[This is probably much too long for the limited attention-span
of Usenetters, but is does give an interesting overview of the
counteroffensive against religion, especially fundamentalist
religion, now being effected by various parties, and does
raise the problem of what will replace religion if and when
it retreats or falls. I disagree with the conclusion.]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070528/lazare

Among the Disbelievers

by DANIEL LAZARE

[from the May 28, 2007 issue]

Imagine it's Paris in the spring of 1789 and you have just announced
that you are an inveterate foe of tyrants and kings. Obviously, your
message is not going to fall on deaf ears. But now that you've made it
clear what you're against, what are you for? Do you favor an
aristocratic constitution in which power devolves to the provincial
nobility? Would you prefer a British-style constitutional monarchy? Or
do you believe in all power to the sans-culottes? How you answer will
shape both your analysis of the situation and the political tactics
you employ in changing it. It may also determine whether you wind up
on the chopping block in the next half-decade or so.

This is the problem, more or less, confronting today's reinvigorated
atheist movement. For a long time, religion had been doing quite
nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were
quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover.
But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners
into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to
rid the world of evil and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian
evolution. As a consequence, religion now looks nearly as bad as
royalism did in the late eighteenth century. But while united in their
resolve to throw the bum out--God, that is--the antireligious forces
appear to have given little thought to what to replace Him with should
He go. They may not face the guillotine as a consequence. But they
could end up making even bigger fools of themselves than the
theologians they criticize.

Richard Dawkins is a case in point. It is no surprise that, along with
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian
Nation, and Daniel Dennett, author of Breaking the Spell: Religion As
a Natural Phenomenon, he has emerged at the head of a growing
intellectual movement aimed at relegating religion to the proverbial
scrapheap of history (which by this point must be filled to
overflowing). He's bright, obviously, a lively writer--his 1978 book
The Selfish Gene is regarded as a pop science classic--and as an
evolutionary biologist, he's particularly well equipped to defend
Darwin against neofundamentalist hordes for whom he is the Antichrist.
But Dawkins is something else as well: fiercely combative. Other
scientists have tried to calm things down by making nice-nice noises
concerning the supposedly complementary nature of the two pursuits.
Einstein famously said that "science without religion is lame,
religion without science is blind," while the late paleontologist
Stephen J. Gould once characterized the two fields as "non-overlapping
magisteria" that address different questions and have no reason to get
in each other's way. But Dawkins, to his great credit, is having none
of it. Although he does not quite come out and say so, he seems to
have the good sense to realize that no two fields are ever truly
separate but that, in a unified body of human knowledge, or episteme,
all overlap. Conflict is inevitable when different fields employ
different principles and say different things, which is why an
evolutionary biologist can't simply ignore it when some blow-dried TV
evangelist declares that God created the world in six days, and why
he'll become positively unhinged should the same televangelist begin
pressuring textbook publishers to adopt his views.

Consequently, he's got to go on the warpath--not only against the
fundamentalists but against the sloppy logic and wishful thinking on
which they batten. This is Dawkins's forte, and it is what makes The
God Delusion such an entertaining read. Not one for politeness, he is
the sort of fierce logic-chopper who chuckles nastily when coming
across what he regards as some particularly choice bit of inanity.
Discussing Arius of Alexandria, for example, infamous in certain
fourth-century theological circles for maintaining that God and Jesus
were not "consubstantial," i.e., not composed of the same substance or
essence, you can almost hear him snicker: "What on earth could that
possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What 'substance'?
What exactly do you mean by 'essence'? 'Very little' seems the only
reasonable reply." Quoting a third-century theologian known as St.
Gregory the Miracle Worker on the mystery of the Holy Trinity--"There
is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the
Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once
had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has
never been without the Son"--he can't help sneering that "whatever
miracles may have earned St. Gregory his nickname, they were not
miracles of honest lucidity." Noting that the Catholic Church divides
angels into nine categories, or orders--seraphim, cherubim, thrones,
dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and ordinary
members of the angelic rank-and-file--he lets slip that "what
impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch
but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the
details as they go along."

