A novelty item
We’re in luck – we have a whole new barrage of clichés to set us straight.
David Adams Richards is angry. The acclaimed novelist and essayist is raging at atheists, the self-righteous ones. The writer with the tough New Brunswick background believes anti-religious people are as bad as fundamentalists in their fashionable absolutism.
Does he! How exciting! How novel, how original, how refreshing, how ground-breaking.
Not that I can talk – I don’t break new ground. I think there’s a place for saying things that have been said before, because the mere fact that something has been said before doesn’t mean that everyone knows that, so there is always room for popularizers to help circulate that which has been said before – but there is a limit. Helping to circulate is one thing but people saying the exact same thing nine thousand times in one week is another.
Richards is adamant about what he considers the intellectual laziness behind so much religion bashing today. People who like to attack religion think they’re being risqué, Richards said, but most of their arguments are just “conformist” and “insipid.”
No, people who like to attack religion don’t think they’re being risqué, we just think we’re saying things that have been marginalized for no very good reason and need to be brought back into the public realm. Most of the arguments may well be conformist (see above) but they still (in our view) need to be re-circulated. I don’t think any of the “New” militant lazy atheists think they’re/we’re saying anything new, much less risqué – but it’s a little foolish to pretend what we’re saying is completely bland and conventional given all the outraged shouting and name-calling it’s received.Surely Richards himself wouldn’t be ‘angry’ about mere insipid milk-and-water.
Richards has always been blunt and cranky. So he starts off the book by throwing Josef Stalin in the face of proud atheists. Stalin, the world’s most famously egregious atheist, was a nihilist of the highest order, Richards says. To the Soviet dictator, murdering people was a thrill.
Blunt and cranky perhaps, but not what you’d call imaginative. Apparently it would come as a surprise to him to learn that every atheist-hater brings up Stalin – in order to refute the claim that all atheists are perfect. If only we had never made that claim, we would have total world domination by now!
…when Richards habitually refers to his rhetorical foes and friends only as an “intellectual,” or the “physicist,” the “academic,” a “feminist” or the “CBC host,” I want to know who he’s actually talking about.
Ah yes – the Chris Hedges problem – the wild accusation accompanied by a total lack of citation or quotation. Yeah that is a bit of a drawback.
…as Richards cheerfully testifies, the so-called secular world has nothing to be smug about when it comes to human frailty. Academic and literary circles, he says, are also full of annoying, “pious” people.
Therefore God exists. Or something.
Douglas Todd, the guy who wrote this article on Richards, typically writes this sort of crap in the Vancouver Sun. Nothing new there either.
Another book I don’t have to read. Even from a mostly favorable review it’s clear that Richards doesn’t have much to offer in terms of “sophisticated arguments”.
This is truly cringe-worthy stuff! Not only the review article, but the “book” of which it is, apparently, a review. This guy knows perverts and alcoholics and violence, so, of course, he knows God! It’s enough to make you weep! But this stuff is felting up so rapidly, it’s hard to keep up. A few books seems to have turned the religiouss into bristles of uncontrolled, helpless rage – or, in Robert Wright’s case – clouds of cotton-wool verbiage. But, as Deen says, another book we don’t have to read.
So Canada doesn’t have any war reporters?
What an arrogant tool.
“To the Soviet dictator, murdering people was a thrill.”
So, atheism doesn’t cure psychopaths of psychopathology, and psychopaths are capable of atheism. And?
What is it with catholic apologists and the ‘Stalin was an atheist’ argument?
Did the pope issue an edict that made it mandatory to use this silly line every time atheism is mentioned?
Well guess what Benny, what did Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler have in common?
None of them were Hindus.
Well, it makes about as much sense as the Stalin-atheism argument.
The Stalin-Hitler jibe is the most common anti-atheist jibe in my experience. It’s fairly easy to debunk it using sources, but Christians rarely feel the need to source their facts.
1) Both Stalin and Hitler were immersed from birth to later teenage years in their respective religions, Hitler in Catholicism, Stalin in an Orthodox seminary (his first ambition was to be a priest).
2) According to Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Stalin’s particularly bloodthirsty nature was at least in part a product of where he came from and the Caucasian tradition of blood feuds (i.e. nothing to do with belief or non-belief).
3) Russian history is unfortunately full of ruthless and bloodthirsty rulers (none of whom were atheists). In Stalin’s case, there were railways to transport his victims and telephones to pass on anonymous orders, which massively expanded the scope of the slaughter. If Ivan the Terrible had 20th Century technology, he’d have been worse too.
4) Stalin’s takeover of Bolshevism in the 1920’s immediately emphasised its religious aspects: the (saint-like) cult of Lenin’s body, the (icon-like) use of the leader’s photo, the repetition by rote of verbal formulae. A religion in all but name; and exactly like other religions, fiercely jealous of competitor belief systems.
The above is all very well but is more in the nature of a discussion, not an argument. Does anyone have pithy ways of countering the tired old Hitler-Stalin feint?
“Does anyone have pithy ways of countering the tired old Hitler-Stalin feint?”
Stalin was no true new atheist?
Why oh why does the Stalin thing get brought up so often? It’s a rebuttal to an argument that I’ve never actually seen made.
No-one says atheists are perfect; no-one says an atheistic society would be perfect, or even better than religious ones (to the contrary, that specifically atheistic societies are actually rather bad, but secular ones on the other hand…).
No-one denies that there has been mass murder made without the hand of God. What is said is that regimes which brook no argument – and these have historically been and currently are mostly religious – are the most likely to become tyrannical, and that ways of thinking which follow this mould are potentially dangerous for this reason, even if they are currently benign. This is why they mustn’t be allowed to think they have a magic force-field around them preventing criticism, or that they deserve deference and privilege because of their age, or their significance in the lives of believers, and this is why atheists are vocal about both their atheism and in criticising religion: because it’s essential that they are to keep society fair.
And it’s always the intellectual arguments that are missed in these cases: atheists have reason to disbelieve in the existence of God, reasons which aren’t repudiated merely by throwing nasty atheists in their face. Sometimes I wonder if these people understand what is actually being said to them, or maybe just hearing what they want to hear…
Who is this bloke? I’m reasonably well-read, but I’ve never heard of him, yet here he is holding forth as if he’s, well, an important writer. Perhaps he is, in New Brunswick…
The Stalin thing speaks volumes about his total lack of original thought. If he had any integrity he’d at least try and deal with the ‘Hitler got along very well with German Christians’ problem.
Yeah I’ve never heard of him – but then he’s, you know…Canadian.
Just kidding, Eric!
“Stalin was no true new atheist?”
Hahahaha!
but most of their arguments are just “conformist” and “insipid.”
Ah, yes, the typical “tradition is really COOl and REBELLIOUS! Rebel by following Jesus!” rhetorical strategy.
How has Richards existed on this planet without encountering the sheer prevalence of the “Stalin/Pol Pot/Hitler* was an atheist” arguments?
*Except Hitler actually wasn’t, if I recall correctly.