Chris Hedges on Point of Inquiry podcast.

They were mostly all astrologers of some kind too. So what?

A Scientologist could come up with a slam dunk consistent quantum thory of gravity tomorrow and it would not lend credibility to claims made about Xenu. That person being a Scientologist wouldn’t take away credibility from the idea either, if it stood on its own merits.

Does the god you speak of exist and what evidence can you provide for what you say? They’re the only important questions to me and the ones that need to be satisfied before we move on — and they’re the ones people most want to obsfuscate on and hand-wave away because … well I guess because I’ve never seen anyone answer it satisfactorally.

I’m not sure if I won’t like it. I just don’t think much of it. Right now lefties blame ‘capitalism’ for any number of things – the exploitation of the environment. But in fact it’s part of the ground of our being. So some of our nasty tendencies have capitalism as their ground. (Just as the Russians managed to rape their environment – rather more badly than we did – through socialism.) I guess it’s legitimate to offer some views based on this. Ie ‘capitalism is better for the environment than socialism’. But I think it makes more sense to speak with closer attention to the specific facts of situations rather than have these great lumbering abstractions churn up the landscape.

Likewise the ‘battle’ between ‘Christianity’ and science. The early builders of science – most of them anyway – were believing Christians. There were (perhaps), things in Christianity that made it more likely that Christians – particularly Protestant ones – would develop science. (Of course this is speculative and of course there were lots of other things going on). And then there were those in the establishment who were threatened by the new ideas – and they were (necessarily) a Christian establishment. Does this reflect badly on ‘Christianity’. It does perhaps reflect badly on established Christian institutions. Then again lots of people in governments went along. Does this reflect badly on ‘governments’. Perhaps. But most people’s response to this would not be to become anarchists, but to believe in the value of constraints on government, developments of the doctrine and institutions of governments.

One might believe that even if such risks were ever present in governments, that they were still a good thing, and the best one could aim for was to ameliorate the risks. If one were a believing Christian, and a believing Christian who valued the church – quite a few aren’t too impressed with the church and some don’t fancy it much at all – one might take a similar view of the church.

I agree with the first three-quarters of Grayling’s statement. (And you’re right: Nicholas won’t like it.) But I’ve found that these discussions always get bogged down and acrimonious when one side starts claiming all the credit for modern civilisation, or blaming the other for mass murders of the past. Can we ever establish whether the Inquisition represented true Christianity, rather than merely a nasty mutation; or whether Stalin killed millions “in the name of” atheism? If someone wants to give a bit of credit to Christianity for laying the foundations of modern science, or abolishing slavery (notwithstanding the opposition of some Christians), I can’t see that this needs to be rebutted ferociously at every turn. It’s not as though a few favourable historical consequences of Christianity add weight to its adherents’ claims about God.

It is also time to put to rest the mistakes and assumptions that lie behind a phrase used by some religious people when talking of those who are plain-spoken about their disbelief in any religious claims: the phrase ‘fundamentalist atheist’. What would a non-fundamentalist atheist be? Would he be someone who believed only somewhat that there are no supernatural entities in the universe – perhaps that there is only part of a god [a divine foot, say, or buttock]? Or that gods exist only some of the time – say, Wednesdays and Saturdays? [That would not be so strange: for many unthinking quasi-theists, a god exists only on Sundays]. Or might it be that a nonfundamentalist atheist is one who does not mind that other people hold profoundly false and primitive beliefs about the universe, on the basis of which they have spent centuries mass-murdering other people who do not hold exactly the same false and primitive beliefs as themselves – and still do?

Nicholas Gruen won’t be happy with this quote, but I happen to agree with it. Every single development in civilisation in the last few centuries in the West – and thankfully there have been many – has been fought tooth and nail by the organised religions. I too know many nice Christian folks, even highly intelligent ones, but I haven’t heard a single coherent argument for their beliefs. And history teaches us how terribly damaging those beliefs have been, when given the political power to be acted upon.

I’m not sure where Hedges stands on this — perhaps he’ll explain in his book. But the version of Christianity he espouses doesn’t sound that different from Humanism. If his difference with the atheists boils down to how much credit Christianity — and monotheism in general — deserves for the development of rationalism and liberal democracy, that doesn’t seem to justify a complete hatchet job on them.

Its currently happening with Libertarianism, Christianity, perhaps Islam and arguably democracy.

He defines God in a way that is pretty much unrecognisable to those of us accustomed to thinking of God as a supernatural being with human-like qualities, who communicates with us an a personal level, who awards merit and demerit points.

I know I take my life in my hands here (or to speak less melodramatically, I know I will be misunderstood here), but I wonder how many of those kinds of people there are? Of course there are lots of fundamentalists – but I don’t really know any – and I don’t have much respect for them – or at least their beliefs. So I’ve not interested myself much in them.

What of the others?

I know of the jokes in Yes Prime Minister where a major wing of the Anglican Church is what you join if you don’t actually believe in God. But I know of lots of people for whom I have lots of respect – not just for their ethics but also for their intellects – who think of themselves as very serious Christians who, at least on my guess, regard the doctrines of Christianity as metaphors for something, rather than anything resembling scientific truth.

They may use expressions like “their relationship with God”. They may use expressions that come to us from a time when those who believed didn’t face much tension between scientific truth and the ‘religious truth’ they sought in religion. But what does it mean to them. They may take the view (I’m thinking without a great deal of evidence, that they take the view) that that kind of language is as accurate, as true to what they’re trying to do as any other language they might use.

But they may not actually think of God in a way that means you can grab hold of their words and say “There, well what IS this thing that you have a personal relationship with?” as if you’re going to get the same kind of answer as the answer you’re after when you say “what is the cause of the collapsing population of polar bears in the Arctic?”

We are dealing here with very basic orientations towards meaning. One can take this on an epistemological plain as I did in this comment, though it’s more common to take it on an ethical plain. Either way, we have a bunch of people who seem like intelligent people – people as much of reason as we recognise any of ourselves to be, who would simply say that they’re not being listened to. That they’re being (more or less completely) misunderstood.

It simply isn’t satisfying to me to say of people who I regard as being worthy of great respect in a discussion are just guilty of the most basic and elementary errors as a result of wishful thinking or some new age desire to be ‘open minded’. And though I’m not a believer, I have no problem with thinking that speaking of one’s relationship with God, or in many of the myriad ways that one tends to within a religious tradition is not some piece of mindless adherence to some relic of the pre-scientific age. I’d go as far as to say that in some sense it might in the final analysis be wrong, or wrong headed, though I’m blowed if I know how we’d ever find out, but it is not trivially stupid, which is basically the message of the militant atheists.

(Great post)