A few last pops from the shut up wars
I find this quite funny – The Smiling Ones, apparently pleased by the reception of that LA Times article, have offered it up all over again, this time at Comment is Free. What’s funny about it is that the comments are scathing. This line is not working for them.
Just one sample out of many:
I’m amazed by the sheer hostility shown by the Guardian to the “New Atheists”. I don’t agree with everything Dawkins says but I would rate him well above pseudo- intellectuals such as Karen Armstrong and her laughable thesis that religion is about practice rather than belief (contradicted by the Nicene Creed). However the Guardian prefers the “spiritual” Armstrong over the rational Dawkins. Now we are being told that the best way to persuade people of the truth of evolution is for the “New Atheists” to shut up.
Why shouldn’t Atheists pronounce their beliefs in the marketplace of ideas? Dawkins, Dennett & co. have some very powerful ideas and some very powerful arguments. Their arguments have won on the internet because their opponents arguments are quite often rubbish. Why should we sustain rubbish arguments just for the sake of appeasing the religious types?
Why indeed? Your guess is as good as mine.
“The Smiling Ones” gives them a mythological quality, like He Who Should Not Be Named. Actually quite a bit more sinister than Lovecraft really.
Amusing observation, Benjamin. Puts me in mind of the ancient Greek pseudonym for “The Kindly Ones” – because one wouldn’t want to call them The Furies and incur their displeasure. Neil Gaiman does all sorts of wonderfully creepy things with them in Sandman.
Not that anyone here is concerned about M&K’s displeasure. Rather the opposite, I think.
Hooray! Fame at last!
As an aside, I should point out that I was kicking myself for not mentioning the Nicene Creed in the general debate about Armstrong’s work. After all, the Nicene creed is the foundation of 99% of modern Christianity and it is purely in terms of belief in factual assertions about the existence of God etc. i.e. ordinary, common or garden beliefs.
The toothy ones works for mine. Toothy implies no benevolence, just uninitiated dawkiness (not Dawkinsness!), but I defer to Ophelia 1) because she’s just far superior intellectually to me, and 2) she’s almost definitely a better person than me (perhaps not a difficult achievement). ;)
Reminds me of the old Temptations song, “Smiling Faces,” which begins:
Smiling faces sometimes pretend to be your friend
Smiling faces show no traces of the evil that lurks within
Smiling faces, smiling faces sometimes
They don’t tell the truth uh
Smiling faces, smiling faces
Tell lies and I got proof
The truth is in the eyes
Cause the eyes don’t lie, amen
I should say the Eumenides connection was intentional! But it wasn’t – I didn’t notice the parallel until hours later. Der. (I love the deeply sinister thing about nervously calling them The Kindly Ones because they’re so not kindly. Sums up the whole god business, if you ask me.)
Yeah Tzimisces – great comment! See Edmund Standing’s article here about the archbish of Canterbury and the Nicene creed and what ‘liberal’ theists really believe.
I am the first to admit that I don’t know much about the history of goddish thinking, nor saints, nor philogophy, even though I recited the Nicene Creed many times back when I was afraid of the night sky b/c of the Southern Cross. So this may be way out of context.
But on the theme of “the comments are scathing” I just had the misfortune to read a piece in the New York Times entitled “The Self-Thinking Thought.” I thought it would be about thinking. See how poorly educated I am? It’s early, so I wasn’t tipped off by the column’s title – alas – “The Happy Days Blog.”
If you want to make certain to avoid it, do not go here:
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/the-self-thinking-thought/?em
It’s a gloppy piece about Anselm, a guy from the olden days who sounds maybe like he had unbalanced brain chemistry. In the comments I got my reward for being duped. #5 offers a particularly fitting image:
Why would I want to worship such a god? Anselm’s god is nothing more than a philosophical blow up doll. I’d rather have a love affair with a deity that is mysterious and makes demands of me than one that is nothing more than the sum total of my self and and all of its abilities.
hahahaha “philosophical blow up doll”!! What a fab image!!! It is now lodged in my head!!! I’m still chortling!!!
Mooney has an interview in the LA Times on 22 Aug. He doesn’t mention atheists this time.
Claire god that’s so funny because I just read the same piece an hour or two ago (Jerry Coyne linked to it yesterday but I didn’t get around to it then) and that same comment cracked me up and I pasted it straight into my notes file so that I could treasure it forever! That exact same identical comment!! Do admit.
Quite right about that comment.
Someone should embroider it on a tea towel.It’s a marketing opportunity if I ever saw one.
Someone should make a soft toy in the shape of a black cat with white paws wearing a little sweater with that embroidered across the front. Then you’d have something!
I see that they think Dawkins has “followers”. Does that mean more than reading and appreciating his books? If it doesn’t then I’m currently “following” any number of people, and they all have different ideas and opinions.
Thanks for fixing my html tag error.
I get the impression that many liberal theologians are trying to rebadge philosophy as theology just to stay in business. Take a look at Philip Clayton’s “Big Questions in Biology and Theology” from his talk at the recent Cambridge Darwin Fest. This is available on his website title “Adaptation, Variation and Extinction: How can there be theology after Darwin?” Not much traditional theology shows up in the mentioned questions.
Not much theology at all, to my way of reckoning. Indeed, if kenotic theories of God are going to be at the forefront of theology, then we can say goodbye to practically everything that goes by the name. We can play games with stories if we like, as Clayton does with the kenotic hymn from Philippians, but in order to play the kenotic game, you have to have some concept of what it is that equality with God might have looked like.
By the way, Clayton puts paid to Armstrong’s idea of the traditional, historical concept of God. Armstrong wants to think that this was kenotic (apophatic) from the beginning, but Clayton makes it clear that this is an expedient that only becomes necessary for theology after Darwin. And now we are not talking only about Jesus as the self-emptying of God, but about God himself being, in some sense, intrinsically self-emptying. But how do you empty something if there is no idea what fulness means? That’s my problem, and I don’t think that Clayton solves it. He can do so only because he has the traditional idea of God in the background, so to speak, and whenever kenosis is mentioned we have to remember what this emptying is an emptying of. Otherwise, he can’t get theology going, but can he keep it going once he’s got it started. I think theology is going to be very kenotic too!
Armstrong’s article is, at its core, a familiar one- “Atheists are attacking religion, but they’re not attacking MY religion, and MY religion is the REAL one, so their attacks don’t count.”
In a weaker form this argument makes a degree of sense. If the criticisms of nonbelievers are tailored to a religion other than your own, there’s no particular reason you should find them compelling. But to then go and argue that the atheists have wasted their time attacking phantasms when the only real religion is the one you hold, is, well, dishonest. Obviously there are people out there with religion other than Armstrong’s.
Once you pour everything out on the ground, it is hard to put it back in….