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WHAT IS MILITANT ATHEISM?
Militant atheism is an extreme form of atheism. Its two main characteristics hostility to religion and its aim to destroy any vestiges of God and religion.
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The following quote by Julian Baggini, a committed atheist author, summarizes militant atheism eloquently.
Although …atheism I not necessarily hostile to religion, there are, of course some atheists who are hostile to religion, and not just fundamentalist religions….Atheism which is actively hostile to religion I would call militant. To be hostile in this sense requires more than just strong disagreement with religion—it requires something verging on hatred and is characterized by a desire to wipe out all forms of religious beliefs. Militant atheists tend to make one or both of two claims that atheists do not. The first is that religion is demonstrably false or nonsense, and the second is that it is usually or always harmful. (1)
Thus, militant atheism is driven by a hatred and hostility toward “any kind” of religion — without distinction. This high level of hostility blinds them to the good religion has done, or is doing, and fails to acknowledge that there is a wide variety of religion expressions ranging from extremist groups, on one side of the belief continuum, to very sincere, loving and service-oriented groups on the other side. Unfortunately, it is this kind of rage that has led to extreme forms of militant atheism in the past that led to the persecution of religions and the killing of a great many, as it has occurred in Communist countries.
This site is concerned about their determination and growth and takes a stand against them by spotlighting their extremism, their lies and their agenda.
http://atheismexposed.tripod.com/what_is_militant_atheism.htm
The National Secular Society (NSS), of which Dawkins is an honorary associate, has campaigned for a godless Britain since the nineteenth century, and devotes its Web site to decrying and ridiculing religious faith. The NSS, whose associates include twenty British parliamentarians, as well as such establishment cultural figures as the playwright Harold Pinter, vows to combat “religious power-seekers” and “put them in their place once and for all.” For his part, Dawkins has said he would remove all financial support from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim schools and make them teach atheism; prohibit hospital chaplains from solacing the ill; and undertake other measures to combat the “infantile regression” of religious belief. And what about parents who persist in telling their children about religion? “It's probably too strong to say the state should have the right to take children away from their parents,” Dawkins told an interviewer. “But I think we have got to look very carefully at the rights of parents–and whether they should have the right to indoctrinate their children.”
According to Dawkins, morality is “biologically determined,” and all moral questions, from the prohibition of incest to the allocation of kidney machines, should be decided by “utilitarian moral philosophers” trained to assess the “balance of suffering and happiness” such questions address. “This is a very different way of doing morality than the absolutist way, which supposes some things are absolutely wrong,” Dawkins has argued.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_8_134/ai_n27223300/
I wouldn't call it militant.
Militant is when you threaten to blow people up.
Like some militant islamists, for example.
Stuart
Atheism is getting a good press these days, but under false pretenses. Remember the Monty Python skit where a bishop and an atheist wrestled to decide “Whether God exists?” The decision was: “God exists, by two falls to one submission.” That's funny because – as the Pythons' Oxbridge students knew – such “solid knock-down arguments” do not apply to this question.
Ever since Aristotle we have known that there are two kinds of rational arguments. One is demonstration, used in the sciences, and the other is reasonable judgment proper to other disciplines. The old philosopher said: “It is equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proof.” And he added: “not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues lack of education.” So we have two kinds of rational thinking, not just one. Science might provide knowledge about reality, but it's not the whole truth.
Today, the creed of atheism is promoted widely – even a summer camp (motto: “Beyond All Reason”) – charging that religion is outmoded, suitable only for the unlettered or naïve. The fallacy here is what renowned philosopher Antony Flew called “the presumption of atheism,” as if a scientific age requires us to begin by assuming atheism. Recently Flew himself has turned, acknowledging that the idea of a creator is logical.
Having spent my working life in academia, in a discipline studying belief and unbelief, let me suggest an alternative view. First we should note that the hallowed halls of the campus are supposed to be where Reason is king, above petty emotions. I discovered, however, that it is just as much run by self-interest and narrow viewpoints as anywhere else (one need only attend senate meetings to find out). But the real danger is that too many faculties operate with a philosophy called Positivism – only what is posited before our senses is “real.”
