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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 Norman Doering, June 16, 2007 at 3:15 am # Cat wrote:
No. Sam Harris asks moral questions about torture, he doesn’t support it. He made two faulty assumption in his argument here, and he didn’t necessarily believe his assumptions. Note first, Sam is not talking about any real case, it’s an imagined scenario, a thought experiment about morality. He tells us to imagine a known terrorist who has planted a bomb. The terrorist now sits in your custody and he gloats about the suffering he’ll cause. Given this state of affairs, given that there is still time to prevent an atrocity, is it wrong to subject this unpleasant fellow to torture? For the sake of making a point he assumed you could actually get reliable information from torture and he assumed he could be assured of having the right subject to torture (the terrorist is gloating). If Sam was suppoting torture he wouldn’t be using such an absurd, Hollywood scenario. Then Harris brings in our way of fighting war, dropping bombs on civilian populations which we do accept because they have worked for us. If anyone thinks the two assumptions in the scenario are true then Harris’ point would stand. Torture as moral as dropping bombs on people in war. That was his point. That was the moral question. If you drop a bomb on civilians in war the results will be worse than torture. You will leave more people mamed, traumatized and crippled than a torture system does. War itself is a form of torture done on a huge scale. The only difference is scale and the goal. The goal of war is not to extract information but to break a society’s will to continue fighting. The negaitive affects torture has are multiplied a thousand times by war. John McCain seems to have recovered from his torture, he is functional and lucid, but Max Cleland will never regrow the limbs he lost in war.
By Norman Doering, June 16, 2007 at 3:10 am #
Well, for one thing Harris uses everday language and everday conversational meanings but Hedges has to redefine everything in weird ways that are ultimately quite Orwellian in their Newspeak way of making it impossible to even think Sam Harris’ thoughts. For example, To Sam Harris’ discredit, he falls into the trap of using the “faith” euphemism in the title of his book. However, I understand what Sam means because that’s how most Christians I know use the word. They mean they have faith in their religious dogmas. But faith doesn’t really mean believing in some religion. It means things like “Trust” and “Fidelity” and one can have faith in people, computers, cars and a thousand other non-religious things. That faith and trust is earned through experience. Hedges isn’t wrong to say that Harris’ book “is an attack not on faith but on a system of being and believing that is dangerous and incompatible with the open society,” but he is very misleading because both Hedges and Harris are continually using the word “Faith” as a euphemism for some kind of religious belief. If we think of having faith in non-religious things, like a friend or an institution, like government, then Harris has no attack on that. But Hedges later, in his opening remarks, redefines Faith to mean “… not faith in magic, not faith in church doctrine or church hierarchy, but faith in simple human kindness.” No, that’s not the meaning of faith either—it’s just twisted enough you miss how faith is earned. And it’s not just about “kindness.” It’s very sloppy reasoning and it seems a matter of dishonesty to pretend he doesn’t know what Harris means. My working assumption is that Hedges intentionally tries to baffle people with BS. He brings in a lot of redefined words to make points that if stated simply are clearly not relevant to Sam Harris’ argument. It’s the diametric opposite of honest argument. Hedges doesn’t seem to want the audience to understand what he has to say. He wants them to come away thinking Hedges is very smart and must be right even if the exposition made absolutely no sense.
By Norman Doering, June 16, 2007 at 2:56 am #
Not true, human love can be directed at other people, or even at ideas, institutions and mere phantoms of your imagination, like God. If Augustine and Hedges can see no other choice but themselves and a single phantom of their imagination, then they have a serious problem.
When a mother lion dies defending her offspring she gains nothing for herself, she loses herself for the sake of her genetic heritage. That bit of mammalian genetics, those selfish genes, are part of the human genetic inheritance too. Parents give up a lot to have kids and it serves their personal selfish interests very little. You can’t strike that all up to ego and status, kids won’t win you status or do much for your ego because any, and most, idiots do it without even knowing they are serving a genetic mandate.
False choice. In human civilization the only way you can serve yourself is by serving others or turning your life into a lie. If you want money, you need to get a job and jobs generally entail you doing what someone else wants you to do for money. In society, this city of man, our lot is tied together and we are all mutually dependent. Michael Shermer, however, also points out that evolution in this social context is now a contest between the liars and the lie detectors. You can cheat your service to your fellows by lying about your value to others.
Made up terms to define false, made up dichotomies. Yes we have laws, morals and ethics and we need them to work together but these come from men who can see we need them, not from some supernatural sky daddy who has to hand them to us on stone tablets even after leaving Egytptian society where they already had similar laws because the people were too stupid to see they needed to agree on some laws to function as a society.
Then apparently Hedges doesn’t know the first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. (Exodus 20:3 1) because that seems to eliminate any society with another god. Indeed, the Jews went on to kill quite a few of them and even their own when they took to worshipping a golden calf.
