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 Chris Hedges: I Don’t Believe in AtheistsPosted on May 23, 2007
By Chris Hedges (Page 3) I also know from my time in the Muslim world that the vast majority of the some 1 billion Muslims on this planet—most of whom are not Arab—are moderate, detest the violence done in the name of their religion and look at the Pat Robertsons and Franklin Grahams, who demonize Muslims in the name of Christianity, with the same horror with which we look at Osama bin Laden or Hamas. The Palestinian resistance movement took on a radical Islam coloring in the 1990s only when conditions in Gaza and the West Bank deteriorated and thrust people into profound hopelessness, despair and poverty—conditions similar to those that empowered the Christian right in our own country. Before that the movement was decidedly secular. I know that Muslim societies are shaped far more by national characteristics—an Iraqi has a culture and outlook on life that are quite different from an Indonesian’s—just as a French citizen, although a Catholic, is influenced far more by the traits of his culture. Islam has within it tiny, marginal groups that worship death, but nearly all suicide bombers come from one language group within the Muslim world, Arabic, which represents only 20 percent of Muslims. I have seen the bodies—including the bodies of children—left in the wake of a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem. But I have also seen the frail, thin bodies of boys shot to death for sport by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Tell me the moral difference. I fail to see one, especially as a father. Finally, let us not forget that the worst genocides and slaughters of the last century were perpetrated not by Muslims but Christians. To someone who lived in Sarajevo during the Serbian siege of the city, Sam’s demonization of the Muslim world seems odd. It was the Muslim-led government in Bosnia that practiced tolerance. There were some 10,000 Serbs who remained in the city and fought alongside the Bosnia Muslims during the war. The city’s Jewish community, dating back to 1492, was also loyal to the government. And the worst atrocities of the war were blessed not by imams but Catholic and Serbian Orthodox priests. Sam’s argument that atheists have a higher moral code is as specious as his attacks on Islam. Does he forget Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot? These three alone filled the earth with more corpses in the last century than all of the world’s clerics combined. The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion. It is the human heart—the capacity we all have for evil. All human institutions with a lust for power give their utopian visions divine sanction, whether this comes through the worship of God, destiny, historical inevitability, the master race, a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Religion is often a convenient vehicle for this blood lust. Religious institutions often sanctify genocide, but this says more about us, about the nature of human institutions and the darkest human yearnings, than it does about religion. This is the greatest failing of Sam’s book. He externalizes evil. And when you externalize evil, all tools, including violence and torture, become legitimate to eradicate an evil that is outside of you. This worldview—one also adopted by the Christian right—is dangerous, for if we fail to acknowledge our own capacity for evil it will grow unchecked and unheeded. It is, in essence, the call to live the unexamined life. This externalization of evil is what allows Sam to endorse torture. He, of course, deludes himself into believing that it is reason that requires us to waterboard detainees in the physical and moral black holes we have set up to make them disappear. He quotes Alan Dershowitz, not only to reassure us that the Israelis treat Palestinians—400 of whom they have killed in Gaza over the past few months—humanely, but to trot out the absurd notion of a ticking time bomb, the idea that we know a terrorist has planted a large bomb in the center of the city and we must torture him, or in the glib phrase of Harris, we must dust off “a strappado” and expose “this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone times” (P. 193). I guess this reference to torture is amusing if you have spent your life encased in the protected world of the university. As someone who was captured and held for over a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the 1991 Shiite uprising in Basra and then turned over for my final 24 hours to the Iraqi secret police—who my captors openly expected to execute me—I find this glib talk of physical abuse repugnant. Dershowitz and Harris cannot give us a legal or historical precedent where such a case as they describe actually happened. But this is not the point; the point is to endow themselves with the moral right to abuse others in the name of their particular version of goodness. This is done in the name of reason. It is done in the name of a false god, an idol. And this god—if you want it named—is the god of death, or as Freud stated, Thanatos, the death instinct, the impulse that works toward the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves. For once you torture, done in the name of reason, done to make us safe, you unleash sadists and killers. You consign some human beings to moral oblivion. You become no better than those you oppose. The danger of Sam’s simplistic worldview is that it does what fundamentalists do: It creates the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. And once you set up this world you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, brutal occupation and even torture, anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous. All this is done in the name of reason, in the name of his god, which looks, like all idols, an awful lot like Sam Harris. “Necessity,” William Pitt wrote, “is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.”