This is not entirely fair. The Catholic Church does not just make such
things up but has thought long and hard about angelic orders and other
matters of equal importance. But Dawkins's outrage at the persistence
of medieval ideas in the modern era is warranted. In fact, it's
overdue. Also warranted is the sheer pleasure he takes in recounting a
double-blind experiment funded by a whopping-rich outfit known as the
Templeton Foundation to test the efficacy of prayer. Headed by a
Boston cardiologist, Dawkins informs us, the study involved 1,802
patients in six hospitals who had just undergone coronary bypass
surgery. Researchers divided the subjects into three groups: those who
were not informed that church congregations as far away as Missouri
were praying for their speedy recovery, those who were informed and a
control group consisting of patients for whom no prayers were said and
who were unaware that an experiment was under way. Church members were
provided with each patient's first name and last initial and, in the
interest of standardization, were asked to pray "for a successful
surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" in just
those words.

The results, announced in April 2006, were a hoot. The first group of
patients, those who had no idea that others were praying for them, did
no better than the control group, while the second, those who knew
they were the object of others' prayers, actually did worse.
"Performance anxiety," the experimenters theorized. "It may have made
them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their
prayer team?" one speculated. Instead of accepting the results
gracefully and conceding that the theory of intercessory prayer had
been disproved, an Oxford theologian named Richard Swinburne
complained that the whole exercise was meaningless because what
matters to God is not prayer so much as the reasons behind it. But if
the experiment had gone the other way and the patients being prayed
over had outperformed the control group, we can well imagine what the
reaction would have been. People like Swinburne would have shouted
from the rooftops that God's existence had been proved and that we had
all better beg his forgiveness double-quick.

But it didn't, and it is now clear that praying for a quick recovery
is on par with crossing one's fingers and wishing for a Mercedes.
Science is predicated on the assumption that belief is unwarranted
without evidence and reason to back it up. But religion is based on
the opposite: that belief in the absence of evidence is a virtue and
that "the more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you
are," as Dawkins puts it. "Virtuoso believers who can manage to
believe something really weird, unsupported and insupportable, in the
teeth of evidence and reason, are especially highly rewarded." That
last line is classic Dawkins--provocative, pugnacious, even a bit over
the top, but true.

As Dawkins admits, there is something distinctly nineteenth century
about the new rationalism that he and others are promoting. It smacks
of prairie populism and freethinkers like the wonderful Robert
Ingersoll, who, in the post-Civil War period, used to crisscross the
country, drawing thousands eager to hear him denounce the churches,
poke fun at the Bible and sing the praises of Darwin: "Can we affect
the nature and qualities of substance by prayer? Can we hasten or
delay the tides by worship? Can we change winds by sacrifice? Will
kneelings give us wealth?... Has man obtained any help from heaven?"
These were questions that made Ingersoll one of the most popular
lecturers of his day. Now, after the mushy ecumenism of the late
twentieth century and the religious terrorism of the early twenty-
first, a growing number of Americans plainly long for something more
bracing.

But we are still in the position of the French revolutionary who has
not moved beyond antiroyalism. Atheism is a purely negative ideology,
which is its problem. If one does not believe in God, what should one
believe in instead? Dawkins thinks he has an answer--science--but his
understanding of the term is embarrassingly crude and empirical.

This comes through when he tries to figure out how "the God delusion"
arose in the first place. Why did people latch onto an idea that we
now know to be incorrect? Why didn't the ancient Israelites conduct
their own double-blind experiment to determine whether sacrificing all
those bulls, rams and occasionally children to Yahweh was really worth
the trouble? Dawkins gropes for an explanation at one point in his
book. He speculates that religious visions may be a form of temporal
lobe epilepsy (which implies that there must have been quite an
epidemic in Palestine when people like Elijah, Hosea and Jeremiah were
raising a ruckus) but then lets the idea drop. He suggests that
religion caught on because it confers certain evolutionary advantages
but concedes that this is exceedingly hard to prove. He speculates
that faith may be the result of a self-replicating "meme," the
cultural equivalent of a gene. But after a murky discussion of
"memeplexes" and genetic cartels, the reader is left with the
uncomfortable feeling that Dawkins is lost in a tautological fog in
which religion is self-replicating because it satisfies certain human
needs and is therefore... self-replicating. Finally, he suggests that
religion survives because it is comforting--this, some 200 pages after
conceding that religion is as likely to exacerbate stress as to
alleviate it. (The last thing Old Testament prophets wanted to do was
soothe troubled souls.)

