he nevertheless acknowledges that there is always the possibility that 'atheists, no less than theists, might want to suppress what they did not believe was true or what they thought was dangerous'.[3]

Against the background of more cautious and historically informed judgements of the relationship between atheism and violence such as that of Martin and others, the more recent pronouncements of the New Atheists generally appear by contrast to recall the optimism of atheistic materialists of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, for whom atheism seemed to offer the promise of bringing about a more violence free world. However, both the history of atheism and the political history of the West suggests that the optimism of eighteenth century atheists as the Baron d'Holbach was misplaced, a point that authors like Martin seem ready to concede but which New Atheists like Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens have generally preferred to underplay.

References

Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: The Case against Religion. London: Atlantic Books, 2007.
Martin, Michael. Atheism : A Philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

http://www.investigatingatheism.info/violence.html

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[wintler2]

Humans generally prefer the illusion of understanding what is going on, hence superstition & religiousity appear in all cultures, and it is amusing to see same in those atheists unreasonably certain of their case. Regardless of whether god exists, it has and will always be invented, and clung to by many.

Given that, to weld any cause to the devaluing of this basic human tendency is stupid politics, and if i was a leftist leader i wouldn't be seen in the same postcode as militant atheists. As materialism stops delivering, religious innovation will flourish, and Dawkins will be just another prophet from a bygone age.

[Canadian_watcher]

great posts... a pleasure to read everyone's thoughts/experiences.
I'd add that one of the major problems I (and my husband the atheist now moving towards agnostic) have is this notion that atheism is a 'cause.'
A cause? Really?

Atheism certainly is a cause as long as children are indoctrinated in death-worship and fundamentalist religion...

if Atheism becomes a cause then it'll be its own death-worshipping fundamentalist religion. (I say that like it already isn't, although it looks like it is when spoken of by Dawkins et al.)

And see.. there it is again, really. "Et al." There shouldn't be an et.al when it comes to something like atheism. Just like there shouldn't be for vegetarianism. You don't want to eat meat, fine, but if you insist that no one else should eat meat then you've crossed a line from 'I don't eat meat because of my beliefs' into "my beliefs should be your beliefs"

right?

I think I'm right on this.

Fight the injustices, by all means - but why does that fight have to start with taking God away from believers? Seems to me your problem is not with God (or the lack of) it's with the men and women wrapped up in the rules men and women created for other men and women wrt to their Gods. Which.. if you look at it.. is precisely what you are advocating Atheists get mucked up in.

[vanlose kid]

...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/07/ ... blem/print

November 07, 2012

The New Elites, Religiosity and Inequality
Atheism and the Class Problem

by DAVID HOELSCHER

The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

~ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

...

expanding on the bullshit in the above:

Enlightenment Optimism


The strategy of the New Atheists has been to downplay the accusation that atheism has led to secular tyrannies (Marxism and Nazism), and stress the tradition of atheist secular humanism.[1] When Christopher Hitchens, for example, in his God is not Great: the Case against Religion (2007) calls in his final chapter for the 'need for a new enlightenment' he appeals to the tradition of Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot and d'Holbach in France, and Hume, Paine, Bradlaugh, and Russell in Britain and America. Indeed, the mainline atheistic wing of the French Enlightenment (and the British and secular humanism which championed its ideals in the next century) was committed to the idea - first anticipated by Pierre Bayle - that a secular society could be equally if not more virtuous and supportive of the social peace than a religious one.

The prominent atheist of the French Enlightenment Jacques-Andre Naigeon (1738-1810), for instance, commented that just as religions cannot agree with one another, a universal secular morality based on a common recognition of how we are determined by nature to seek our survival, well-being, and avoidance of suffering[2] provided no such grounds for unnecessary conflict. As Alan Kors has noted, Naigeon regarded Christianity as the cause of avoidable cruelty, superstition, and intolerance'[3] but believed that by removing this irrational support for such things, atheism 'put human beings in a relationship to natural phenomena and the quest for well- being that offered our only hope of amelioration'[4]. As Kors further notes, d'Holbach and Naigeon, the two foremost atheists of the Enlightenment, saw their materialistic atheism finally as more a moral than a philosophical choice - a strategy for achieving well-being.