By Norman Doering, June 16, 2007 at 2:49 am # Cat asked:
The Bible. Your average Christian education in Sunday School. My education in Sunday Scoool as a child. Every preacher I’ve seen on TV. I find it hard to believe you can live in this culture and not know that.
No, that’s not what I said. But what are you saying, that Chris Hedges bases all his morals on the Bible? That the Native American Indians based their morality on stories? That’s the only way your question would have any honest import. What you said was: “You talk about miracles being stated as magic in the Bible. The events that are called ‘miracles’ are of course impossible, but remember that these are only stories. The Native Americans told creation myths, not necassarily to explain how the world was made, but what lessons could be learned from these stories.” I don’t see the word “moral” in your statement which I responded to. What is the connection between creation and morality if any?
Well then, that’s a bad start right there. The Bible writers bit off way more than they could crew, no wonder their minds got sick.
Because that is how most of those who call themselves Christian have defined themselves since at least the codification of the Nicene Creed. That is what emerged from Rome and if Chris Hedges is going to say that over a thousand years of Christianity was theocratic fascism then he’s getting a lot closer to Sam Harris than he knows, or will admit. More to come later…
By Norman Doering, June 15, 2007 at 9:19 pm # Jim wrote:
You’ve see Jesus Camp one too many times.
By Norman Doering, June 15, 2007 at 7:16 pm # Cat wrote:
To a “real” Christian most of the “miracles” I mentioned are not stories, they are supposed to be historical facts. This has been so ever since the Nicene Creed was codified. Now, I suspect that the ancient Hebrews stole some material that was originally created as fiction to add to the Old Testament, but ever since the concil of Nicea the standard meaning of “Christian” has been a believer in certain magic/miracles, Jesus rising from the dead and saving you from death. There is some wiggle room but you’ve wiggled yourself out of Christianity once you stop believing Jesus Christ is some kind of miracle performing dude who can save you from death—and saving you from death is the big magic. If all it takes to be religious is to believe in the meaning of stories than I would be a Odyssian because I find meaning in Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’d be a Farmian because I find meaning in Animal Farm. And a thousand other fictional religions and nobody really uses language that way unless they’re trying to obfuscate their relationship to the culture’s dominant religion. Hedges is a Christian if and only if he believes that Jesus Christ was a historical figure and a magic dude who can save him from death. This is the final bit of logic one can only obfuscate around and avoid answering. One is an atheist if and only if one finds the idea of a mentally anthropic God too incredible to credit. They exist and I am one. A few years ago I got into an online debate with a Christian and I tried to use a line of evidence like this: “what about all these other religions, now dead, that came before? See how the idea of an afterlife evolved?” The Christian thought those mythologies and old religions actually did glimpse some partial and magical truth. After I explained Mithraism and said it was older than Christianity they admitted that if there were no Christianity they would have been Mithrain. They think they can intuit truth. They think they can feel when something is right and earlier people got it partly right. Push them further and they’ll admit that Christianity as they know probably isn’t 100 percent right. That’s why more liberal Christians can reject all the more vile stuff in the Bible. They “intuit” (and only partially reason it) that it’s not right. They’re still Christian as long as the “if and only if” def above applies. That’s all the wiggle room there is in the definition Western society has accepted for over a thousand years. Hedges can’t monkey with that and expect to be understood. Harris is not perfect, but he makes a lot more sense to me than Hedges. George Bernard Shaw once said “England and America are two countries separated by a common language,” and perhaps Hedges isn’t obfuscating to himself—but the way I define things he makes no sense at all.
By Melanie Stephan, June 15, 2007 at 6:08 pm # I think you have made some good points. However, Mark wrote that you can’t prove that God exists. I can prove that God exists cause he dropped in on me. Yes, he talked to me in a series of dreams. What he told me in the dreams is the meaning of First is Last and Last is First as written in Revelation. Now for over 2000 years no one has been able to understand what this means. Maybe that is why God dropped in on me, he just couldn’t take the confusion any more. I wonder if he thinks we are all stupid not to get it. Of all of the things going on in this world, Gods issue is the meaning of First is Last. Some people have issues with Gays, Abortion or Women being priests. God said nothing about those issues, nada, nothing. Gods big issue is the meaning of First is Last and Last is First. Don’t get me wrong he had other things to say but First is Last and Last is First was number one. Now Birth is First, maybe you can figure out the rest. OK, Birth is Last and Last is Birth. I think what God is telling us is that we are still children that have not been born yet. Your Birthday is coming up. First you have to pass Judgment Day. Judgment is painfull and so is Birth. Now how do you think your going to do on Judgment Day? Think about your life up till now. How bad were you? Do you think he will forgive you for that? Don’t ask me if you’ll pass. God didn’t tell me what you did. Anyway just something to think about. And Yes, there is a God. I have proof. God talked to me. My proof is written, plus I have evidence. Melanie Stephan
By Jim H., June 15, 2007 at 4:49 pm # Re: 78372 To: Norm Do You say:"---the Bible’s---"(?) And, more recent ‘researchers’ of such TRASH know ‘it’ factually to be a slimy pornographic, ‘how-to-torture’, and ‘how to kill’ manua! That filty ‘garbage heap’ of lies and deceptions of all kind, is used by ‘Godist’ charlatans to afflict, mezmerize, and robotize innocent children and fools so they may be manipulated to the servile toiling of ‘shills’, rape, and abetting cohorts in spreading the ‘Ponzi-racketeering’ criminal plague-like disease of ‘Godism’, referred to as “religion”! People with active brains wish the “Bible” totally out of existance! Further: With that SOB Muslim A/ho in the White House, we ‘are’ ‘now’ living in a “Religious Theocracy”!
