New Atheism and Your Probs With It, If Any

[bks]

Sounder quoted:

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.

Sounder, this really answers nothing. He was deeply iconoclastic and pretty much without peer in terms of sheer brilliance. The sketch above is a caricature of him, long ago discredited, and largely the product of a false presentation of his work by his sister during the period of his life when he was institutionalized, and the Nazis' cultish glorification of a highly selective sample of his output. It was these distortions that made it into mainstream accounts of Nietzsche. See the article below.

Nietzsche and Fascism: On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy

Introduction
Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich

Nietzsche and fascism? Is it not almost a contradiction in terms? What can Nietzsche have in common with this murderous ideology? The central ideal of Nietzsche's philosophy was the individual and his freedom to shape his own character and destiny. The German philosopher was frequently described as the "radical aristocrat" of the spirit because he abhorred mass culture and strove to cultivate a special kind of human being, the Übermensch, endowed with exceptional spiritual and mental qualities. What can such a thinker have in common with National Socialism's manipulation of the masses for chauvinistic goals that swallowed up the personalities, concerns, and life of the individual?

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7403.html

[JackRiddler]

Speaking for myself, and of strawmen, I didn't do this:

No, you did not.

Nor did I say or imply this:

Nor did I say or imply you did.

[JackRiddler]

At the site on Hitler's Christianity, there is a great page of photos:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm



This is a Deutsche Christen march.

It normally doesn't occur to me to single out Christian ideology or church among the many forces complicit in the rise of the Nazis, but anyone who tries to play Hitler as an atheist or Nazism as an atheist creed is basically echoing postwar church propaganda of the lowest order. It is absolutely false. The Nazis were theists and Christians, what handful of atheist intellectuals there may have been among them had no interest whatsoever in challenging the established churches of Germany, who supported the Third Reich.

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[Canadian_watcher]

.... Except for the curiosity of seeing it reposted by you, said passage would definitively meet with my apathyism or whatever they're calling this disguised form of disbelief I'm supposed to claim so as not to provoke the persecution complexes of highly sensitive religionists.

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pure paranoia. that has not happened, and i doubt will happen on such a forum as this.

you needn't disguise your disbelief.. however it is really very funny the way that you cannot see yourself in the mirror you think you're holding up

[Sounder]

highly sensitive religionists.

That's a good one Jack. Have you ever noticed what I say about religion?

bks, I was merely pointing out problems that many folk have with Atheism. I do agree that the Nazi-Atheism connection is weak. Still the Marxism-Atheism-inhumanity connections could do with better examination.

[DrVolin]

I thought atheism meant "without god," for me very much depending on how you define "god." Perhaps its greatest importance to me is political, meaning that it refuses attempts by human beings to rule over, lead or influence other human beings, either mentally or physically, by claiming special relations with an invisible higher power.
.

By that definition, I am an atheist. If by atheism you mean the affirmation that there is no divine, then I don't qualify. I am squarely agnostic. I have no evidence one way or the other.

As for Marx, he was certainly an atheist, but certainly not a materialist. He believed in historical forces such as progress and vitality that made him an idealist. Those forces exist outside the material realm and animate it. The same is true of Darwin, Spencer, and the rest.

[compared2what?]

I've never really understood why tolerance was such an incredibly unpopular option.

Nothing's for everybody, though, I guess.

[82_28]

There is such a thing called "Christian atheism" of which I figure I probably count as one.

Jesus, although not seen as divine, is still a central feature of Christian atheism. Most Christian atheists think of Jesus as a wise and good man, accepting his moral teachings but rejecting the idea of his divinity. Hamilton said that to the Christian atheist, Jesus is not really the foundation of faith; instead he is a "place to be, a standpoint".[4] Christian atheists look to Jesus as an example of what a Christian should be, but they do not see him as a god.

Hamilton wrote that following Jesus means being "alongside the neighbor, being for him",[4] and that to follow Jesus means to be human, to help other humans, and to further mankind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism

There is no reason to hate on anyone or anything. When we do so we fuck up numerous lives and generations from now by our actions. Morality cannot be taught, but rather, felt because of empathy and to boot, morality has nothing to do with it. All I see is people doing shit for all the wrong reasons. I am not the authority on these "reasons" but I am the authority on what I feel like fucking thinking about. Nobody can ever tell me otherwise. I believe in "God". I do not believe in authority . I believe all humans and all animals know what is right, just as a dog when being played with could totally bite your finger off, but refrains for some reason as a show of self same respect.

It's a deep contemplative subject and I do enjoy that it was brought up. It's never been an issue about what is "right" but what is the right thing to do and I don't need told anything. Nor does anyone. Life as a mortal sure is a conundrum!