That's why measurement is king; even the social sciences justify their claim to be scientific by devising ways of measuring human behaviour. C.S. Lewis once remarked: “Our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world alone.”
In its earlier form as Logical Positivism this view claimed that only statements of definition (“a bachelor is an unmarried man”) or sense data (“there is a cat in the next room”) make sense. All others – poetry, morals, religion – are “non-sense.” They cannot be tested, i.e. measured. This kind of reductionism had a short life, as language analysts showed how much richer human discourse really is. Today we recognize that each discipline may respond to reality in its own appropriate way, not reducible to merely physical categories. This takes nothing away from science, but shows a wider and more complex truth.
My favourite philosopher is David Hume, star of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment. He is the “father of skepticism,” whose brilliant analysis showed that one cannot prove cause-and-effect, it's rather a habit of mind based on experience. (Will the sun rise again tomorrow? Probably.)
Now this destroys proper demonstrative proof, so that science is no longer arbiter of right speech. Since the radical breakthroughs of the early 1900s (relativity physics and quantum mechanics), the strictly inductive method of what Einstein called “the youth of science” is outmoded. Now it works with deductive models, analogies, even paradoxes. And if string theory is at all correct, it unveils a multi-dimensional universe where fantasies such as folds in space and wrinkles in time might be discussed as possibilities.
If science is constrained by its own limits (saving it from becoming the ideology of “scientism”), what about other disciplines? Are our moral values and religious beliefs mere products of evolutionary human being? What kind of sense do they make? If Aristotle was right to distinguish two kinds of reasoning, both equally valid, then the discourse of morality and religion – and poetry, too – has its own inner logic, its own proper take on what is real. Therefore the myths and symbols that have haunted the imagination since cave-dwellers are in fact responses to a deeper understanding than mere sense knowledge.
But we must also acknowledge faults in religion. Traditional atheism was largely a reaction to the idea of an omnipotent deity: If God controls everything, why is there evil? (Of course, if theists have to live with the problem of evil, atheists face “the problem of goodness.”) This will not do: the popular image of a “God of the gaps” filling in bits of our ignorance, or “God of the zaps” interfering when things get rough – such naïve images require correction. A reasonable faith demands better theology than that, showing a God whose presence in our world affects us through not coercive power but persuasive love. Thus will it be attuned to the dynamic worldview of modern science, worthy of playing its partner in understanding this mysterious universe.
Modern atheism, however, reacts also to the “religion-and-violence” thesis. Certainly the rise of fundamentalism, which even accepts violence in its agenda, is clear. But the thesis is wrong because it fails to define religion in acceptable terms. After all, the very term “religion” is a modern invention of academics, who separated a belief-system from its cultural matrix. While it is questionable whether it's fair to blame religion for conflicts that have political and economic causes as well, the real question is whether one can assign blame to a supposed entity called “religion” rather than to “nationalism” as the cause of most modern wars. My faith does not tell to me to kill, but my nation does.
Definitions of religion tend to be too narrow or too broad, proving that one needs to shift ground, distinguishing a “cumulative tradition” from “faith” as Wilfred Cantwell Smith did. We must admit that “tribal religion” can spoil both faith and patriotism, but surely in its nobler essence and higher aims faith in a benevolent God must be tolerant, peacemaking. Good religion has to be as self-critical as good science. Or better: genuine “faith” remains a valid interpreter of reality even when “religion” is faulty.
Among the last words of Socrates are these: “We must take the best and most indisputable of human doctrines, and embark on that, as if it were a raft, and risk the voyage of life, unless it were possible to find a stronger vessel, some divine word on which we might journey more surely and securely.” Faith, in short, is the logical response to such a word, carrying the deeper meaning of human being. It's not “other-worldly” so much as seeing the “extra” dimension hidden within this world of the “everyday.” Faith sees the world as gift, and divine presence as giver – so we have gratitude for this grace.
Faith reveals the “sur-réal,” the unutterable Beauty, ultimate Truth.
You could just make your point and link to the rest of the text.
We have suggested that to you before, but you appear to be a slow learner.
You certainly don't have the wit to write all this stuff yourself.
