Hoffmann’s brief hour upon the stage
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Even the devil can quote Shakespeare (or Goethe) to his purpose — und wir werden uns vor Gott (oder vor den Teufel) nicht erniedrigen.
I had almost forgotten, pleasantly, I assure you, of R. Joseph Hoffmann, and his continuous harangues about the new atheists — or is it just atheists in general now — and how they simply do not understand how ridiculous they are. (H/t to Veronica Abbas for pointing out Hoffmann’s continued angst about the new atheism and its shortcomings.) He does not date his posts, so it would be hard, but for the comments, to know whether his article, “Atheism’s Little Idea,” was written recently, or is some long remembered, far off thing. But since the comments begin on the 26th November, we can take it as the latest from this fountainhead of virtue, intellectual sophistication, and artfully contemptuous thought. Anyone who styles himself, as Hoffmann does, so superciliously, really must produce something worthy of the presumption. However, Hoffmann so obviously lacks any insight into genuine disbelief that he seems fated to skim over the surface forever.
He states that
It seems that everything I write these days is anti-atheist. And who can blame my unbelieving brethren for assuming I am fighting for the other side.
But his arguments for the other side simply miss the point, skimming elegantly over the surface of things. Sure, there may be tacky things about contemporary atheism, the coffee mugs, T-shirts and billboards, blasphemy days, and other signs that disbelief has slipped out of its isolation in the academy, but has the sophisticated one never been to St. Anne de Beaupré recently, or stepped into one of the hundreds of tacky little shrines set up where someone was killed or cured, or joined the queue to venerate a victim soul?
It really is tiresome to be continually reminded by self-proclaimed atheists that only they are right and everyone else is wrong, the way Hoffmann does, instead of trying to understand where the downmarket aspects of some atheism comes from. Atheism cannot afford to continue to play the polite academic game, and write thousands of pages of angst-ridden contorted thought about having swallowed the sea, because, in the meantime, religion is playing its usual, perfidious game of perverting the minds of children, fighting for its right to be the guiding principle (or principles) of a culture or two, at the same time that it murders unbelievers and critics, and endeavours to tie unbelief up in knots of self-doubt.
“Lieber Gott: Bitte kommen Sie wieder. Wir sind sehr traurig, daran zu zweifeln Sie.” is simply not for us. We’re simply not very sorry to have doubted him. Hoffmann claims that
There was nothing “mistaken” about belief in God, and the fact that there is probably no god does not lessen his significance.
Ah, a paradox! Let’s delve into that significance awhile. There are people in the United States, to go no further, who stalk the land with their mistaken beliefs about the constitution of reality. They tried and failed to define the person as a fertilised ovum in the fine state of Mississippi (was it? — these idiocies pop up like mushrooms after a rain, it’s hard to keep track), but they won’t stop there. They proclaimed, in a state where assisted dying has recently been legalised, that “assisted dying is false compassion.” The Republican Party in the US seems to be composed of a bunch of crazy theocrats who want to take God into public life, and break down the separation between church and state, and Hoffmann can say that there was nothing mistaken about belief in God! The mind reels with the idiocy of the claim.
No, perhaps religious belief in God never amounted to a scientific claim. The reason for this is that religion was around for thousands of years before science became a going concern and proved to be so successful in discovering the truth about the world around us, enough truth, at least, to make the guesses of the past look like fairy tales. But this doesn’t mean that belief in God was not, and is not, a mistake, and Hoffmann, an atheist (well, perhaps) who doesn’t think it was a mistake, is simply confusing culture and religion. Religions, as Don Cupitt has pointed out, are cultures, and theocracy is a kind of cultural imperialism. Christians want their god to be at the centre of public life because they see the cultural gravity pulling it away from the centre of things, as the cultures of the west become not only multi-ethnic but also multi-religious. Judaism has been, for centuries, the odd man out in places where the culture, created on the basis of the Christian religion, was dominant. Jews were allowed to live amongst Christians on sufferance only, and very often found themselves in unpropitious circumstances, when Christian permissions (through a lapse of forgetfulness, perhaps) lapsed, and orthodox subsitutionary beliefs took their palce. The Holocaust may have cured us of that, but the increasing presence of Islam in our midst has raised the ugly questions once again. These are religio-cultural conflicts, and until we recognise that that is what they are, and that religion has to be told that, henceforth, religious fairy tales have to take a back seat, and stop trying to drive and dominate the cultures they once took a proprietory interest in, the kinds of things represented by the Holocaust are going to happen again and again.