The fundamental assumption underpinning their hope in the relatively violence free nature of a purely secular society was their belief that humans were inherently virtuous, and that religion represented a (corrigible) perversion of their inherent virtuousness. According to Naigeon, human beings' basic instincts are directed towards the achievement of well-being so that we were predisposed to love one another and enjoy a peaceful co-existence in this world; religion, however, as Kors observes, 'was regarded by Naigeon as 'a war against those natural tendencies, and its claim to authority was that it spoke on behalf of 'a fierce God whom it presents as the Tyrant of the human race'. Religion itself was born of fear, melancholy, ignorance, and a disordered imagination only a rethinking of the human relationship to nature and, consequently, to happiness could alter such a sad state of affairs. People would seek to understand and change the physical and social condition of mankind only after they understand that the 'force' governing phenomena was merely the 'necessary laws' of an amoral physical nature...atheism...alone could lead us to seek the satisfaction of our needs and the diminution of our pains among their actual causes'[5].

This optimism about pristine human nature unadulterated by religion may be said to be the fundamental conviction underpinning the hopes of enlightened atheists (both in eighteenth century France and in Britain and America in the following century) in a relatively violence free atheist future.

References

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: The Case against Religion. London: Atlantic Books, 2007.
Kors, Alan Charles. "The Atheism of D'holbach and Naigeon." In Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by Michael Hunter and David Wootton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

http://www.investigatingatheism.info/enlightenment.html

Post-Enlightenment

Sade
However, there were dissenting voices on this matter even within the French Enlightenment, most notably (but not only) the Marquis de Sade. By contrast with atheists such as d'Holbach and Naigeon, De Sade's atheistic moral nihilism endorsed violence; indeed, like Nietzsche a century after, De Sade encouraged violence as a way in which the superior sort of human being honoured nature (which itself is prodigiously violent).[1] According to De Sade, Christians have succeeded in enslaving and weakening the aggressive type of person which nature created as a free and cruel being.[2] Notwithstanding the Christian 'slave morality', in De Sade's view everything is allowed, from prostitution, divorce, incest, rape, and infanticide; nothing forbids us from seeking our desires at the cost of others, and nothing is more satisfying than exercising our will to destroy and to inflict cruelty.[3]

What one in fact finds in De Sade, as in Nietzsche whom he strikingly prefigures, is a disturbing form of 'ethics' which belongs quite outside conventional morality. As Schroeder has noted, De Sade held that nature, which acts destructively, demands from us the harming and destruction of others: in fact, he raises aggression and cruelty to a norm that should be pursued, being as it were a 'true law of nature'.[4] He does not deny that we also have natural altruistic feelings, but he believes that they should be snuffed out since the law of nature primarily demands cruelty. Every failure to act with cruelty is a crime against nature.[5] What fundamentally distinguishes De Sade from men such as d'Holbach and Naigeon is his willingness to recognise in human beings not just tendencies towards altruism but also towards the most unbridled sort of egoism.

Schopenhauer and Stirner
Not all atheists who subsequently diverged from mainstream Enlightenment atheism in their view of human nature took the Sadist view. As Robert Wicks has noted, Schopenhauer diverged just as deeply from d'Holbach and Naigeon in his view of human nature. He regarded the human world as essentially one of constant struggle, where each individual thing strives against every other in a permanent war and as a result advocated a morality very much in the spirit of Christianity, as well as the sacred scriptures of India.[6]

Not all of the 'pessimistic' psychologising atheists took this view however; Max Stirner, for example, stood closer to Sade in promoting unbridled egoism, which did not take account of the interests of others. This attitude is encapsulated in Stirner's disturbing formulation 'What you have the power to do, you also have the right to do' ('Was Du zu sein die Macht hast, dazu hast Du das Recht').[7]


Nietzsche
The definitive representative of this strand of European atheism is Friedrich Nietzsche, who alongside Feuerbach is often regarded as the best known modern atheist. It is striking, then, that the New Atheists fail to engage with his thought (Nietzsche does not appear in Dawkins' The God Delusion or Hitchens' God is Not Great; he is only mentioned in a footnote in Sam Harris' The End of Faith and only in passing in Dennett's Breaking the Spell). As Winfried Schroeder notes, the late Nietzsche, like De Sade, explicitly encouraged violence; according to him, the superior type of human being (or Übermensch) was entitled (indeed, obliged) to exercise cruelty and violence over his inferiors. Nietzsche believed that morality constituted a 'capital crime' against life, by which he meant that it frustrated those forms of individual behaviour by which (according to him) the superior sorts of people most authentically express themselves - such as sexuality, greed, the will to dominate, and cruelty. As such, it stood in the way of the realisation of a future elite race of 'supermen'.[8]

