Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Just Hold On!

I came across a solid article critiquing what they call the New Atheism, some examples we've recently enjoyed on our dear blog. I am sharing it because it is my belief that atheism must be as much self-critical as anti-theistic if it is meant to remain relevant and true to itself. This article offers an interesting and contrasting viewpoint on contemporary popular atheism.

Here is a sample:

"Beneath its superficial rationalism, then, the New Atheism amounts to little more than an intellectual defense of empire and a smokescreen for the injustices of global capitalism. It is a parochial universalism whose potency lies in its capacity to appear simultaneously iconoclastic, dissenting, and disinterested, while channeling vulgar prejudices, promoting imperial projects, and dressing up banal truisms as deep insights.
Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins may masquerade as intellectual insurgents, leading a crusade against the insipid tolerance of liberal politics. But ultimately they are apologists for some of its most destructive tendencies."

10 comments:

Dementor said...

Your cryptography skills are no matched for even the most intricate of Qubits based cryptosystems. Only a direct psychoethereal link to Alan Turing's ectoplasm gave me the key to your text to background color cypher scheme.

Dementor said...

I also had to use my special alphacryptolexical tool (dictionary) to further decipher the content of this post

Barbarosa said...

Ooops, I forgot to check the final formatting. I'll go fix it.

Barbarosa said...

Ooops, I forgot to check the final formatting. I'll go fix it.

Napoleon Bonerpants said...

I don't see the pertinence of this. If these authors (excluding Bill Maher who really doesn’t count) make generally sound arguments against the effects of religion on modern society, their perceived political leanings shouldn't really be the issue. As if we didn’t know that Hitchens was controversial. He wrote a damned article about why women aren’t funny, for chist’s sake. Maybe someone should write another article wrought with quote-mining about how the new atheists are secretly pushing the agenda for worldwide chauvinism based solely on that little blurb. I agree that one should remain critical of popular intellectual meanderings but that article seems to be reaching to the point where it reeks of its own agenda.
For instance, there was no mention of other “atheists” mostly fighting creationism in the western world because it has claimed their entire environment. We’re pretty far from these people but their struggle is real and I really can’t warp my mind enough to think that these guys are also pushing a western imperialist agenda.
It doesn’t always have to be about politics, man.

Karl Hungus said...

I saw that they put Bill Mayer up there with the intellectuals and thus decided not to read the article. There's only so much crap I can take-in in a day.

Barbarosa said...

I definitely agree that the article is flawed, especially for its egregious cherry-picking.

I just thought it was an interesting viewpoint. I guess I often find atheist-talk is an echo chamber of preaching to the converted, so it's important to remember that what brought us here was skepticism.

Napoleon Bonerpants said...

Agreed, the sentiment is there. Beware of when everyone agrees with you

Dementor said...

Dont worry about that. As long as I'm alive, there will always exist at least one person that doesn't agree with you.

Dementor said...

(by person I mean antagonizing asshole)