Religions, as Don Cupitt tells us (see The Religion of Being), told us who our brothers are, and who are our enemies. The liberal project over the last three hundred years or so has been an attempt to rise beyond those religio-cultural barriers, but instead of seeing that this is a worthwhile project, and may, indeed, be the only thing that can save us from the religious conflagration to come if we don’t learn how to do it, Hoffmann pines for the days of the kind of “thick” atheism that took religions seriously, and measured its own seriousness against the supposed profundities of religion. So he mentions Sartre, for instance. The whole of the next bit is worth quoting in full:
Atheism until fairly recently has been about a disappointing search for god that ends in failure, disillusionment, despair, and finally a new affirmation of human ingenuity that is entirely compatible with both science and art.
That’s the way Sartre thought of it. — A conclusion forced upon us by the dawning recognition that we are both the source and solution to our despair. That is what Walter Lippmann thought in 1929, when he described the erosion of belief by the acids of modernity. This atheism was respectful of the fact that God is a very big idea, a sublime idea, and that abandoning such an idea could not take place as a mere reckoning at one moment in time; it had to happen as a process that included hatred, alienation and what Whitehead saw as “reconciliation” with the idea of God.
But we don’t want to be respectful of the fact that “God is a very big idea.” It’s not. It’s simply not a big idea at all. It’s a classic piece of religious hyperbole to suppose that, because God is (according to the religions) the creator and sustainer of the universe, this imagined being at the centre of religion is a correspondingly big idea. But it’s not. Nietzsche said that by killing God we had swallowed the sea. In other words, we had emptied human life of meaning. But where is the evidence that for all his angst about dispensing with God, atheism is nihilistic in the way he thought it was?
Hoffmann obviously wants us to retreat to a culturally serious atheism, to an atheism that takes its opposition to religion with grave solemnity, and acknowledges what a big, perhaps catastrophic, cultural move it is to reject the fear of the gods, and to treat them with casual, and even frivolous, contempt. But one of the things that we might discover when we really have given up our idea of god or gods, is how little is changed when the gods depart. Thousands of gods have already gone. They died when those who believed in them died. After mentioning Walter Lippmann, Ortega y Gasset, Wilfred Owen, and William Butler Yeats, Hoffmann goes on to say, with evident self-congratulation:
My current Angst, to use that hackneyed word correctly, is that most contemporary humanists don’t know what classical humanism is, and most modern atheists won’t even have read the books mentioned in the last paragraph, and what’s more will not care.
Good, I’ve read them too, some of them many years ago. I can acknowledge the kind of angst and wavering, unsure respect that atheists used to experience, something like the ambivalence expressed by Philip Larkin when he wondered what would remain “when churches fall completely out of use.”
Power of some sort will go on [he writes]
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress sky,A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. ["Churchgoing"]
But why, I want to ask, does there have to be such angst about it? Sure, read Ortega, read of his doubts about mass culture, and where the gravity of high culture will go, but don’t pretend, as you do, that the sublimity of Mozart was not unaccompanied by something that seems, by contrast, dissolute and irresponsible, that great men have their seamier side.
So, when Hoffman dismisses, with these words –
That’s what the atheist militia, the campaigners, the billboard mongers are: people who just say “Duh” when they are asked about the existence of God.
