What I’m Reading
Wanted to post about a couple of books I’m reading. BREAKING THE SPELL by Daniel Dennent is a philosophical and evolutionary look at religion as a natural phenomenon. It’s very readable and accessable, but the really fun book is Christopher Hitchens GOD IS NOT GREAT. I kept giggling on the plane during the flight home because he is so marvelously witty and vicious. They are research for the book series I’m writing and for once not a dry tome.
Today was spent watching Lauren ride Pi, and this woman from back east who is looking for a horse threw a leg over him. Tomorrow I get a chance to ride DreamWeaver and I’m going to ride Pi. I’ll be nice and tired and sore after a two weeks of not riding. There is something about this sport that has you out of shape in a week. Which sort of sucks.
I finished off the afternoon with retail therapy. I’ve found a great store with wonderful clothes, and I picked up a couple of more outfits today. I tend to just live in jeans or riding pants, but it’s fun to have some pretty tops, embroidered jeans and a great jacket.
Melinda
June 16th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
he really fun book is Christopher Hitchens GOD IS NOT GREAT. I kept giggling on the plane during the flight home because he is so marvelously witty and vicious.
There’s no doubt Hitchens is witty but the vicious part should be underlined. Reviews indicate that he has many of his facts wrong.
June 17th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
I couldn’t state the accuracy of his Biblical lore. I suffered through Sunday school when my mother decided she had to return to her fundamentalist roots (The Church of Christ), and have forgotten everything they forced on me.
Hitchens is a particular type of drunken Englishman for whom I’ve always had a soft spot.
June 17th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
I’ve read both Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Dawkins’s The God Delusion. I found Dennett much better: his arguments were more sophisticated and his presentation was more reasoned and less polemical.
Some earlier works I liked: Flew’s God and Philosophy (it had a second edition under a different title, which I’m afraid I’ve forgotten) is a careful, analytical critique of various arguments for the rationality of belief in God, in the classic dry witty style one often finds in British academics, and seldom in Americans. Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, on the other hand, is scarcely an attack on theism at all: It’s an attack on Christianity as a cultural phenomenon.
June 18th, 2007 at 10:19 am
When talking about god, are there any ‘facts’?
Or is it historical religious facts that he is getting wrong?
June 18th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Hitchens and Dawkins are examples of ‘preaching to the converted’; they claim to be trying to undermine religious belief, but they’re actually just out to stroke and reinforce the tribal solidarity of anti-theists.
Not one believer is going to be converted by what they write; quite the contrary. Abuse of the ‘only an idiot could belive X!’ type simply gets their backs up and confirms them in their convictions.
(Just for starters, neither really knows much about religion in general or Christianity in particular. Theology is a hobby of mine, and I wince at their howlers, of the ‘the Church tried to supress science!’ variety. Fellahs, some of the smartest people in the history of the human race spent a lot of time thinking about these issues; you’re not going to demolish them with a faculty-common-room bon mot.)
I’m an atheist myself, but not an anti-theist. I don’t hate God, I’m not hostile to religion as such; I don’t think religious people are stupid or evil; I just don’t think it’s true, and never did — as far as I can recall, I didn’t believe in God even as a small child. I’m not interested in ‘converting’ people and don’t get upset when they deny what I think is ‘obviously true’. I’m not _angry_ about it.
And my take on history and human nature inclines me to believe that most people will always be religious believers, and that we in the minority should just learn to live with that.
I think a lot of the outrage of the Hitchens et. al. crowd is due to disappointment and frustration; they thought they were the wave of the future, and it turned out not to be so.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
I think the wave of interest and the number of these types of books being published is because we are in one of those particularly virulent periods where religion is flexing its muscle — if you will. The 19 men who flew those planes into buildings and a field were undertaking a massive “faith based initiative”.
I have no objection to people believing any damn fool thing they like, but I draw they line at them attempting to convert me, or affecting the laws of my society, or leaving us with a generation of scientific dolts because they have dumbed down our school curriculum. (Hey, my Social Security depends on the little buggers getting good jobs to support me in my old age. Just kidding. I intend to work until I fall down dead.)
When the gay marriage issue reaches the Supreme Court this “strict constructionist” court is going to have to bow before the power of the 14th Amendment, and not allow a particular class of people to be denied equal protection.
June 19th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
“The 19 men who flew those planes into buildings and a field were undertaking a massive “faith based initiative”.”
– this is where “religion” becomes a category so broad that it’s actively misleading.