Dawkins's sense of history is so minimal that it approaches the
vanishing point. He is a classic example of the kind of shallow
rationalist who thinks that all you have to know about history is that
everything was cloudy and dark until the scientific revolution of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at which point the sun began
poking through. To quote Alexander Pope: "Nature and Nature's laws lay
hid in night:/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light." Religion
took hold at a certain point because people were stupid and benighted,
but now that this is no longer the case, it should not hang around a
moment longer. Yet it never occurs to Dawkins that monotheism is a
theory like any other and that certain Jewish scribes and priests
adopted it in the sixth century BC because it seemed to confer certain
advantages. These were not survival advantages, since the Jews went on
to rack up an unparalleled record of military defeats. Rather, they
were intellectual advantages in that the theory of a single all-
powerful, all-knowing deity seemed to explain the world better than
what had come before.

Since Dawkins sees all religion as merely dumb, he can't imagine how
this might be. Hence he can't see how the idea of an all-powerful, all-
knowing creator might cause worshipers to see the world as a single
integrated whole and then launch them on a long intellectual journey
to figure out how the various parts fit together. Roughly 2,500 years
separate the Book of Isaiah, in which Yahweh first declares, "I am the
first and I am the last; apart from me there is no god [44:6]," and
Einstein's quest for a unified field theory explaining everything from
subatomic structure to the Big Bang. Everything else has changed, but
the universalism behind such an endeavor has remained remarkably
constant. Dawkins blames religion for stifling human curiosity. But
were he a bit more curious about the phenomenon he is supposedly
investigating, he would realize that it has done as much over the long
haul to stimulate it. For a world-famous intellectual, he is oddly
provincial.

Christopher Hitchens's new book, God Is Not Great, is another example
of atheism as an empty vessel, one he manages to fill with an
intellectual justification for George W. Bush's "war on terror."
Hitchens, of course, is the former left-wing journalist who astounded
friends, colleagues and readers alike by coming out in support of the
invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since then, with everyone from Richard Perle
to Peter Beinart busily backpedaling as the dimensions of the disaster
have grown more and more glaring, Hitchens has dug in his heels. Like
John McCain strolling through the Baghdad markets, he is more defiant
of reality than ever, more insistent, as he put it in a March 26
article in the Australian, that the occupation has made the world a
better and safer place. In God Is Not Great, he has something
unpleasant to say about nearly every believer under the sun--except
one. He trots out John Ashcroft's infamous remark that America has "no
king but Jesus" and reminds us that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson
both welcomed 9/11 as payback for America's tolerance of homosexuality
and abortion. He informs us that Hamas has talked about imposing the
old Al-Jeziya tax on Christians and Jews in the West Bank, while in
Gaza in April 2005 Muslim militants shot and killed a young woman
named Yusra al-Azami merely because she was sitting unchaperoned in a
car with her fiancé. For those inclined to think of the late Saddam
Hussein as a Third World dictator in the secular-nationalist mold,
Hitchens points out that Saddam found religion after the 1979 Iranian
Revolution, inscribing the words "Allahuh Akhbar" (God is great) on
the Iraqi flag, building a huge mosque as a showcase for his new piety
and producing a handwritten version of the Koran allegedly with his
own blood.

Yet one person is conspicuously absent from Hitchens's list of
religious evil-doers: George W. Bush. Yes, the man who said Jesus is
his favorite philosopher "because he changed my heart" and, as
governor of Texas, proclaimed June 10 as "Jesus Day," goes
unmentioned. How can this be? The explanation has to do with
Hitchens's subtitle. If "religion poisons everything," then it must be
responsible for most of the evil in the world, since belief of this
sort is currently so widespread and pervasive. If a political leader
is religious, he or she must be bad, and if he or she is bad, he or
she must be religious. This is why Saddam gets slammed for his cynical
exploitation of Islam and why Bush, author of the Global War on Terror
and the war on Iraq, both of which Hitchens supports, gets a free
pass. If he is to be believed, our faith-based President is defending
rationalism against religious intolerance. Despite Hitchens's anti-
Stalinist credentials, arguments like these are so unscrupulous as to
call to mind the Comintern of the late '30s and early '40s. Somewhere,
Andrei Vyshinsky is smiling.