– those who have simply abandoned belief in God or the angst once joined at the hip with this dismissal of the supernatural – imaginary supernatural – agents who have to do with us, and our lives, is there really a need to be so contemptuous? What, we may ask with Larkin, will happen when churches fall completely out of use? What will take the cultural place of religions, and the disbelief adjoined to them? What will we hold serious on serious earth then? Good questions all. But they will not be answered by nostalgia. Something new is taking their place. Where seriousness will be found is perhaps yet to be found. But can we not suppose that
… someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
and that, while Larkin could think of no other way of fulfilling this hunger than by
… gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round,
can we not suppose, after all, that other ways of being serious will be found, and that that seriousness can at the same time laugh at itself, and at earlier ways of trying to be serious, and that such gravity need not forever lean towards those “serious houses on serious earth” we call churches or synagogues or mosques? Certainly, disbelief must find its way. But, must it continue to find its way back to this ground, which was once thought proper to grow wise in? Is this the only proper place to be serious on serious earth? I think not. I certainly hope not, because along with that old seriousness went so many horrendous consequences, people stoned to death — still! — people burned to death, people ostracised, people hated and despised, women subordinated, women put in bags, lest mens’ seriousness should turn to debauchery. Well, perhaps that’s enough. Must we forever be locked into religious dreams in order to take life seriously? Can we find meaning and purpose with seriousness and appropriate gravity only through imagining the subordination of our lives to an imagined other?
What does he mean by ‘authentic imagination’? Must get me one of them.
His pedestal is so high I doubt he can even see the little men he’s talking down to.
It sounds like Hoffman is taking the classic approach of applying his own experiences (assuming he feels like those authors he’s quoting) and imagining that not only that everyone *does* experience the same, but that everyone *should*.
The funny thing is, I actually experienced loss of faith as the step where I left all that theological Angst behind. Suddenly worrying about Heaven, Hell, how good people in other religions fit into the scheme of things, about people before Jesus, about the historicity and scientific possibility of it all, and why the most religious seemed to be the most stupidly crazy… all of that ceased. There are good existential questions remaining, but they really are mine to answer… I don’t have to feel bad because I have to judge my answers against those given by a 1st century handyman, or a 7th century despot, or a 18th century cult leader anymore. Perhaps Hoffman also thinks it immensely sad that so much effort over the years has been wasted on religions that are false… but I think trying to reveal in that sadness is just the fallacy of sunk costs. Having spent so much time in religion, why should we spend more? Why let it keep taking more when you can go and do thinks more worth while?
Some things are wrong but in ways that are tell us something significant. Many atheists (myself included) believe that God and religion are wrong ideas that don’t tell us anything important about the human condition whatsoever. I understand why that claim rankles people like Hoffmann that believe that the idea of God has significance, but it really doesn’t. Sure, it has tremendous historical and sociological significance, but that doesn’t make something a “big idea”, just a popular idea. Atheism isn’t a big idea either. It’s just the denial or lack of belief in a wrong idea. I find it baffling what the crisis is that Hoffmann thinks “besets atheism”. Does he seriously believe that being an atheist precludes being a naturalist or a good person (I hate the term humanism so I’ll stick with what I think is at stake)? If Hoffmann really wants to read atheists having big ideas, he should feel free to open any of the better analytic philosophy journals. However, like most “Humanitites people”, I sure he has nothing but disdain for today’s naturalistic analytic philosophy.
He’s a card carrying member of the ‘ Ur Not Doin It Rite’ brigade; and yet he lives in America so must be aware of the massive anti-atheist prejudice there. It is hard for us poms to grasp just how deep and pervasive and significant that really is. Does he want atheists to become a political movement of some sort? Hard to know what he’s really saying, if anything.
Whatever valid thing Hoffman had to say is dwarfed by his inability to articulate anything in a reasonable and amiable way, making him smaller than the people he condemns.
– from Catch 22
It would have been so much easier for him to have simply written “Kids these days!!!”
No essential content would have been lost, but we would have understood completely in those three words that he is of the mind that he and his generation had it right, and that everyone else is wrong for not thinking the way he’s accustomed to.
Hoffmann is totally off the mark here. There is no god, period. We don’t have to immerse ourselves in literature and philosophy and “angst” to prove ourselves worthy of atheism. It’s all quite simple: There’s no god, period. And I am quite unworried about what “seriousness” will take religion’s place. I am quite confident that people will go on working and loving and having fun and the future will take shape without our thinking up a scheme to replace it.
The only role religion plays in my life is that of an object of scorn and as something interesting to read about. It also amazes me that people believe in it. Just now I asked the cleaning lady if she believed in god, and she said yes. I then asked her if she had any evidence, and she said no, and that she had never thought about it. So, I suggested she think about it and see what she comes up with.
Let me fix this for him:
Indeed.