Stuart
Quote (Stu @ Feb. 08 2010,17:19) You could just make your point and link to the rest of the text. We have suggested that to you before, but you appear to be a slow learner.
You certainly don't have the wit to write all this stuff yourself.
Stuart
In time my friend… I strike when the Iron is Hot!Quote Ever since Aristotle we have known that there are two kinds of rational arguments. One is demonstration, used in the sciences, and the other is reasonable judgment proper to other disciplines. The old philosopher said: “It is equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proof.” And he added: “not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues lack of education.” So we have two kinds of rational thinking, not just one. Science might provide knowledge about reality, but it's not the whole truth.
We have science, and we have special pleadings by the religious. Let’s not forget this is not all Aristotle was wrong about!Stuart
Quote Today, the creed of atheism is promoted widely – even a summer camp (motto: “Beyond All Reason”) – charging that religion is outmoded, suitable only for the unlettered or naïve. The fallacy here is what renowned philosopher Antony Flew called “the presumption of atheism,” as if a scientific age requires us to begin by assuming atheism. Recently Flew himself has turned, acknowledging that the idea of a creator is logical.
What on earth is ‘the creed of atheism’? Notice this professor is not big on academic rigour, he seems to be in special pleading mode. The ‘presumption of atheism’ sounds like an impressive argument until you realise that anyone who uses it is atheistic towards one god or another. That is why atheism is the default position, because it is the only common ground humanity has on religious questions.Stuart
Quote Having spent my working life in academia, in a discipline studying belief and unbelief, let me suggest an alternative view. First we should note that the hallowed halls of the campus are supposed to be where Reason is king, above petty emotions. I discovered, however, that it is just as much run by self-interest and narrow viewpoints as anywhere else (one need only attend senate meetings to find out). But the real danger is that too many faculties operate with a philosophy called Positivism – only what is posited before our senses is “real.” That's why measurement is king; even the social sciences justify their claim to be scientific by devising ways of measuring human behaviour. C.S. Lewis once remarked: “Our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world alone.”
That’s because the ‘other worlds’ are all inventions. You just have to ask people to actually tell you what those ‘other worlds’ are actually like, and no two people can give you the same story. The running of academia by narrow opinion does not mean you should therefore accept religious assertions about gods. That would be a logical fallacy on the part of the author, but of course he stops short of saying anything logical himself, or anything at all actually.Stuart
Quote In its earlier form as Logical Positivism this view claimed that only statements of definition (“a bachelor is an unmarried man”) or sense data (“there is a cat in the next room”) make sense. All others – poetry, morals, religion – are “non-sense.” They cannot be tested, i.e. measured. This kind of reductionism had a short life, as language analysts showed how much richer human discourse really is. Today we recognize that each discipline may respond to reality in its own appropriate way, not reducible to merely physical categories. This takes nothing away from science, but shows a wider and more complex truth.
We only have HIS ASSERTION that academia runs this way, and now he is reducing it to absurdities on what is probably a false premise anyway. Maybe we can see that this professor has as much a part to play in running his university by narrow viewpoint as anyone else.Stuart
Quote My favourite philosopher is David Hume, star of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment. He is the “father of skepticism,” whose brilliant analysis showed that one cannot prove cause-and-effect, it's rather a habit of mind based on experience. (Will the sun rise again tomorrow? Probably.) Now this destroys proper demonstrative proof, so that science is no longer arbiter of right speech. Since the radical breakthroughs of the early 1900s (relativity physics and quantum mechanics), the strictly inductive method of what Einstein called “the youth of science” is outmoded. Now it works with deductive models, analogies, even paradoxes. And if string theory is at all correct, it unveils a multi-dimensional universe where fantasies such as folds in space and wrinkles in time might be discussed as possibilities.
Is there a point to this paragraph? I couldn’t find it. Science has never claimed to have demonstrative proof. That is a strawman.Stuart
Quote If science is constrained by its own limits (saving it from becoming the ideology of “scientism”), what about other disciplines? Are our moral values and religious beliefs mere products of evolutionary human being? What kind of sense do they make? If Aristotle was right to distinguish two kinds of reasoning, both equally valid, then the discourse of morality and religion – and poetry, too – has its own inner logic, its own proper take on what is real. Therefore the myths and symbols that have haunted the imagination since cave-dwellers are in fact responses to a deeper understanding than mere sense knowledge.
