There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because of a confused and confusing willingness to label as 'religion' the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein.
The president of a historical society in New Jersey wrote a letter that so damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind, it is worth reading twice: We respect your learning, Dr Einstein; but there is one thing you do not seem to have learned: that God is a spirit and cannot be found through the telescope or microscope, no more than human thought or emotion can be found by analyzing the brain. As everyone knows, religion is based on Faith, not knowledge. Every thinking person, perhaps, is assailed at times with religious doubt. My own faith has wavered many a time. But I never told anyone of my spiritual aberrations for two reasons: (1) I feared that I might, by mere suggestion, disturb and damage the life and hopes of some fellow being; (2) because I agree with the writer who said, "There is a mean streak in anyone who will destroy another's faith." ... I hope, Dr Einstein, that you were misquoted and that you will yet say something more pleasing to the vast number of the American people who delight to do you honor. What a devastatingly revealing letter! Every sentence drips with intellectual and moral cowardice.
We respect your learning, Dr Einstein; but there is one thing you do not seem to have learned: that God is a spirit and cannot be found through the telescope or microscope, no more than human thought or emotion can be found by analyzing the brain. As everyone knows, religion is based on Faith, not knowledge. Every thinking person, perhaps, is assailed at times with religious doubt. My own faith has wavered many a time. But I never told anyone of my spiritual aberrations for two reasons: (1) I feared that I might, by mere suggestion, disturb and damage the life and hopes of some fellow being; (2) because I agree with the writer who said, "There is a mean streak in anyone who will destroy another's faith." ... I hope, Dr Einstein, that you were misquoted and that you will yet say something more pleasing to the vast number of the American people who delight to do you honor.
What a devastatingly revealing letter! Every sentence drips with intellectual and moral cowardice.
I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
In doing so, he offends believers on all sides. First, he tells a variety of believers that what they think is not really religion at all (leaving them perhaps somewhat perplexed as to what exactly their beliefs are). Then he smears everyone else as an idiot.
What is provocative in those quotes is the deliberate way in which Dawkins separates any sort of defensible and reasonable (by both his standards and the typical standards of his audience) spiritual and religious sentiment from what he defines as "real religion," which is solely composed of fundamentalist insanity.
But he doesn't say that in the quotations, which is not surprising because he has made it clear in various places that he doesn't think this. Thus he accepts, as is obvious, that there are moderate, nice, reasonable religious people - and he thinks theirs is "real religion" too. His problem with them is that, as he sees it, they give a cloak of respectability to the more extremist forms - so obviously he doesn't restrict "real religion" to the extremists or he wouldn't have this complaint/argument.
Yet again views are attributed to him which he just doesn't hold. The distinction he makes, see chapter one, is between the "religion" attributed to Einstein and others, which was awe and reverence for nature, and, the real religion of those who believe in a god, a supernatural being who created nature. The latter can come in moderate or extremist forms. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
aspiring to genteel poverty
And how would you judge the adequacy of any definition - by whether it fitted some anterior definition - or by your general understanding of what religion is?
School essays are often supposed to start with a definition, sometimes it's a good idea, with a very general term which we're perfectly capable of applying, it's just a waste of time; See your own favourite "definition" of religion - and stop wasting your time. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Maybe "religion" is an extremely complex topic that does not lend itself to those who would dismiss it as evil in a paragraph or two.
What are you talking about - Dawkins wrote a book, not just a few paragraphs - if you have any arguments about what he has actually written, let's see them. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Am I supposed to take this kind of rambling seriously:
Well I stared off with a sympathetic mind on the smearing of Dawkins. I was less open to some of Dawkins arguments. Some of his arguemts I think are interesting and under some circumstances would be interesting to debate. Did nanne go overbord? I still don't have enough information to form an opinion. On the other hand the defense of Dawkins so far is none to pretty either. And then there is Hitchens.
What is the "none to [sic] pretty" part of the defense ? Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
We are meant to be impressed with the evils of religion and regaled with the Battle of Jericho. Alternative explanations are not listed. Einstein said Nationalism is an infantile disease. What role did religion play? What role did nationalism play? What would Jewish children who did not believe in god think? We have no answers and are thus little wiser. Simple truths to mask complex questions, such as "Does religion manipulate and control society? Is it the other way around? Is it a two way street?" "As society changes, does religion change?" "Do we create god in our own image, or does religion create us in its own image?" Is Skinner correct or is he wrong?
Nationalism is an infantile disease.
What role did religion play? What role did nationalism play? What would Jewish children who did not believe in god think? We have no answers and are thus little wiser. Simple truths to mask complex questions, such as "Does religion manipulate and control society? Is it the other way around? Is it a two way street?" "As society changes, does religion change?" "Do we create god in our own image, or does religion create us in its own image?" Is Skinner correct or is he wrong?
Instead you are interested in pretending that I have said nothing at all. You are trying to score cheap debating points as opposed to something more serious.
If you don't want to answer my criticisms then don't. Don't pretend that I have not made any.
I will no longer be reading your responses on this topic.
Oh dear. For anybody else - the bit you quoted from your comment is not exactly coherent - you seem to be complaining that Dawkins doesn't deal with all the possible issues you can dream up. You don't clearly set out anything specific he says and show what's wrong with it.
Simple truths to mask complex questions
Exactly which supposed "simple truths" ? Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Maybe I also hold many local politicans to be [pejorative, plural]!
Otherwise, the quotes show that Dawkins is incapable of developing a sympathetic understanding of 'the religious mind'.
I can understand dislike for the first; I cannot understand presuming to judge upon the second.
Whenever I contemplate pantheism seriously, the thing I find really, really impressive about it - ironically, a sentiment which 'pantheistic reverence' glosses over entirely - is its utter, utter indifference to human concern. Get your head around that, even for a split second, and you will be seriously awed ... but it isn't a nice, warm, fuzzy type of awe at all. A serious pantheism - a pure form of it - should stress not reverence, but indifference and insignificance. Those are the realities of our relationship with the Universe. The 'awe at something bigger' is, in my view, simply a projection ... as I might love the whole world and forgive it everything simply because I spent the night in the arms of someone nice.
What irked me was your (and Dawkins') intolerance for pantheistic reverence, which is after all a largely personal affair; at least you do not see me, Einstein, Spinoza or Hawking, and I'd guess at edwin, proselytising.
You can't even talk about the concept of significance from a non-personal perspective. Your interpretation of how pantheism should be interpreted can only reflect your own and other people's infusion of meaning into it. Indifference and insignificance, in the human mind, cannot be mere absences, just as atheism cannot be a mere absence (as I will explain in my longer answer to Ted which is still in the making). They are active stances, imbibed with meaning, which is how you can question the ethics they would lead to.
In that sense it is, indeed, projection.
Now I find that occassionaly entertaining the thought that I, and all mankind is, in the larger scheme of things (as a metaphor, I don't think there actually is a "scheme" of things) ... insignificant, to be helpful. It helps me modify the more hubristic and overly rationalistic tendencies of humanism, and it helps me to keep in mind that meaning is only found/created/mutually constructed in personal interaction.