I am nearly as scared of ‘seriousness’ as I am of religion. All despots start by banning jokes about the leader, about the government, about the war: they know just what a powerful weapon humour is against ideological brainwashing. Importance is an objective quality that we can agree on: but seriousness is always someone trying to impose their standards on someone else.
Yeah, so the cluelessness continues from R. Joseph. I think he’s definitely earned the right to vie for the Mr. Irrelevancy Award. Meaning, that until he can think himself out of this muddle-headed mush, the rest of us can continue to go along with our busy lives and pay him no heed.
I think he’s deliberately trying to provoke in order to make himself bigger than he is.
Move along, nothing to see.
But, for the record: My god isn’t green, nor does it have a stick. It isn’t large and isn’t an omnipotent omniscient creator of the universe. That’s because I don’t have a god. All gods are imaginary. Constructs of flawed human reasoning. So, to declare that the atheists’ god is “too small” is to declare nothing at all. Because my god is way smaller than “too small”. It’s nonexistent.
Then why do I fight the concept? Because of the harm done to people (mainly believers, BTW) in the name of whatever god happens to be in play at that particular instant. Giving AIDS to an African woman who follows Catholic Church teaching about condoms. Shutting down stem cell research because baby Jesus cries at the thought of a 16-cell clump of useless DNA being used for something rather than be dumped in the trash. Girls being sexually mutilated and sexually enslaved in the name of one god or another. Or killed in the name of that god if the deign to not go along 100% with the patriarch’s wishes.
Does Hoffman really think this is unworthy in and of itself? Do we need to once again over and over and over again debate the existence of a nonexistent creature in order that we have standing to fight the fight against the harm caused by belief in this fiction?
Simply amazing. I’m done with him.
Done.
This Angst is all rather hard to understand for somebody who never deconverted, somebody who grew up an atheist and stayed an atheist. There is no god; that is a rather obvious piece of information if you have lived on a steady died of science-for-kids literature from age 7 or so. (Seriously, once you truly contemplate the implications of deep space, deep time and evolution, the idea of an Abrahamic god simply becomes too ridiculous to deserve anything but scorn.) So what? We are not immortal. There is no all-powerful sky father watching over us. Again: so what? If I never assumed that in the first place, there simply is no Angst or disappointment.
Wir sind sehr traurig, daran zu zweifeln Sie.
Is that a direct quote? Because the second half of the sentence is gibberish… “an Ihnen zu zweifeln” perhaps?
it was a joe frazier left hook. it was desvastating.: KO
Hoffmann appears not to have a sense of humor – he’s complaining about “axial tilt – the reason for the season.” Doesn’t he realize it’s a joke?
My critical comment on Hoffman’s blog has been bounced: apparently it wasn’t fawning enough. I have made another attempt, as follows:
PZ Myers’ response to your article now has 210 comments to your 27. Of course, Myers doesn’t delete critical comments, so that may have something to do with it. If you want your blog to attain even one-tenth the credibility of his, maybe you should follow suit.
Let’s see if it penetrates the barrier of smug complacency.
Alex SL (#12). I assume the quote is from Goethe’s Faust, and it is not completely gibberish. “Wir sind sehr traurig, daran zu zweifeln Sie” can easily be taken as a rhetorical inversion of this: “Wir sind sehr traurig, daran Sie zu zweifeln,” which can mean: “We are very sorry, to doubt you about that (daran = an das).” But perhaps a German speaker could help us out.
Michael (#14). No, that’s funny isn’t it? Almost as funny as the original joke, that Hoffmann simply doesn’t get it. And of course, though a joke, it’s true. The only reason for the season is the waning of the year, and coming of winter, the hiberation of the green world, which, to early people must have been a bit fearsome, since they could not know the reason for the season!
jonjermey
While most of the comments on Hoffmann’s blog are fawning, (see steph), mine did get through. Hoffmann seems to like critical comments, so he can reply and be condescending. My comment concerning “most modern atheists won’t even have read the books mentioned in the last paragraph, and what’s more will not care” got through and Hoffmann replied. I posted a similar comment on Sandwalk which has contributed to a discussion of 39 comments to Hoffmann’s 28: http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-being-sophisticated-atheist.html
I’ve read every Mills n Boon ever printed and never found romance.