According to Schroeder, Nietzsche's fully developed critique of morality in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) leaves the reader in no doubt that Nietzsche saw the destruction of the most basic moral principles - including the fundamental moral obligation not inflict gratuitous harm on others - as the only position consistent with a genuine rejection of God. According to Nietzsche, traditional morality was essentially a product of Jewish, and subsequently Christian, resentment against the original aristocratic values of strength, pride, and hardness of heart of their pagan political masters.[9]Nietzsche traces the Judeo-Christian moral principles of non-violence, impartiality and altruism to the particular group interests of the subordinated Jews and Christians.[10]Consequently, since traditional morality is merely the product of particular group interests, it loses its claim to universal validity.[11]

Schroeder notes that having exposed Judeo-Christian egalitarianism and universalism as a mere disguise for the promotion of their particular interests, Nietzsche promotes a particularist morality for the 'strong'. Hardness of heart, cruelty, and the will to annihilate the inferior sort of human beings constitute the basic components of his 'ethics' which he proposes should replace the old (religious) morality.[12] As Schroeder further observes, Nietzsche did not stop at seeking the physical annihilation of those human beings whom he considered the detritus of life ('Ausschuss und Abfall des Lebens').[13] Like De Sade, the harming - and also the killing - of supposed inferiors is not only allowed by Nietzsche but positively encouraged, for the sake of the improvement of the race.

Marx and Marxist-Leninism
Another very influential strand of atheism which condoned violence was Marxist dialectical materialism. Marxism and Marxist-Leninism undoubtedly permitted violence as a means to an end, namely, the establishment of the communist society. The Marxist theory of ideology, as well as Marxist-Leninism which interpreted Marx faithfully in this respect, regarded morality as a mere ideological product or epiphenomenon of material conditions prevailing within a given society. It saw in morality no binding reason not to exercise violence in the achievement of its political ends, since the ideological critique had supposedly exposed morality and its claims to universal validity as the mere expression of particular interests.[14]

It is for this reason that Dawkins appears to be wrong in claiming that the insinuation that Stalin and Hitler 'did their terrible deeds because they were atheists' is 'false'.[15] Just as the connection between Nietzsche's atheism and his amoralism lies in his supposed exposure of Judeo-Christian morality as a mere disguised expression of its essentially partial will to power, equally the connection between Marx's atheism and his amoralism lies in his similar exposure of bourgeois Enlightenment morality as a mere disguise for the pursuit of the partial socio-economic interests of a particular class (the bourgeoisie). It can be argued that Lenin was only being consistent in regarding morality as just one more instrument in the political struggle. It was not immoral to commit violence, since morality was just ideology, and could be ignored in pursuing the aims of the communist revolution; as Schroeder notes, the events post-1917 in Russia were merely a consistent application of the atheistic and amoral principles of dialectical materialism.[16]


Difficulties for the New Atheists
Given the deeply ambivalent relationship between different forms of modern atheism and violence, there is an urgent need to debate the grounds for the New Atheists' confidence that a contemporary widespread promotion of atheism would realise the hopes of d'Holbach and Naigeon rather than repeat the failures of Marxism or Nazism. Despite Dawkins' protestations there does seem to be a case for finding a connection between atheist tyrannies and the atheism of the doctrines they apply; this is the case both for Marxism and for the influence of Nietzsche on the intellectual justification of Nazism.[17]

The New Atheists have tended up to the present to bracket aside these difficult issues. Dawkins denies that there is any essential connection between atheism and the readiness to commit violence on a large scale ('even if we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism in common, they both also had moustaches...so what?').[18] Hitchens largely sets aside the question of whether atheism and violence are connected and instead concentrates on showing religious complicity with the Nazi government. It is, of course, to the great discredit of elements of the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Germany and elsewhere that they were complicit with the Hitler regime, and Hitchens brings forward some very embarrassing evidence on this score - but the deeper issue is avoided, namely, whether atheist tyrannies would be any less likely to arise if the world were to witness a drastic diminution in (or total disappearance of) religious practice? It is not sufficient to say that the alternative to religion should be the 'defence of secular pluralism' and not secular dictatorship (Hitchens): what concrete reasons can the New Atheists offer for their confidence that a future without religion would be one without violence?