Hitchens's historical sense in God Is Not Great is perhaps even more
stunted than that of Dawkins. Here he is, for example, attacking the
Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which celebrates the Maccabean revolt in
168 BC against the Seleucid effort to de-Judaize the Jerusalem temple
and consecrate it to Zeus:

When the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic
offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the
next few years of the Maccabean "revolt," many more assimilated Jews
were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had
flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since
the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to
the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas
in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion
between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial
governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to
Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the
birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

If only the Maccabees had stood by as Antiochus IV Epiphanes looted
the temple treasury, the world could have skipped 2,000 years or so of
religious fanaticism and proceeded directly to the founding of the
Council for Secular Humanism. Needless to say, there is no sense here
of historical progress as necessarily convoluted and complex, with
lots of back eddies, side currents and extended periods of stagnation.
But just as it takes a child a long time to mature, it takes a long
time for society as well.

It would be nice to believe that anachronistic thinking like this
halted at Calais, but Michel Onfray's Traité de athéologie, which has
been given the hotter title of Atheist Manifesto for the American
market, is not reassuring. Onfray is more philosophically
sophisticated than Dawkins and Hitchens, and he is entirely
commendable in his determination to hold Judaism, Christianity and
Islam to the same rigorous standard. Whereas Sam Harris singles out
Islam as "a religion of conquest," for instance, Onfray points out
that it was the Israelites who invented holy war, that the Israelite
god Yahweh "sanctioned crimes, murders, assassination...kill[ing]
animals like men and men like animals," and that the Vatican has
distinguished itself more recently as "a fellow traveler with every
brand of twentieth-century fascism--Mussolini, Pétain, Franco, Hitler,
Pinochet, the Greek colonels, South American dictators, etc." Islam's
division of the world into a land of Islam and a land of infidels is
"not too distant from Hitler's," Onfray adds. But Harris should know
better than to call it "unique."

This may seem fairly obvious. But with everyone from atheists to
neocons jumping on board the anti-Islamic crusade, it bears repeating.
Still, Onfray goes astray in the left-Nietzschean twist that he gives
to his antireligious critique. Nietzsche's influence is evident
throughout Atheist Manifesto--in its high-wattage prose style, in its
tendency toward aphorism, but mostly in its treatment of things like
Judaism and Christianity as intellectual categories removed from their
historical contexts. Onfray, to cite just one example, is extremely
hard on St. Paul, whom he describes as a hysteric "driven by a host of
psychological problems," a loser who "converted his self-loathing into
hatred of the world" and someone whose "impotence and resentment took
the form of revenge: the revenge of the weakling." None of this is
surprising, given Paul's views on such subjects as celibacy (strongly
in favor), marriage (only for those unable to forgo sex), slavery
(accepting) and women (condescending, to say the least). But anyone
who reads Paul in the context of the entire Bible--which Onfray says
elsewhere is the only way the Bible can be properly understood--will
likely come away with a different impression. His hysteria, such as it
is, doesn't begin to compare with that of Hosea, Jeremiah and other
Hebrew prophets, whose rages were truly volcanic. His political
quietism is more explicable if one bears in mind that he believed that
an impending apocalypse would soon put an end to all forms of
injustice. His views on gender are more benign than is commonly
realized, which may be why even pagans reported that women were among
the first to convert.