Muslims of the 9/11 stripe would be just as hostile to us if we were dominated by fundamentalist Puritans… as long as we were _Christian_ fundamentalist Puritans.
The libertine, atheist ‘kufr’ is the enemy to them; the believing, crusading Christian ‘kufr’ is equally the enemy, as is of course the Jew, the Hindu, and so forth. They’ll cheerfully kill all categories of ‘kufr’ and hope for the 72 rasins.
They _are_ our enemies; quite simply the hereditary enemies of our blood. It’s no deep mystery requiring investigation. They were our enemies at Tours; they were at the Siege of Constantinople; they were at Lepanto; they were at the Siege of Vienna; they were during the Bulgarian Horrors; they are today. The only surprising thing is that anyone is surprised at this.
Getting mad at Christians because we’re under attack by Muslims is… ah… sorta strange, and smacks of displacement activity. The one is a dispute within the family; the other, attack by outsiders and aliens.
The West started out as Christendom, and is and will always be profoundly marked by that.
The scientific worldview, for example, is simply Aquinas with God taken out.
>but I draw they line at them attempting to convert me
– well, that’s free speech. You don’t have to listen; or you can try to convert them, if you want.
I tell the Jehovah’s Witness and the Mormons to get lost when they come around; no hu-hu.
>or affecting the laws of my society
– Melinda, it’s their society too. And in fact, they’re the majority. 82% of Americans believe in the Virgin Birth; about half that number believe in evolution.
You can scarcely expect them to act like a barely tolerated minority group when they are, in fact, the overwhelming majority.
And Christianity has been affecting the laws of our society from 1776 and before. The Pilgrim Fathers didn’t come to Massachusetts Bay to spread Buddhism, and George Washington didn’t take the oath of office on a copy of the Koran, nor was the official chaplain appointed by the first Congress an agnostic.
Virtually every President of the US and an overwhelming majority of legislators and judges have been and are believing Christians. (Hillary Clinton is, for example, a sincere Methodist and has repeatedly said that her political convictions are grounded in her religious faith. I see no reason to doubt her.)
It is again, sorta strange, to expect people to leave their most fundamental conceptions of how the universe works and what constitutes right and wrong at home when they go to work, and adopt yours instead from 9 to 5.
June 19th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
“When the gay marriage issue reaches the Supreme Court this “strict constructionist” court is going to have to bow before the power of the 14th Amendment, and not allow a particular class of people to be denied equal protection.”
– oh, come now, Melinda. You know court decisions don’t work that way.
The Supremes decide what they want to be the result and then “interpret” the wording to suit. They always have and they always will and it doesn’t matter how tortured the reasoning has to be.
In 1890, they decided that “separate but equal” was A-OK with the 14th; in the 1950’s, they decided it wasn’t.
In fact the Constitution means whatever they say it means, after they’ve taken a close look at the political balance at that moment, or possibly just decided to poke those they don’t like in the eye.
(Judicial positivism strikes again…8-).
June 20th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Oh, Steve. First I find the statement _They _are_ our enemies; quite simply the hereditary enemies of our blood_ to be at the best bizarre, and at worst…. well, I can’t even think how to categorize it. Yes, at present there is a small group of fanatics who are targeting the west. Cynical men are using some very real grievences, wedding them to a virulent and fundamentalist version of Islam and unleashing these angry young men on the world. But the problems are far more complex than “we fought them a Tours”.
And you missed my point about this phase where fundamentalism is on an uptick, and choose instead to go off on this tangent about Islam. Blind faith is a damn dangerous thing. It gave us Crusades and Jihad and the Inquisition, and those pious haters Robertson and Falwell stating that 9/11 was the fault of feminists and gays and pagans. Since within your circle of friends you have all three of the above I think it behooves us to be concerned when churches are demanding that people they consider beyond the pale be rejected by the secular society as well.
Which is my final point. Seperation of Church and State. It is one of the founding principles of this country. Therefore I have a right to demand that legislatures not enshrine anyone’s particular cult as the law of the land.
As for the Supreme Court, if you study the less hot button cases that have come before various courts you will find that they are not taking polls. They have acted contrary to presidents and public desires as they seek to interpret our Constitution. Everyone always trots out the Plessey case, but in truth that court was known even in its own time as ignorant and corrupt. Fortunately that hasn’t happened too often in our history.