The principle difficulty here is that modern evolutionary ethics (to which all the principle New Atheists seem to subscribe) acknowledges that humans have both altruistic and egoistic urges, but produce no compelling justification for why we should pursue our altruistic rather than our egoistic urges. According to Dawkins, Dennett (although he also elsewhere denies it), and Harris, there is no such thing as moral objectivism: morality is a natural phenomenon which has evolved from our basic survival urges and will continue to evolve. Furthermore, morality is entirely analysable in terms of self-interest (in crude or 'enlightened' forms). But if morality is finally a natural fact and is fully analysable in terms of self-interest, what ultimate sanction is there against humans interpreting their self-interest (as De Sade, Stirner and Nietzsche do) to include the infliction of cruelty and violence on others? Nature, after all, it will be objected, seems to have programmed its products for cruelty as well as altruism.

John Gray, in his recent and influential work Straw Dogs (2002)[19] takes an atheistic but entirely disillusioned view of human beings which might be seen as posing a contemporary Nietzschean-style challenge to the Enlightenment optimism and implicit progressivism of the New Atheists. Gray, with his typical black humour, describes genocide as just as human as art or prayer: 'from the stone age onwards, humans have used their tools to slaughter one another. Humans are weapon-making animals with an unquenchable fondness for killing'.[20] Gray, however, is not inclined to blame the human propensity for violence on religion, but on our biological inheritance: 'if you seek the origins of ethics, look to the lives of other animals';[21] nor is he coy about spelling out the fundamentally moral ambivalence of humans, who are both 'peace-loving animals, but [also]...have an itch for violence'. If, as Gray argues, 'There is no way of life in which all these needs can be satisfied'[22], then the atheist would do better to reconcile themselves to a tragic vision of the human future (Godless or not) rather than the optimistic one of the New Atheists.

The biologically reductionist picture of human nature which Dawkins, Dennett and others present to us does not seem to provide us with any particularly good reason to suppose that morality will develop towards greater perfection and a diminution of violence, or even for why humanity should develop in this direction. Neither the history of modern atheism nor the political history of the twentieth century nor the New Atheists' own depiction of human nature seem to supply any obvious reasons for believing that a dramatic diminution of religious belief in the world would significantly reduce human violence.

References

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta Books, 2002.
Schroeder, Winfried. Moralischer Nihilismus: Radikale Moralkritik von den Sophisten bis Nietzsche. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005.
Wicks, Robert. "Arthur Schopenhauer " In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed Edward N. Zalta, 2007.
Wicks, Robert. "Friedrich Nietzsche." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed Edward N. Zalta, 2007.

http://www.investigatingatheism.info/po ... nment.html

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[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://www.motherjones.com/print/202056

I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the European intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song. The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, "revolutionized" physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these "thinkers" took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended; they "secularized" Christian religion, as the "scholars" like to say—and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three, Answer!

This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment—that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one—is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stop-gaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stop-gaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke, and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology—and that is put in his own terms—he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx's—and his followers'—links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel, and the others.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But let's look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at de humanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and other wise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real estate speculator may refer to "developing" a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be "developed" through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open—in the European view—to this sort of insanity.

Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to "redistribute" the results—the money, maybe—of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around: But in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This is much the same as when power was redistributed from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society changed a bit, at least superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can see what the American Revolution of 1776 did for American Indians. It's the same old song.

Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to 'rationalize" all people in relation to industry—maximum industry, maximum production. It is a materialist doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us "precapitalists" and "primitive." Frecapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists: we have always been economically retarded in Marxist terms. The only manner in which American Indian people could participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers, or "proletarians" as Marx called them. The man was very clear about the fact that his revolution could occur only through the struggle of the proletariat, that the existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society.

I think there's a problem with language here. Christians, capitalists, Marxists. All of them have been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really mean revolution. What they really mean is a continuation. They do what they do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop according to its needs.

Poetry.

[vanlose kid]

^ ^

Wakan Tanka made the atheists too. they're just ignorant.