Indeed, Paul was something new as far as the biblical tradition was
concerned, a thinker, polemicist and organizer who was sober,
practical and all but tireless. This is undoubtedly why Engels was so
notably friendly toward him in one of his last essays. Not only did he
describe Pauline Christianity as the socialism of its day but,
referring to an epistle in which Paul reminds parishioners of the need
to provide the new movement with financial support (which he describes
as the "grace of giving"), he even commiserated with him across the
centuries over the difficulty of squeezing party dues out of local
members. ("So it was like that with you too!") Context for Engels was
all. It was obvious from his perspective that someone like Paul could
not be held exclusively to a modern standard but had to be judged on
the basis of his historical role. So what has happened in the century
or so since Engels wrote that essay that has caused otherwise
admirable leftists like Onfray to lose their historical bearings?
Could the baleful influence of Nietzsche, the favorite philosopher of
overwrought 16-year-olds, have something to do with it?

Terry Eagleton shows a firmer grasp of the issues in The Meaning of
Life--far firmer, in fact, than he did in the verbal hurricane that he
unleashed on Dawkins in The London Review of Books last October. That
article, which earned Eagleton a warm note of congratulations from
Peter Steinfels in his "Beliefs" column in the New York Times--an
indication of just how bad it actually was--was filled with ex
cathedra comments and unsupported assertions that Eagleton, a left-
wing Catholic back in the 1960s, somehow thought he could intimidate
his readers into accepting. Thus: Dawkins "does not see that
Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply,
which is why the martyr differs from the suicide." Or: "Because the
universe is God's, it shares in his life, which is the life of
freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and
Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible." Dawkins is a boor, in
other words, because he is unable to grasp such ineffable truths. Yet
both statements were nothing more than silly. Judaism concerns itself
not with the life of the individual but the life of the nation, while
Christianity saw the life we know as merely a prelude to the real life
that will occur after the Resurrection. If the universe worked all by
itself, similarly, God would have no need to intervene in it
miraculously from time to time, as He does in both the Old Testament
and the New.

With The Meaning of Life, however, Eagleton, the author of such works
as Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory and The
Illusions of Postmodernism, goes back to channeling his inner
materialist. When he mentions God, it is in the sense of an abstract
principle that he identifies by the Greek term agape, or love.
Needless to say, this is not love in the erotic sense of the word but
as a cosmic force that is an expression of the deity's free choice in
creating a material universe in which human beings can exist. Since
Eagleton is coy as to whether he is speaking literally or
figuratively, most readers will assume the latter. As a rhetorical
device, it therefore allows him to make the point that the alternative
to divine creation is not an empty and meaningless universe, as some
moderns would have it. Rather, we can still see the universe as an
intelligible whole, one whose "underlying laws," he writes, "reveal a
beauty, symmetry, and economy which are capable of moving scientists
to tears" (a rare point of agreement with Dawkins). If believers,
according to Bishop Berkeley, believe that God invested the universe
with meaning through the act of creating it, then nonbelievers can
believe that people can invest life with meaning through a similar act
of creating a mode of living that allows people to realize their full
potential.

This supposes that meaning is not something that one discovers "out
there," by, say, sitting on a lonely mountaintop and contemplating the
heavens. Rather, it supposes that one discovers it "in here," that is,
in society and through it. In The God Delusion, Dawkins notes that
people might fill the gap left by religious belief in any number of
ways but adds that "my way includes a good dose of science, the honest
and systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world."
The words "my way" are a giveaway, since they suggest that meaning is
something we arrive at individually. Eagleton, by contrast, contends
that individual meaning is a solipsism, because any statement about
oneself--such as "I am handsomer than Adonis" or "I am the greatest
composer since Beethoven"--is meaningful only to the degree it is
recognized by others. Hence, "my life is meaningful" is itself
meaningful only to the degree that other people view it as such and
see their own lives the same way. Hence, meaning can be achieved only
via a collective act of self-creation in which humanity creates new
conditions for itself so that humanity as a whole can flourish. As a
corollary, Eagleton adds that "since there can be no true reciprocity
except among equals, oppression and inequality are in the long run
self-thwarting as well." Freedom and equality are necessary for
humanity to create a meaningful existence for itself.

In short, humanity creates meaning for itself by liberating itself so
that it can fulfill itself. This is also a solipsism, but one as big
as all existence. Odd, isn't it, that atheists can be right about God
but wrong about religion and much else about the modern condition,
while a believer can be wrong about God but at least on the right
track concerning the current spiritual malaise?