Sam ends his book with a chapter that can best be described as Buddhism light. His spirituality, which apparently includes life after death and telepathy, fuels our narcissistic obsession with our individual unconscious. I am not against solitude or meditation, but I support it only when it feeds the moral life rather than serves as an excuse to avoid moral commitment. The quest for personal fulfillment can become an excuse for the individual to negate his or her responsibilities as a citizen, as a member of a wider community. Sam’s religion—for Sam in an odd way tries at the end of his book to create one—is in tune with this narcissism. His idealized version of Buddhism is part of his inability to see that it too has been used to feed the lusts of warriors and killers, it too has been hijacked in the name of radical evil. Buddhist Shinto warrior cults justified and absolved those who carried out the worst atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanjing. By the end of World War II Buddhist and Shinto priests recruited and indoctrinated kamikaze (divine wind) pilots in the name of another god. It is an old story. It is not the evil of religion, but the inherent capacity for evil of humankind.
We have forgotten who we were meant to be, who we were created to be, because we have forgotten that we find God not in ourselves, finally, but in our care for our neighbor, in the stranger, including those outside the nation and the faith. The religious life is not designed to make you happy, or safe or content; it is not designed to make you whole or complete, to free you from anxieties and fear; it is designed to save you from yourself, to make possible human community, to lead you to understand that the greatest force in life is not power or reason but love.
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By Jim H., July 11, 2007 at 12:18 pm # COPY
By Jim H., July 11, 2007 at 10:35 am # Re: 85807 And I, for one, am thunderstruck that the ‘World Intellectual Community’ has not, and does not, completely expose all you criminally fraudulent scheming swindlers, for the true debauchers, and destroyers of our Democratic, and Human Society, that is so obvious ‘you are’, to anyone who is not distracted from, or beholden to you-all!
By Doug L, July 10, 2007 at 11:31 am # Refering to straight_talk_11 #84850 I made a simple comment. From that you have made some rather bizarre conclusions about me. Looks like you’re trying to pick a fight. I’m not interested. Jim H seems to be handling you just fine. Anyway, I’ll take Harris over Hedges any day. Many others have made better points than I could make as for why this is true. And don’t take it so personally.
By Jim H., July 9, 2007 at 5:33 pm # Re: 83666 Hello DSA;
By Jim H., July 9, 2007 at 8:21 am # 85222 Rev. ‘STRAY’ Talk, Dr. of Divinity, and Proselytizing Preacher So! You’re at it again? First, You are doiing your ‘damnedest’ trying to re-define “FAITH”? Dictionary: FAITH: Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence! And you’re are trying a ‘new tack’? Another ‘AFFRONT’ at RE-INVENTING a lost-cause farcical “God”? You say: “Not all theists consider God as “supernatural”.(?) This is an outright lie! Dictionary: “If you don’t realize this, you are dangerous to both yourself, and the rest of humanity!” And, anyone who thinks, or ‘pretends’ otherwise, is either an imbercile, an escapee from a ‘Nuthouse’, or a thieving charlatan (like you?) seeking to perpetuate the schemes and tricks used to prey on, and enslave innocent children, and fools (like you?), give them ‘inferiorty complexes, and compel them to kneel and You say a/o imply: ‘in effect’, “It is) “My personal view--- (that) God (did not) “create” “nature” “from outside of nature”! “---not a “supernatural” agent acting from outside.” With your ‘warped’ and ‘twisted’ method of making asinine deductions, your mental numbness has accidently finally brought you closer to the ‘actual’ TRUTH! You are SICK, and getting SICKER! You had better see a Psychiatrist! I am by now ‘MORE CONVINCED’ you are one of the ilk of that gang of criminals: Falwell, Haggard, Pat Robertson, Jerry Brown, James Dobson, the Pope, etc. etc. who LIE, and steal money from little kids, and convert them through mesmerizing, branding, indoctrination into automaton shills for spreading your rotten cancer of the mind disease to other little childrens minds so they all become robotic donaters of money to sate your filthy, slimy insatiable greed! Why else would you lie so much? And keep insisting that FARCE IS FACT? You certainly KNOW that “God” is a farcical tool of rotten crooks! And that it was originally used to describe every type and sort of evil in mythology, the forerunner of all religions! It might help your weak and distorted conception of the world to dwell on the question that: if there WAS a so called “Creator God”, who, or what CREATED the “Creator God”,? And, Who or what created that which created the one that created the “Creator God”? And IF you say that “God” ALWAYS WAS”? Then you are in fact describing the UNIVERSE! That “ALWAYS WAS”! Wake up! And stop lying! You cannot fool sensible people who have not caught that discease. And I am certain most others here realize you are just another of those ‘lying crooks’ who seek to hypnotise and enslave more little kids so as to do dirty things to them!