June 21st, 2007 at 6:25 am
They _are_ our enemies; quite simply the hereditary enemies of our blood. It’s no deep mystery requiring investigation. They were our enemies at Tours; they were at the Siege of Constantinople; they were at Lepanto; they were at the Siege of Vienna; they were during the Bulgarian Horrors; they are today.
I’m not sure that I find that a complete explanation. In at least one of the major sore points between Islam and the West, it seems to me there is a deeper pattern than the clash of rival religions.
I often do historical research in developing campaigns for roleplaying games, or in writing game books (mostly for GURPS, which goes in for serious historical research). A few years ago, I ran a campaign of Muslim superheroes fighting to repel the First Crusade. So I read several histories of the era, and looked at a lot of maps. I was struck by how much the boundaries of the crusader states looked like the sphere of influence of present-day Israel at its height . . . and the present-day Muslim view of Israel stopped looking like complete nonsense to me. I could see how someone obsessed with historical parallels could be struck by this one.
But I also noticed other parallels: to the boundaries of the Roman Empire’s Levantine provinces, and even to the parts of the Near East that the Egyptians either controlled or held as client states during the Bronze Age.
I’m not sure I believe in full-scale geographical determinism in history. But this looks rather like a plausible case of it, with political boundaries reflecting how far inland you can move and still be supplied from the sea. And there seem to have been repeated bitter clashes between states with maritime orientations and the desert peoples living further inland, supported in most cases by religious differences, even though the specific religions involved have changed. The current clashes involving Islam seem to fit the pattern.
On the other hand, I quite agree that The scientific worldview, for example, is simply Aquinas with God taken out. I’ve read about a major debate in Paris where Aquinas argued that the sun rises because God has ordained natural laws that provide for its rising, as against the other side, which held that all you could say without blasphemy against God’s omnipotence was that the sun rose because it was God’s will—and won the debate. Had he lost, scientific inquiry as such would have been heretical. Which can have a real impact; as I understand it, Islam still favors the view that Aquinas rejected.
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:25 am
“Yes, at present there is a small group of fanatics who are targeting the west.”
– no, it’s not a small group of fanatics. That’s wishful thinking.
It’s a BIG group of fanatics.
Probably at least a third of the world’s Muslims support OBL’s basic goals — and that’s over 400 million people. I’m being optimistic about the numbers, by the way. It’s quite probably much worse than that. A quarter of _American_ Muslims support suicide bombing.
And OBL is quite correct when he says his interpretation of Islam is orthodox. Read the Koran sometime.
I know it’s obligatory to say “Islam is a religion of peace” in public. In fact, that’s horseshit: it’s an ideology devoted to aggression, war, conquest and domination. It’s right there in the Book, which I’ve read, by the way.
“Cynical men are using some very real grievences, wedding them to a virulent and fundamentalist version of Islam and unleashing these angry young men on the world. But the problems are far more complex than “we fought them a Tours”.
– not really. It’s tempting for people of good will to assume “everyone wants peace, it’s a small group of fanatics, cynics are exploiting them” and so forth, but it just ain’t so.
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:33 am
“Which is my final point. Seperation of Church and State.”
– if you examine both the statements of the Founders and the practice of the US governments and courts in the first century and a half, you’ll find that what they meant by “no establishment of religion” (separation isn’t mentioned) is that the FEDERAL government can’t favor a PARTICULAR CHRISTIAN DENOMINATION. After the Civil War ammendments, that’s (arguably) extended to the States, or possibly not.
And that’s _all_ it means. It didn’t strike down the State established churches, for example, which persisted for generations after the Constitution was ratified, and which were abolished by _political_ action at the State level — by votes.
There’s nothing in the Constitution which forbids, for example, nondenominational prayer in schools. Saying that there is is just bad law, like Roe v. Wade in another context.
The fact that you or I favor “Policy X” gives us no particular right to _win_ if we can’t get the majority to agree with us.
I’m glad the citizens of Massachusetts decided to disestablish the Congregational Church. But that was for the citizens to decide, not for me or you or anyone else to impose on them against their will.
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:38 am
“They have acted contrary to presidents and public desires as they seek to interpret our Constitution. ”
– usually to protect some vested interest or particular crotchet popular in the social strata from which judges are chosen.
Eg., in the New Deal period they struck down a lot of FDR’s legislation, and they forbade child labor laws and so forth. After he threatened to pack the court, they caved in — along with some convenient vacancies that allowed him to appoint judges who’d decide the way he wanted.
July 20th, 2007 at 12:05 am
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