Aristotle was wrong.Stuart
Quote But we must also acknowledge faults in religion. Traditional atheism was largely a reaction to the idea of an omnipotent deity: If God controls everything, why is there evil? (Of course, if theists have to live with the problem of evil, atheists face “the problem of goodness.”) This will not do: the popular image of a “God of the gaps” filling in bits of our ignorance, or “God of the zaps” interfering when things get rough – such naïve images require correction. A reasonable faith demands better theology than that, showing a God whose presence in our world affects us through not coercive power but persuasive love. Thus will it be attuned to the dynamic worldview of modern science, worthy of playing its partner in understanding this mysterious universe.
Atheism never has to be more than calling the bluff of the emperor’s new clothes. You are an idiot if you are pretending the emperor has new clothes when he is actually naked, which is a separate point from the fact that you cannot absolutely prove that the emperor does NOT have clothes. If you cannot see them, then it is not an unreasonably hypothesis that there are no clothes. Atheism is the attitude of what is reasonable to conclude given the evidence. How is it reasonable to conclude there is a god of love when is supposedly created the guinea worm?[utrl]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis[/url]
Stuart
Quote Modern atheism, however, reacts also to the “religion-and-violence” thesis. Certainly the rise of fundamentalism, which even accepts violence in its agenda, is clear. But the thesis is wrong because it fails to define religion in acceptable terms. After all, the very term “religion” is a modern invention of academics, who separated a belief-system from its cultural matrix. While it is questionable whether it's fair to blame religion for conflicts that have political and economic causes as well, the real question is whether one can assign blame to a supposed entity called “religion” rather than to “nationalism” as the cause of most modern wars. My faith does not tell to me to kill, but my nation does.
The koran does tell people to kill, the old testament does too. The new testament just says people are 'worthy of death' which is a punishment, to be meted out by whom, we wonder? There is no book of atheist mythology that tells atheists to kill anyone. This argument which seeks to dodge responsibility does not wash. Conflicts are certainly fought on the basis of difference in religious belief alone, for example in Northern Ireland. In cases where the conflict was really over resources, you would first have to remove the religious tribal labels worn by the combatants to demonstrate that there was no religious conflict involved.Stuart
Quote Definitions of religion tend to be too narrow or too broad, proving that one needs to shift ground, distinguishing a “cumulative tradition” from “faith” as Wilfred Cantwell Smith did. We must admit that “tribal religion” can spoil both faith and patriotism, but surely in its nobler essence and higher aims faith in a benevolent God must be tolerant, peacemaking. Good religion has to be as self-critical as good science. Or better: genuine “faith” remains a valid interpreter of reality even when “religion” is faulty.
What a load of meaningless bollocks. And it patronises the religious too. The history of christianity for example is one of perpetual revision and schism as people move around in what they think their religion says. If he is serious about religions being self-critical, then what timeless ethics do they possess? I have no problem with a religion saying ‘we got it wrong all this time, here is what is really going on’, but how many religious leaders have ever said anything remotely like that? I know of one: the Dalai Lama.Stuart
Quote Among the last words of Socrates are these: “We must take the best and most indisputable of human doctrines, and embark on that, as if it were a raft, and risk the voyage of life, unless it were possible to find a stronger vessel, some divine word on which we might journey more surely and securely.” Faith, in short, is the logical response to such a word, carrying the deeper meaning of human being. It's not “other-worldly” so much as seeing the “extra” dimension hidden within this world of the “everyday.” Faith sees the world as gift, and divine presence as giver – so we have gratitude for this grace. Faith reveals the “sur-réal,” the unutterable Beauty, ultimate Truth.
Faith is the evidence of the unseen, the testimony of things that could only possibly be imagined, by definition. The christian faith actually says that you cannot know the workings of god, so in fact far from faith revealing anything at all, its business is to conceal. Is that because it is concealing the bluff of the existence of its deity? If reason and empiricism mean anything then the abrahamic faiths are one collective con job.Stuart
Quote Militant atheism is an extreme form of atheism. Its two main characteristics hostility to religion and its aim to destroy any vestiges of God and religion.