By Jim H., July 8, 2007 at 10:39 am # Re: 84377 To: Mister Maani; “Evangelical Minister"--- to the poor(?) You say: “Faith deals with ---the “super"-natural world.” I say: “Supernatural” is an oxymoron! Nature is ‘superb’, but, there is NOTHING ‘BEYOND’ “NATURAL”! “Supernatural” is the realm of fakers, and criminal ‘charlatans’ who sell “Pigs in a poke” saying: “ Trust me! There is absolutely nothing better than, or “super” to the natural world! I say “supernatural” “Faith” is unnatural! And ‘Godism’ is ‘Blind Faith’ in an unnatural superfluous nonentity! And those who believe in the “supernatural”, and ‘Godism’ are ‘blind’ to the “facts of NATURAL life”! Dictionary: supernatural (?) You say: “I VEHEMENTLY oppose ANY attempt by “religion” to foist on---anyone---explanations As an “Evangelical Minister”, ‘Proselytizing-Preacher ‘YOU’ ARE always “FOIST"ING upon all within earshot your lying “explanations"---[about ‘Godism’] which do not stand up to the scientific method."(!) So you are an admitted liar! You say: “---my mother---rabidly atheist---invites me to discussion-s---(at) CSI---(secular meetings)---her “ulterior motive” is---"(?) (No doubt an effort to mend your mind! And startle you back to reality!) You say: “---my mother, while---not understanding or accepting my faith---”. (Has no alternative but to HUMOR her once sane, but now, the victim of a warped mind, daughter, with whom she is making an effort to bring her back to reality while avoiding insulting, or offending, her once cute little innocent girl, who has somehow strayed from the ‘straight and narrow’ path of natural reality and is the unsuspecting victim of criminal charlatan thieves who may any day convince her to make an oath of poverty, then be compelled to give up all her worldly possessions to those thieves!) Think! How would you react to a daughter who renounced sanity, in favor of an ‘addiction, to something you knew was the most evil force on the face of the earth? What could you possibly do to ‘win her back’ without alienating her, and losing her altogether? Your mother is smart enough to realize that; just as you are reacting to the information, and criticism provided by some of us here, you would be just as adamant and resentful if ‘she’ were to say, or imply The very least you should do if you have any respect for the integrity of your ‘highly intelligent’ mother, is, to, ask her to tell you why she is an atheist, and why she does not believe in the “God” you believe in! You say:"--only true God...” makes an awful lot of presumptions---” You have said: “I am an Evangelical Minister” (!) So! You therefore believe “There is only one True God!” And, according to ‘your’ “faith”, “anyone who denies “God” is, in ‘your’ “faith” a “mortal sinner”! I do not know why you would call this a “sarcastic”, “presumptuous” “accusation”! And why do you say: “--- (the above) has no application in my life and faith.” (?) PS: I am an Associate Member of CSI, a Member of CFI, and a subscriber of both Skeptical Inquirer, and Free Inquiry! But I haven’t seen you at any of the meetings? Are you a momma’s boy?