[Canadian_watcher]

I've never really understood why tolerance was such an incredibly unpopular option.

I agree. I mean, wtf, right? live and let live already.

[H_C_E]

I've never really understood why tolerance was such an incredibly unpopular option.

Precisely.

Many years ago, I had a number of atheist friends. It was no problem for me.
I even verged on what I'll call popular atheism, in light of 82_28's excellent input.
But I realized a belief in nothing was still a belief. It required too much faith for
me to be atheist. That's how I saw it at the time, anyhow. Understanding now
that we are embedded in something bigger and weirder than we have the ability
to even suppose, modern materialistic\scientific atheism is untenable to me
more than ever before.

But I have no fight with atheism, generally.

Yet Dawkins, Hitchings, Shermer et al are a new breed. Hence the thread title?
These new atheists are every bit the fundamentalists as some, but not all, of the
Christians they rail against. The arrogance and intolerance of the new atheism
is too much.

[compared2what?]

Yet Dawkins, Hitchings, Shermer et al are a new breed. Hence the thread title?
These new atheists are every bit the fundamentalists as some, but not all, of the
Christians they rail against. The arrogance and intolerance of the new atheism
is too much.

The implacable confidence of clueless people is really almost as dangerous as conventional evil is. And almost as frightening. And about one-gazillion-million times more fucking difficult to figure out how to confront, oppose or vanquish.

...

Or maybe not. I don't really know.

Oh, well. All dubious comparisons aside, it's a real and enduring problem, imo. I mean, how are you supposed to stop a bunch of complete fools who think they know what's good for other people from killing you, others and themselves when they can't understand what they, you, or anybody else is doing, even though they're looking right at it?

It's a challenge to the tolerantly inclined. Story of the world, even, in a way.

[Sounder]

Jack wrote…

So I wanted to have a discussion about the neoconnish group who have set themselves up as the neoatheist intellectual mafia. Science mafia, in fact.

I will keep this in mind, and maybe others will address this. But if I say nothing about it, it is not because I want or intend to ‘hijack’ the thread.

One of my daughters is religious, while my other daughter claims to be Atheist. She also grew up having the impression that I am Atheist, a misunderstanding that was only cleared up when she was twenty-something. I think people can do better by discarding beliefs that serve to preinterpret the meaning content of ones experience. I feel that belief and its mirror disbelief, fixes the meaning content of any given category thereby reducing potential for creating new correspondences for and between our categories.

Many folk seem to think that they will float away into space if they are not held to earth by their beliefs. This is not true.

I still have a problem with the category confusion produced by conflating religion and spirituality.

[153den]

Well...I personally don't have any problems with so called "Atheism or Theism", however I do have a problem with fanatics. I'm sure you know the rest of the story.

[NeonLX]

Reading 82_28's post above made me realize that I'm far older, but far less wise than he is. That was a helluva read.

[JackRiddler]

But I realized a belief in nothing was still a belief. It required too much faith for
me to be atheist.

Nonsense. Atheism is not a belief in nothing. Not even nihilism is a belief in "nothing." Among conscious entities receiving and trying to understand sensory signals, there can be no such thing as a belief in "nothing." If you say this, you show me that you've never been fair to the ideas of atheism. It's a kind of defamation. Also, it's a meaningless statement.

Atheism is a refusal to believe in an invisible and sentient super-powerful creator-ruler-god on the sole basis of someone's say-so without evidence, or someone's expectation that you should have faith. Atheism means "without god." It is the same self-evident stance one takes with any other claims of invisible unproved phenomena that no one ever sees, but when it comes to "god" people are generally unhinged, thanks to early conditioning.

Nevertheless, if there is a god, clearly it wants us to be atheist, since it has set up the universe to appear as if it is absent. If there is a god or higher design in the universe, the first step in searching for it would be to dispense with all the false ideas of it that humans have created on the basis of their wishful thinking or to serve their power systems. The Sky-God of many monotheisms, especially when coupled with eternal hellfire or other fictional punishments, is an especially crude yet proven-to-be effective device for legitimating unaccountable authority and ruling by fear. That doesn't mean that somewhere someone can't or has not established tyrannies without this device. It also doesn't mean that no one has ever done good out of a religious motivation. Those are both peripheral to the question of whether there is a "god" and whether we should want there to be one.

To me, atheism matters in society. I always say politically I'm an atheist but philosophically an agnostic. If we're talking pure epistemology, why of course the only stance that makes sense is agnostic. We don't know that we know anything. In every century, the universe will turn out to be very different from anything we until then imagine.

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