*

[Canadian_watcher]

I'm having trouble finding an adequate exultation for the eloquence of Russell Means.
What a superb and brief explanation of the reality of our condition in the Modern World.

[Canadian_watcher]

^ ^

Wakan Tanka made the atheists too. they're just ignorant.

*

I don't think Wakan Tanka 'made' anything.

[JackRiddler]

My 3 cents. I think at the core humans are faith based, must believe and act, with only limited information. So Progress is a god, Science is a god, Rationalism is a god, Liberalism is a god, Atheism is a god, Mathematics is a god, Evolution is a god, and so on, and the Zeus they all bow to is the god Truth, which we all believe speaks just to us and whatever priests and priestesses in white we worship who have the answer(s). It is quite easy to become fanatical and rabid about anything that appears to explain the sliver of reality we inhabit.

Sure, long as we don't abandon nuance and differentiation by it. Often not even God is a god, but something conditional used as a principle of social organization or inspiration.

You remove God and the first thing people do is they elevate a human and worship them as a living god. And the most non religious scientific based belief systems such as Russian and Chinese Communism bear this out while bringing reigns of terror as bad as any crusade or inquisition down.

Looking at the history, you keep God and the first thing people do (often) is they elevate a human and worship them as a living god. That's what all your divine-right absolutist monarchs and emperors have been, no? This happens whether or not there's an official God in the system. This has happened in all theist orders, sooner or later and repeatedly. So it's not an argument for or against any given god, or for or against any other reigning ideology that demands and enforces faith. They all end up doing it. Also, even if you believed that this was more of a problem in orders run under non-theist ideologies than in those with theist ideologies (not at all true), this wouldn't say anything about whether there actually is or isn't a god-like entity/creator/ruler of all. It's a variant on Kant's argument that since you can't absolutely disprove the existence of a noumenal being, you should keep it because it maintains the moral order for all the people who need such a being to avoid going crazy and turning into murderous cannibals. It's a practical claim and has nothing to do with showing the reality of this divinity.

.

[JackRiddler]

^ ^

Wakan Tanka made the atheists too. they're just ignorant.

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I don't think Wakan Tanka 'made' anything.

Well then you're an atheist as regards Wakan Tanka. And presumably also Zeus and a bunch of other Chief Deities who happen not to be your own.

.

[kool maudit]

i am no more of an atheist regarding zeus or ahuramazda or whatever than i am concerning jehovah. in my best suspicions, they are all garbled and distorted glimpses of a certain order of consciousness.

[Hammer of Los]

...

The kool maudit is a smart kid.

...

[Canadian_watcher]

^ ^

Wakan Tanka made the atheists too. they're just ignorant.

*

I don't think Wakan Tanka 'made' anything.

Well then you're an atheist as regards Wakan Tanka. And presumably also Zeus and a bunch of other Chief Deities who happen not to be your own.

.

maybe I misunderstand Wakan Tanka...

but other than that: what kool maudit said.


Edited to add:

Wakan Tanka is the Sioux name for the Great Spirit or Great Mystery. Wakan Tanka is thought of the creator of the world or universe; believed to be the All-Providing One. This Spirit is paid reverence as providing for the needs of everyone. This reverence is displayed when the people honor the four directions, the Sun, Mother Earth, and their fellow man because these are Wakan Tanka's creation; when honoring them, people honor the spirit of Wakan Tanka which resides within each of them. The American Native does not attempt to describe this Great Power that Created All because "it is a Mystery," they advise, "leave it alone; no one describe such a vast mystery."

Since it is traditional for the American Indian people not to argue over religious concepts, considering such arguments foolish, they invite everyone, especially the rainbow people, to join them, each in their own way and expression, in the reverence of Wakan Tanka. A.G.H.

http://www.themystica.com/mythical-folk ... tanka.html

[Hammer of Los]

...

I would add that Anarchism has similar problems. The notion that anyone would advocate or evangelize for Anarchism is comedy -- but at least it's highbrow comedy. It'd be like Militant Taoists (which I'm sure also exist).

Anarchism does have similar problems because it affirms and focuses on a negative - lack of government - which is really a lot more ridiculous because government certainly does exist and basically always has. Even if you go far enough back in evolutionary history to before the advent of organized social groups, there was always copious amounts of patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and rampant violence, all of which the better strains of anarchism are concerned with eliminating. The closest thing that to an anarchist utopia that (might have) ever existed was probably a matriarchal society based on fertility worship, which is at odds with the atheism of most hardcore anarchists.