By Jim H., July 7, 2007 at 6:16 pm # Re: 84756 Doug L You say :“Chris Hedges has taken religious double talk to a new level of insanity. That’s all there is to his rant.” I say: BRAVO! You are so very right! Please read on: Re: Chris Hedges: “I don’t Believe in Atheists” Dictionary Dictionary Dictionary Hedges says: “What he (Harris) fails to grasp is not simply the meaning of faith(?)— but the supreme importance of the monotheistic traditions in creating the concept of the individual."(?) I say: “Monotheism” “faith” in “God”, enslaves; and absolutely destroys “the the concept of the individual”! I say:Hedges begins his statement with ranting accusations and outlandish lies! And then, in order to support his atrocious lies, he raves on, and on with a stream of ‘mumbo-jumbo’ doubletalk that creates the impresssion he is so fanatically addicted to the idea of a “Creator-God” that where he sees increasing opposition to the gigantic ‘spoof’ from ever more ‘quarters, he decided he would try his hand at ‘re-inventing ‘God”. And, like so many before him, he fails! So much for his farcical ridiculous self-destructive diatatribe!
By Doug L, July 7, 2007 at 5:44 am # Chris Hedges has taken religious double talk to a new level of insanity. That’s all there is to his rant.
By Jim H., June 28, 2007 at 12:16 pm # Re: 81965 Rt. Rev. Stray Words Dr. Div. You say:"---Tooth fairies and Santa Clauses are--- fictional---”! And, to your question: “---Do-(es--- ‘that’ put them in a separate class from an idea(?) (NO!)---(an absurd, false conception, “idea” of another make-believe fairytale character)---of a Supreme---(being)?” (NO!) I say, ABSOLUTLEY NOT! ‘THEY’ ARE ONE AND THE SAME ! BOTH, MAKE BELIEVE FAIRYTALE MENTAL CONCOCTIONS! “IDEAS”! If you don’t realize this, you are dangerous to both yourself, and the rest of humanity! And, anyone who thinks, or ‘pretends’ otherwise, is either an imbercile, an escapee from a ‘Nuthouse’, or a thieving charlatan (like you?) seeking to perpetuate the schemes and tricks used to prey on, and enslave innocent children, and fools (like you?), give them ‘inferiorty complexes, and compel them to kneel and plea for ‘grace’ for their “sins” (whatever that means) which often is only granted in return for criminal Then: you ‘spout’ about “---Conscious Intelligence---"(?) I say: “Conscious Intelligence” is a HUMAN ATTRIBUTE! FAKE things, like dolls, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse, make-believe “Creator God”, Porky Pig, Mortimer Snerd and Charlie McCarthy do not have either “Conscious"ness, or “Intelligence”! You are SICK, and getting SICKER! You had better see a Psychiatrist! I am by now CONVINCED you are one of the ilk of that gang of criminals Falwell, Haggard, Pat Robertson, Jerry Brown, James Dobson, the Pope, etc. etc. who steal money from little kids, and convert them through mesmerizing, branding, indoctrination into automaton shills for spreading your rotten cancer of the mind disease to other little childrens minds so they all become robotic donaters of money to sate your filthy, slimy insatiable greed! Why else would you lie so much? And keep insisting that FARCE IS FACT? You certainly KNOW that “God” is a farcical tool of rotten crooks! And that it was originally used to describe every type and sort of evil in mythology, the forerunner of all religions! It might help your weak and distorted conception of the world to dwell on the question that: if there WAS a so called “Creator God”, who, or what CREATED the “Creator God”,? And, Who or what created that which created the one that created the “Creator God”? And IF you say that “God” ALWAYS WAS”? Then you are in fact describing the UNIVERSE! That “ALWAYS WAS”! Wake up! And stop lying! You cannot fool sensible people who have not caught that discease. And I am certain most others here realize you are just another of those lying crooks who seek to hypnotise and enslave more little kids so as to dirty things to them!