You say it like it’s a bad thing! It certainly is not like militant islamic suicide bombing or abortion clinic murdering. I personally do not subscribe to this view, as I think the mainstream christian religions are doing a fine job of self-destruction. I think the Roman Catholic church should be forcibly disbanded for concealing crimes against children, and for causing human death and misery more widely. If the UN had any teeth then it would be ethically right for it to work with countries all round the world to prevent the official take-up of sharia law, as a basic act of human decency.Stuart
Quote Although …atheism I not necessarily hostile to religion, there are, of course some atheists who are hostile to religion, and not just fundamentalist religions….Atheism which is actively hostile to religion I would call militant. To be hostile in this sense requires more than just strong disagreement with religion—it requires something verging on hatred and is characterized by a desire to wipe out all forms of religious beliefs. Militant atheists tend to make one or both of two claims that atheists do not. The first is that religion is demonstrably false or nonsense, and the second is that it is usually or always harmful.
I think actually those last two are ‘mainstream’ atheist viewpoints. We should be careful to note here that the hatred is for religion and god-concepts, and not for people, unlike with islam where militant muslims’ hatred for Jews (whether doctrinally correct in ones opinion or not) can be very real, potentially murderous and is never justified in rational terms.Stuart
Quote Thus, militant atheism is driven by a hatred and hostility toward “any kind” of religion — without distinction. This high level of hostility blinds them to the good religion has done, or is doing, and fails to acknowledge that there is a wide variety of religion expressions ranging from extremist groups, on one side of the belief continuum, to very sincere, loving and service-oriented groups on the other side. Unfortunately, it is this kind of rage that has led to extreme forms of militant atheism in the past that led to the persecution of religions and the killing of a great many, as it has occurred in Communist countries.
You would have to say what religion actually is, to say whether it has done any good or not. People do acts of goodwill and kindness, and those acts are possible regardless of the religious beliefs of those doing them, so actually to say that ‘religion does good’ is a bit of a myth.
Murders of people under communist regimes were not in the name of atheism, but in the name of the totalitarian regime. They were communist murders.Stuart
Quote The National Secular Society (NSS), of which Dawkins is an honorary associate, has campaigned for a godless Britain since the nineteenth century, and devotes its Web site to decrying and ridiculing religious faith. The NSS, whose associates include twenty British parliamentarians, as well as such establishment cultural figures as the playwright Harold Pinter, vows to combat “religious power-seekers” and “put them in their place once and for all.” For his part, Dawkins has said he would remove all financial support from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim schools and make them teach atheism; prohibit hospital chaplains from solacing the ill; and undertake other measures to combat the “infantile regression” of religious belief. And what about parents who persist in telling their children about religion? “It's probably too strong to say the state should have the right to take children away from their parents,” Dawkins told an interviewer. “But I think we have got to look very carefully at the rights of parents–and whether they should have the right to indoctrinate their children.”
Do we think Dawkins intends to stop parents taking their children to an anglican church where there is even a 13% chance the vicar does not actually believe in god? No, this is about the child abuse of chopping off functioning parts of their genitalia before children can give consent, or watching a child die through want of a blood transfusion, or the indoctrination bit which is to force their children to accept lies about natural history, or to stop their proper development by preventing them from meeting with their friends or using a newspaper or the television. It is about making parents think twice before exposing their children to priests who may tell them that they will go to hell if they are not saved.Child abuse all of it. And mainstream elements of commonly-held religious belief systems.
The House of Lords has an unelected bench of CofE bishops. Children in state schools in the UK have a ‘daily act of collective worship’. This is a modern secular nation where the established church gets an automatic say in the running of government, as if it is still the Medieval Age. Anyone who believes in freedom of religion is being a hypocrite if he does not also believe in freedom from religion. British taxpayer-funded institutions do not enjoy this freedom by right. That is the kind of thing the NSS has fought successfully, for example helping in the recent overturning of the absurd blasphemy law.
Stuart
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