By Norman Doering, June 15, 2007 at 2:25 pm # Cat wrote:
Your statement (and Hedges’ ) contradicts the Bible’s use of the term miracle. In the Bible miracles are magic. When Jesus heals a blind man or feeds thousands with a few fishies and a couple loaves of bread, Christians call that a miracle. The Bible doesn’t call Love, and waking up in the morning miracles. The Bible points to magic tricks. I looked up miracle in a concordance [click here] and got examples like these: Exodus 7:9 Psalm 78:12 The Bible doesn’t call a miracle “the awakeing of meaningful consciousness within oneself to larger patterns that transcend our own intelligence or understanding” either. It’s a magic trick used to intimidate and confound, to mystify your victim. Perhaps you are confounded by love and waking up in the morning? Are you?
That “why question” isn’t the problem (unless the “why” implies the answer must be teleological). The problem is the dead wrong answer offered by the Bible. The Bible’s answer is stated explicitly: A jealous God who “hates” sin and occasionally, magically/miraculously, involves himself in human affairs, tells some selected human beings what to do and if you don’t do what they say you’ll get punished, zapped, cursed, or damned to Hell.
I’ll give you a half a concession on that point. It’s badly worded. Neither Harris nor Hedges would be writing books and having debates if they were not trying to shape other people’s thinking. Hedges wants to warn us of the dangers of Fundamentalism and fascist theocracy. Harris wants to say religion is ultimately going to lead to fascist theocracy. They both are against fascist theocracy they just don’t agree on how that’s to be done or what the cause is. I side with Harris. What you and Hedges call religion isn’t really religion. It’s just a way to avoid saying you don’t really believe the Bible. Harris isn’t saying that reading the Bible like we read Greek myths or watch “Rise of the Silver Surfer” is bad. He is saying that believing its explicit message about a mentally anthropomorphic god is. That is Christianity, that is a religion, the rest is obfuscation.
By Jim H., June 15, 2007 at 7:13 am # Re: 78219 I say: More “asinine verbiage”? Conservation of Mass/Energy E=mc2
By Jim H., June 14, 2007 at 8:25 pm # Re: 78087 To: Wrong-words Mike; I say: As I have said previously: “‘You’ don’t read well!” You say: “--you are a fundamentalist yourself?” I say: That is an outright lie! You say:"---God and the Bible have been used as reasons for atrocities” (?) I say: ‘They’ ‘are’ the worst kind of “atrocities”! You say: “You keep saying that “all belief” is a “cancer of the brain.”(?) I say: As I have said previously: “‘you’ don’t read well!” You Say: Isn’t atheism a belief? I say: Rejecting fairytales as something to believe in, does not make a person an “atheist”! I say: I am a ‘realist’, one who only believes in the believable! And, dislikes lies, and liars! You writesome pedantically snide remarks that really show you to be extremely naive, or to have the You say: “---the need of each person to find their own answers for themselves.(?) I say: How many ‘religious fanatical robots’ do you know who have found “their own answers for themselves”? You say: “Let us pursue truth in our own way”. I say: When ‘your’ pursuit of “truth” causes: alteration of our US Constitution, changes our PLEDGE of Allegiance to a PRAYER, INSTALLS a ‘not-elected’ wartime military deserter in the White House, loads
By Jim H., June 14, 2007 at 8:51 am # Re: 77886 And, ‘you’ don’t read well! Religion’s faith? Is cancer of the brain! “God” “belief” ‘of any kind’, is: cancer of the brain! The word “God” is one of the many tools used by the rapers of innocents, and fanatical killers!
By Norman Doering, June 12, 2007 at 9:20 am # Cat wrote: Why are we here is not a moral question. Why would it be? 2. “Hedges does not believe in witch craft, magic or anything of this sort. He believes, for example, that miracles are everywhere.” Why is that not a contradiction? He doesn’t believe in magic, he believes in miracles. What’s the difference? 3. “not where people would worship christianity, but would accept all religions.” That can only happen when you drain them of all conflict, and that only happens when you drain them of all meaning. Chris Hedges wants a world without arguments where everyone believes what he believes. |
Newsroom Carnage Continues at The Washington Post
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