That’s sophistication all over.
Hoffmann bounced my comment to Stevie twice. It was not critical of Hoffmann or his post. Stevie linked to a Royal College of Psychiatrists Position Statement on ‘Recommendations for psychiatrists on spirituality and religion’ written by Chris Cook who is a professed Christian and teaches in the Theology Department at Durham. Stevie’s link was intended to counteract a short video by Stephen Law on creationism, but the connection between the two is tenuous and writer’s position is hopelessly comprised by his religious beliefs.
RJH has become the poster-boy for conceit, and for (new term) philosophobabble.
If Hoffmann just wants more “mystery” why not jettison science altogether? Instead of going back 20 years or 50 years, what about 5000 or 10,000 years – forget Christianity and monotheism – and advocate animism. Given his axial tilt sneer, why not return to praying or sacrificing to ensure summer comes again. Does he engage his brain before he posts?
I am a German speaker, that is why I am so curious about this otherwise completely negligible issue. Wir sind sehr traurig, daran Sie zu zweifeln does not make any sense either. Perhaps it did as poetic language at the beginning of the 19th century, who knows; but I just searched through both parts of Faust online and did not find the phrase…
Thank you Alex. What a strange thing. Very slight matter indeed, in one sense, but since it poses at the beginning of RJF’s nastiness as setting the scene in what purports to be a learned way, that comes as a bit of a surprise that it is not to be found in Faust. Thanks for looking it up.
I’m also pretty sure it’s not from Goethe’s Faust, where God is a minor character with only one scene. The illustration is from a 1926 movie.
Atheism isn’t a big idea. It’s not an idea at all, but the absence of an idea; it’s only interesting when it’s a rare condition. If you’re healthy you wouldn’t proclaim yourself leprosy-free unless you lived in a leper colony
“Lieber Gott: Bitte kommen Sie wieder. Wir sind sehr traurig, daran zu zweifeln Sie.”
Sounds a bit like someone’s thrown a quote in an internet translation thingy, like Google Translate, and pasted the result in his blog. Unfortunately, it’s no use trying to translate it back to German: the gibberishness only increases.
But that’s the impression I was left with after reading Hoffmann’s tale: smoke and mirrors, trying to dazzle us simpletons into believing that we miss out on something. Meanwhile, I’ll get on with my life.
Off topic but an article you might find of interest, Eric–
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/dec/01/spiritual-practice-art-science-paganism
Here is what Apple’s translator does:
Lieber Gott: Bitte kommen Sie wieder. Wir sind sehr traurig, daran zu zweifeln Sie.
Dear God: Please come back. We are very sad to doubt you.
Lieber Gott: Bitte zurückgekommen. Wir sind sehr traurig, Sie zu bezweifeln.
Dear God: Ask returned. We are very sad to doubt you.
Lieber Gott: Bitten Sie zurückgegangen. Wir sind sehr traurig, Sie zu bezweifeln.
Dear God: Ask decreased. We are very sad to doubt you.
Lieber Gott: Bitten Sie verringert. Wir sind sehr traurig, Sie zu bezweifeln.
Dear God: Ask reduced. We are very sad to doubt you.
Also, the “Ihr, Faust” at the end is a dead giveaway of a bad translation.
It presumably is in English: “Yours, Faust.”
One wouldn’t close a note in German with “Ihr” and your name.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen or Liebe Grüße would be more appropriate.
Michael,
hehe. These online translators are always fun. I have seen virtual stones of Rosetta in some places in South America, where they have written something in Spanish, and used Yahoo Babelfish or something to translate into English without ever having anybody check the correctness. And then they often found that there was no direct language path in that software from Spanish to French and German, so they took the already garbled English version and had the software translate from there… you can imagine how that looks like.
Picture caption in a bilingual Peruvian tourist brochure from 2002:
Vista panoramica de la plaza mayor de la ciudad de Trujillo.
See panoramic of the square bigger than the city of Trujillo.
I saw Hoffmann’s post days ago, but decided to ignore it. He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases (real Lewis Carroll, not fake Goethe). If we Horrible Gnus don’t react to him no one reads his blog apart from devoted Steph, who all but slobbers on him.
The machine translation thing is hilarious. Oops!