To me the materialistic viewpoint of militant anarchism makes it primarily about, again, egotistical self-gratification. That is to say making a show of appearing to resist, feeling like you are resisting, drinking coffee and getting drunk while living in squats, listening to mostly terrible music devoid of artistic value, and eventually developing an alcohol or other substance abuse problem. And ultimately they assume the posture of crucifying themselves in the name of (supposedly) creating a better world, which is the epitome of the slave mentality of the Christian religion. I'm not saying that all anarchists are like this but this is certainly a common path for the more angry, bitter, and alienated ones.

Regarding militant Taoists - of course there are militant Taoists. They practice Tai Chi Chuan, the martial form of Tai Chi. Kung Fu also falls under the cultural umbrella of Taoism, and although it is more militant in the physical sense it seems to me that Tai Chi Chuan is much more militant in the esoteric sense, but this is a debate for more learned people than any of us here, who wouldn't bother to descend to the level of quibbling about the existence of God.

If the anti-establishment types had more people doing this kind of thing we would be in much better shape - physically, socially, and economically.

Quite so.

I'm not sure I know what "militant" means, though.

I practice ahimsa.

But some things still get my goat.

Only a fool would speak of the mystery.

Pass me my dunce's cap.

I wanna start my own gnosis college.

...

[Sounder]

Thanks undead, very high marks for that post. Since then; kool man, very cool also and vanlose kid, quite informative, thank-you, thank-you. The Russel Means essay is also spot on Wombat. It is so good to be reminded, that at least within a rough outline, SOME people do see a good bit about how the dominant narrative is imposed and maintained.

This fellow should be applauded for his perceptive critique of himself and his fellow travelers. Because I have no connection to that community, the volume of information in the paper serves as a fine dose of perspective on that community. Thanks Jack for posting. As expected, there is a range of social conscience commitment within that community similar to what is found in other ‘believer’ communities.

He lends some maturity to a belief set that can seem shrill to less invested folk as it also seems to miss the distinctions between religion and spirituality.

Given the mutual reliance on ‘belief’, despite the limited depth of our categories, atheism and religion have more in common than do religion and spirituality. Being materialistic, (by virtue of what seems to me to be a reactionary disavowal of any potential substance that might underpin the admittedly crude forms within religious expressions), the atheist seems unable to properly value the interior life and the creative potentials of consciousness to deepen and/or rearrange the terms of our understanding.

Atheists might do well to shift toward a representation of that category that dispenses with some of the ‘belief’ element. Perhaps this bit from Allegro from the Bisquit Crumbs thread. This seems more logically sensible at least when compared to Atheism.

Apatheism (/ˌæpəˈθiːɪzəm/ a portmanteau of apathy and theism/atheism),
also known as pragmatic atheism or (critically) as practical atheism, is acting with apathy, disregard, or lack of interest towards belief or disbelief in a deity. Apatheism describes the manner of acting towards a belief or lack of a belief in a deity, so it applies to both theism and atheism. An apatheist is also someone who is not interested in accepting or denying any claims that gods exist or do not exist. In other words, an apatheist is someone who considers the question of the existence of gods as neither meaningful nor relevant to his or her life.

Apathetic agnosticism (also called pragmatic agnosticism) acknowledges that any amount of debate can neither prove, nor disprove, the existence of one or more deities, and if one or more deities exist, they do not appear to be concerned about the fate of humans. Therefore, their existence has little impact on personal human affairs and should be of little theological interest.

Apatheists hold that if it were possible to prove that God exists, their behavior would not change. Similarly, there would be no change if someone proved that God does not exist.

This might work for some but not for me. “Religion” has programmed our unconsciousness with images of worthlessness for quite long enough already, and I for one would not relish having Atheists taking over this programming task.

The term ‘deity’ presupposes limitations on the Source of being if it tries to localize this source when or by calling it a ‘deity’. (the category; ‘deity’ is weak to begin with)

The term ‘deities’ presupposes a thing that is preposterous to any modern mind, that being the existence of any focused expressions of being that are not connected to physical bodies (as we know them).

The irony is that Atheists literalize the metaphorical with a tedium similar to fundamentalists.