by Jerome du Bois with Catherine King
[Necessary background to this posting is comment #20 in First Sunday.]
We're not talking about Pink Unicorns anymore, are we? We're not taking religion playfully anymore, are we? But Michelle is still bypassing Catherine's original point. Catherine wrote that a line had been crossed. It has nothing to do with atheism. Here were the pagans, gentle people who worship the earth and its spirits, its cycles and mysteries, its signs and symbols, its traces in uncanny orbs and Parrot Goddesses. You don't hear about any pagan suicide bombers, do you? They don't claim that they have all the answers, even as they build up the world. But it's somehow okay to ridicule these sincere seekers as a crew of infantile fantasy freaks. No, Catherine said, you don't get away with that.
I won't be answering Michelle point by point, but last thing first and it's got nothing to do with religion: where the hell you do get off calling us "racist"? There isn't a scrap of evidence that this is true and a mountain of testimony that it's false. So no matter what else you have to say, you'd better settle this first, because it's a goddamned lie! I am proud of my heritage: I am homo sapiens sapiens, and a white guy, but like all of us, I came out of Africa.
Now: Dawkins is probably the most arrogant of them all. Glad you brought him up. This is the guy who thinks religious instruction is child abuse and would advocate hauling the poor helpless empty vessels right out of the classroom. Guy's a closet fascist. Page 318 of The God Delusion:
I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.
On the other hand, Lee Smolin is a genius physicist and an atheist, and he would never advocate the kind of arbitrary authority Dawkins would arrogate to himself. Nor would Christopher Hitchens. Nor would Daniel Dennett (I hope not, anyway).
One more point: you make a mistake when you assume that the reason for religion is comfort and easy answers. (You think walking with Jesus is easy? Get real.) Right now we're doing research for an art installation proposal that would use over three hundred distinct representations of gods, spirits, imps, kami, ancestors, forces, from all over the world and down through time. This sampling represents a small fraction of the myriads of partial, tentative answers humanity has come up with over thousands of years to the question: What's out there? Who's out there? What does it look like? Is it anything like me? Atheism effectively closes the door on such rich explorations, because atheists already assume it will be a dead end. Why bother? There's nothing out there, nothing but the darkness.
Posted by Jerome at January 8, 2008 10:05 AM | TrackBack