Ophelia may already have seen this when I posted it on Facebook recently, but it’s a real winner of machine translation: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150434432420645&l=b51a855f71
“We are assured that skepticism is “a humanism” by one of the keynoters, whatever that is supposed to mean; P Z Myers and Greta Christina justified their rancid approaches to belief by saying that religion “hurts human beings” (well, that’s something to suppose, which is better than nothing to suppose),”
The word *rancid* clearly stood out a mile for me, so I looked it up to see which meaning the New Oxonian might, perhaps, be trying to bring across to his readers in the 4th last para of “Atheism’s Little Idea”
1. Having a rank, unpleasant, stale smell or taste, as through decomposition, especially of fats or oils: rancid butter.
2. (of an odor or taste) rank, unpleasant, and stale: a rancid smell.
3. offensive or nasty; disagreeable.
In light of Lift-gate. Sorry – erm… ‘Elevator’ in that capacity, does not really serve much relevance to the ordinary Irish person. (Unless, one connects the latter to the host that the priest elevates during the most sacred/crucial part of mass. The consecration and transubstantiation…say no more!) I was wondering whether the scholar was alluding to the ongoing debacle?! It’s indeed a very suggestive word, whatever the case.
Yet another example by Joseph Hoffmann is: “hurts human beings” (well, that’s something to suppose, which is better than nothing to suppose),”
Yeah, you can say *suppose* once again, New Oxonian, from your privileged vantage point. Well – from my perspective, anyway.
In a letter you’d write: “Ich würde mich freuen, bald wieder von Ihnen zu hören.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Ihr(e) ….(name)” (formal)
“Ich würde mich freuen, bald wieder von Dir (singular)/ Euch (plural) zu hören.
Liebe Grüße, Dein(e)/ Euer(female”Eure”)…(name) ” (familiar). There you have loads of other options, but for somebody you are not familiar with it’s better to stick with the official formula.
An ancient joke concerned a machine translation into Russian of “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”, which came back “The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.”
Ophelia:
Yes, of course, but usually I don’t read him at all any more, so when Veronica pointed out this one, I simply had to say something. And that ersatz quotation from Goethe. I thought I had to make some sense of it, given its apparent origin. But, like Alex, I too have now searched Faust, and could not find it. So, what is it? Even if the English version there’s nothing similar.
He may like to tease, but it is so childish, really. It’s almost as if he lives in a bubble, and his nonsense irritates me, and does not intrigue, like Carroll’s (Dodgson’s?).
Goldenbridge. I finally got the connexions right, I think, so your whole comment is now up as it should have been yesterday.
Oh, it irritates me too, Eric…and I wasn’t saying that as a reproach – more like explaining why I’d neglected a duty. Heh.
It is childish, and surprising in that way. It seems beneath him. But then I always think that about Ruse, too. (But Joe is actually a charmer in person, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone say about Ruse.)
Not to mention that, in German, God is always addressed in the familiar (SIe is formal). See for example
http://www.german-way.com/friends.html
Thank you, Robert, of course I knew that, but hadn’t remembered. God is always on “per Du” terms with his people. The funny thing is that when people use ‘Thou’ in English to address God, they think it more formal, and therefore more appropriate, but in English usage, ‘thou’ is like ‘du’ in German, reserved for close friends, family and children.
Ophelia, I didn’t take it as a reproach, and I’m sorry even to have intimated that to you. It’s interesting that he should be charming in person, and to be so prickly online. Ah, I remember the early days of email, how it was so easy to raise hackles and have them raised!
Well, I went there, very politely, had to wait in moderation a bit, but got through twice and was answered once (so far) – by steph, according to whom that quote isn’t one, but only a joke, though I still don’t really get it.
He now has changed the quote to “Lieber Gott: Bitte kommen Sie wieder. Wir sind sehr traurig. Ihre Gottheit steht außer Zweifel. Ihr, Faust.”
Which roughly says – “There is no doubt of your divinity.”
He is is also claiming that “Ihr, Faust” is archaic – like Faust….