By Jim H., June 26, 2007 at 1:27 pm # Rev: stray_ talk (?) You say: “---God as existing---."(?) “He creates(?) from within it---"(?) Do you also believe in the “Tooth Fairy” “as existing”? And “Santa Claus” “as existing”? Your asinine assertions about a farcical “creation” of backward illiterate ‘aboriginal’ prehistoric hominids, who named every fearful and horrifying evil “God”, is insanely comical, coming from an ‘adult’(?) in the Computer accessable information age of the Twenty First Century! You must be “Brain Dead”! Or, the infectious ‘plague-like’ disease has warped, and twisted whatever ‘bit’ of brain you ever had into an upside-down knot, so that you ‘see’ and imagine things to ‘be’ the ‘wacky’ way they appear to an upside down-backward nut-case! For any who are able to read this below, there never, never was a “Beginning”! Or, the need for- any so called “First Cause” “Creator God”! It’ a Fact! Mass/energy never disappear Without something to ‘create! a “so-called “Creator-God” Conservation of Mass/Energy E=mc2 P.S. Don;t worry about “consciousness”, you don’t have any!
By Norman Doering, June 25, 2007 at 5:00 pm # straight_talk_11 wrote:
Oh really? The flaws in their reasoning? Then don’t bother with me, writeMinsky and Dennett. I think they’ll tell you that you’re just assuming your conclusion… if they bother to give you the time of day. And I repeat my questions: 1) What kind of consciousness could you have without any memory what-so-ever? If none, then memory is more fundamental than consciousness. 2) Do you think your consciousness will survive your death?
By Norman Doering, June 23, 2007 at 6:36 pm # In post #80722 straight_talk_11 wrote:
Dogmatically repeating my own views? I said you’re not going to get it, and you didn’t. Let’s consider what straight_talk_11 skipped over from my post:
What you don’t get is that there is real math and real science and real engineering that goes far beyond your introspective sophistry. It’s not dogmatic when I’m reporting on real science and engineering—science contradicts your views and I’ve got links that demonstrate it. There were links in my post that would take you to websites that described more. Go back and click on the word “perceptron.” The perceptron was the first attempt to model how the neurons in the brain’s neural network produce everything we consider mind, including consciousness. They got it wrong—but they’ve improved now. Today we have the Blue Brain project, an attempt to create a biologically accurate, functional model of the brain. We know that these neural nets store our memories, hell we’ve even got cyborged neurons on computer chips storing information. Now where would your consciousness be without memory? What would your self-awareness be like if you had utterly no memory? Consciousness is not fundamental, it’s made of component parts and memory is one of them. Another component part of consciousness is the pattern classification schemes that define what we can remember and be aware of. A perceptron could never have achieved consciousness because it could never create a scheme for representing a self to be aware of. It couldn’t classify (and remember) itself as a pattern. Consciousness requires a physical neural system to have memory and pattern recognition. The brain is a systems that can be altered just like we can alter neural nets, and indeed, take a drug like LSD and your consciouness will be altered. Suffer brain damage and you could wind up like someone in Oliver Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
By Norman Doering, June 23, 2007 at 4:43 pm # In post #80733 straight_talk_11 wrote:
You don’t pay attention. Back in post #79105 I wrote:
There is something we can call consciousness, in fact a lot of things, but like the illusion that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun revolves around you—things are not quite what they seem. Did you ever bother to find out who Michael Gazzaniga was or learn anything about his split brain research? Let’s cut to the chase and get you to admit what you really want to believe. You wrote:
You don’t want to conceive of your own negation, do you? Isn’t that what you’re trying to believe in? You want to believe that when you die your consciousness will continue. That’s when the real negation of meaning happens for you.
By Norman Doering, June 22, 2007 at 6:54 am # Alan in post #80387:
What systematic opinion polls do you have access to? There was an article called ”The myth of Muslim support for terror” that claimed:
I found the wording suspicious and blogged on it:
By Alan, June 22, 2007 at 6:02 am # Norman:
By Jim H., June 21, 2007 at 10:25 pm # Re:80317, 80277 Why don’t you two long-winded semi-unconcious blabbermouths take a vacation, and stop ‘hogging’ the ‘board’? Have you no shame? Can’t you afford “Instant Email? This is not the proper place for personal chats about the garbage you people pretend to know so much about. The very least you should do is make an effort to talk some sense, and relate it to the subject of this Report! Is’nt that some kind of “sin”? You had better see your confessor! |
Huckabee’s Major Misfire
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