I could try saying this over there, but his last clearly discourages any further waste of his bandwidth on it. He’ll probably read it here; I don’t see him getting so worked up about us unless he follows what we’re writing. If you publish something, it doesn’t make sense to then criticise people for having wasted their time trying to figure out what it says and what it means. And yet, that is his main reaction. Not only does his article attack us for what we pay attention to and how in the issue of religion, we are even castigated for having paid attention to the article in the wrong way. I shan’t presume that discussion was of interest to him, but he certainly shuts down the possibility. Which is a pity.
Sorry, that does need a little more sharpening, despite my natural reticence to go for the jugular. You lead with a quote in a language foreign to most of your readers, who ought to be forgiven for thinking you wouldn’t lead with if it didn’t set the stage somehow for what follows. Taking the trouble to try to understand you is only proof of our wrong-headedness, despite the fact that one of our worst characteristics, according to the same article, is our unwillingness to steep ourselves in ancient attempts to figure out how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Slight exaggeration, but I think the point made is very valid. When people seem to want things both ways, closer scrutiny usually reveals that they want them only one way – theirs.
Vielen Dank, Eric! Weiss du, ‘Ich wahr sehr traurig’!!
!
Religion is based on false premises, but we’re supposed to take it seriously, with angst, rather than moving on to dealing with reality and life absent the false premises of a horrendous cognitive error? Huh? What’s with the love of angst anyway? Is this a movie for teenagers?
Atheism is the conscious recognition that fairy tales about fabricated gods are false, and thus irrelevant. That’s all the seriousness required. Religion has no claim on our mental resources precisely because of what religion is – utterly pointless. We’re supposed to feel sorry because we have no interest in spending time thinking about Isis?
I expect people fooled by the conceptual rigamarole of religious belief to spout rhetoric based on the premise that religious beliefs deserves respect automatically because it’s religious belief. When an atheist does it he’s merely displaying confusion.
Crossposting my long and rambly comment from Hoffmann’s blog, since I started it here:
What I find odd about this piece, and many others I have encountered like it, is the pervasive nature of this suggestion that atheism is inherently depressing, and thus that there has to be something wrong with, or something irrational or shallow about, people who don’t recognize that within it.
I found atheism to be tremendously freeing, something that evaporated much of the angst (to use that mundane term mundanely) that I had felt about a world in which human beings were merely actors in God’s play. When I look at religious practice, contemporary or traditional, “liberal” or “literal”, on the grand or the small scale, I see much that is trite and shallow. I see much pettiness, on both the individual and tribal levels. And I see conceptions of God that reflect that consistently shallowness.
And those conceptions of religion that come from the religious are invariably self-serving. There is much hemming and hawing about mystery and purpose, even these do not actually, inherently follow from traditional supernatural beliefs, except via tradition itself. When reading about atheists who felt that giving up God meant giving up these things, that doesn’t strike me as a solemn appreciation of the human condition. It strikes me, rather, as an expression of an internalized prejudice against disbelief, an inability to rise above the pervasive assertion that God adds something special and unique to human life, and that if there is a God, one’s cultural practices become justified, and the threat of nihilism evaporates.
Well, the world has seen black men who claimed they were happier as slaves, women who claimed they were happier when forced to be housewives, and gay folk who feel that being gay was the worst thing that could have happened to them. But at least in those cases we have the good sense to recognize this as a difficulty in adaptation, not a measure of profundity. Not so, it seems, with atheists who, losing the belief in an actual God, still attributes an unqualified and poorly examined meaningfulness or reassurance to the God concept, or who thinks that it can act as a stand-in for some aspect of the human condition to which it is only incidentally linked.
But it is is no less rational to feel that God is Terror. To me, there is no form of despair that compares to the idea of a world that is merely a plaything in the hands of a mad tyrant, a tyrant with whom no meaningful disagreement is possible, however bizarre his actions or demands. And a mad tyrant who styles himself as “loving” is, if anything, more terrifyingly alien, and more inescapably withering. It is the strict father who ages and ages, immortal, from whose presence you can never remove yourself for even an instant. It is the leviathan upon which we are parasites, from which we must feed or perish.
That is the being that monotheists hold as the greatest good. This is the “big” version of the God idea. That is the being that I grew up worshiping, and that I once spent all my philosophical efforts on trying to justify, defend, and rehabilitate into some semblance of rational and moral and emotional acceptability. The closest I came to succeeding was when I stopped thinking of God as a person, or being with any intentions at all. At that point I was more or less an atheist in any case.
I have never actually hated God, insofar as I have never faulted any particular conception of God and believed in that entity at the same time. But I wouldn’t be caught dead wishing that there was one. The tiny, “hobgoblin” sort of god would perhaps be acceptable, but not the abstract, omnipotent, omnipresent, vast, looming thing that theists gesture at, subtly glinting behind the veil.
Leaving religion was not a disappointment, and not merely because I’m too ignorant or shallow or haven’t read enough to have bought into this prejudice that God is such a big idea that it is tragic to lose it. Leaving religion was not a disappointment because I found something better.
I found a conception of the human being as a flawed but ultimately noble creature, something that I could appraise objectively and not merely discount as falling short of perfection. I found ethical systems that were far more nuanced and reasonable, the problem not being moral nihilism, but rather too many different types of ethical reasoning to choose from. And I found that, in fact, I was vastly more comfortable with the responsibility of choosing my own purposes, than the slavery of justifying my every desire by referencing someone else’s.
This may sound cheesy, but that has no bearing on whether it is valid or sensible to value such changes.
Whether one calls oneself an “atheist” or not, living without constantly attributing one’s values and experiences to God is a quality of adulthood. Growing up may be uncomfortable and unpleasant for many people, but there’s very little to respect about someone who grieves about not being able to remain an infant forever.
As for these slights against the atheist and skeptical communities, well, yes, they are centered around politics, social welfare, and, yes, entertainment. Is that such a bad thing? Is that even slightly unexpected? The world is full of Old Codgers (usually not so old) who see moral and aesthetic decay in every bit of light-heartedness, and in any new habit or practice that is not filled to the brim with solemn intellectual quality. To look at a popular social and political movement (any movement!) and complain that they have unfunny bumper sticker slogans is to be comically over-judgmental. To look at a largely grassroots movement, which has experienced rapid recent growth, and which is defined primarily by the beliefs that its members don’t share (and implicitly one’s willingness to disagree with others), and complain that they lack a single, unified, intellectually coherent message? Ha.
Why should they? Are you sure that this is even a major goal for those involved? For most of the people who attend these sorts of conference, skepticism is a hybrid between a personal interest(/hobby), a (type of) personal philosophy, and a political movement with a narrow focus. Perhaps that’s not as good as if every one of those people demonstrated exceptional intellectual capability and dedication and seriousness at all times. But it seems rather better than a much smaller movement that has even less lasting impact.
If we’re going to make some comparison to a older conception of secular humanism that has “failed”, why not talk about why, exactly, it failed? What are we supposed to get nostalgic about when discussing a social movement (if it was, in fact, a movement, and not a purely academic program) that apparently was too unappealing to grow and accomplished so little as to be labeled a failure in the first place? Why should we credit an Old Codger who seems to hate everything about a movement that reflects its popularity, while wistfully yearning for the days when a related movement was so unpopular and so unsuccessful that only dedicated intellectuals were visible within it?
You can explain how, realistically, a popular social movement can live up to certain standards, or you can admit up front that it’s unlikely that any such movement will. But if you try to do neither, and then gripe about inadequacies, the “Have you done any better?” question arises. It comes off as uninformed and petulant, if not reeking of outright disdain for those who are vulgar enough to be politically involved despite not really being “thinkers”.
Of course the piece ends with the actual comment about atheism having a stage but not having thinkers. I suppose it would sound absurd to resort to grade-school insults, but the conclusion here is effectively the same thing. It would be equally informative to close with: “But these atheists can’t do anything right! They’re just stupid loudmouth jerks!”
Atheism doesn’t have to “be” anything at all – depressing, respectful, serious, whatever – atheism is simply non-belief in patently incredible beliefs.
Atheism should be the natural state, before the spirit of enquiry promotes questions which lead to answers which can turn out to be wrong.
At birth, we are not theists. Very soon thereafter, we are indoctrinated into an archaic method of answering the big questions – Religion and magical thinking.
With maturity, we throw off these intellectual shackles and adopt rational thought.
Except…. in the USA where for some inexplicable reason childish and archaic belief systems take pride of place in public life. *That*’s the real mystery.