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Apologia Report 14:19
May 20, 2009
Subject: Atheists as whiners
In this issue:
ATHEISM - another example of hard-line atheists being asked by their
own camp to tone down hostile rhetoric
+ Atheists, "just whining ... tiresome ... excruciating snoozes"
HINDUISM - new book's "alternative history," an eye-opener
RELIGION, GENERAL - democracy and markets, technology and reason have
combined to make religion stronger, not destroy it as predicted
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ATHEISM
Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by Terry
Eagleton [1] -- Marilyn Dahl didn't review this book in the April 24
edition of Shelf-Awareness, she merely reported its opening lines:
"Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most
part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful
thinking, and oppressive ideology. I therefore have a good deal of
sympathy with its rationalist and humanist critics. But it is also the
case, as this book argues, that most such critics buy their rejection
of religion on the cheap. When it comes to the New Testament, at
least, what they usually write off is a worthless caricature of the
real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match
religion's own. ...
"It is with this ignorance and prejudice that I take issue in this
book. If the agnostic left cannot afford such intellectual indolence
when it comes to the Jewish and Christian scriptures, it is not only
because it belongs to justice and honesty to confront your opponent at
his or her most convincing. It is also that radicals might discover
there some valuable insights into human emancipation, in an era where
the political left stands in dire need of good ideas. I do not invite
such readers to believe in these ideas, any more than I myself believe
in the archangel Gabriel, [or] the idea that Jesus walked on water....
If I try in this book to 'ventriloquize' what I take to be a version
of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists, I do not
wish to be mistaken for a dummy. But the Jewish and Christian
scriptures have much to say about some vital questions - death,
suffering, love ... on which the left has for the most part maintained
an embarrassed silence. It is time for this politically crippling
shyness to come to an end." <www.tinyurl.com/crcwh7>
Meanwhile, Charlotte Allen of the Manhattan Institute
<www.manhattan-institute.org> writes in "Atheists: No God, no reason,
just whining" that "My problem with atheists is their tiresome - and
way old - insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation
with the fine points of Christianity."
She complains: "The problem with atheists - and what makes them
such excruciating snoozes - is that few of them are interested in
making serious metaphysical or epistemological arguments against God's
existence, or in taking on the serious arguments that theologians have
made attempting to reconcile, say, God's omniscience with free will or
God's goodness with human suffering."
Further, "What primarily seems to motivate atheists isn't
rationalism but anger - anger that the world isn't perfect, that
someone forced them to go to church as children, that the Bible
contains apparent contradictions, that human beings can be hypocrites
and commit crimes in the name of faith. The vitriol is extraordinary."
Los Angeles Times, May 17 '09, n.p. <www.tinyurl.com/pgmb4q>
---
HINDUISM
The Hindus: An Alternative History, by Wendy Doniger [2] -- Pankaj
Mishra's review reports that "Repelled by [what they described as]
pagan blasphemies, the first British scholars of India went so far as
to invent what we now call 'Hinduism,' complete with a mainstream
classical tradition consisting entirely of Sanskrit philosophical
texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads. In fact, most Indians
in the 18th century knew no Sanskrit, the language exclusive to
Brahmins. ...
"[T]he British Indologists who sought to tame India's chaotic
polytheisms had a 'Protestant bias in favor of scripture.' In
'privileging' Sanskrit over local languages, [Doniger] writes, they
created what has proved to be an enduring impression of a 'unified
Hinduism.' ...
"[T]he nontextual, syncretic religious and philosophical traditions
of India that escaped the attention of British scholars flourish even
today. ...
"Doniger sets herself the ambitious task of writing 'a narrative
alternative to the one constituted by the most famous texts in
Sanskrit.' As she puts it, 'It's not all about Brahmins, Sanskrit, the
Gita.' It's also not about perfidious Muslims who destroyed
innumerable Hindu temples and forcibly converted millions of Indians
to Islam. Doniger, who cannot but be aware of the political
historiography of Hindu nationalists, the most powerful interpreters
of Indian religions in both India and abroad today, also wishes to
provide an 'alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they
tell.'
"She writes at length about the devotional 'bhakti' tradition, an
ecstatic and radically egalitarian form of Hindu religiosity which,
though possessing royal and literary lineage, was 'also a folk and
oral phenomenon,' accommodating women, low-caste men and illiterates.
...
"Motivated by realpolitik rather than religious fundamentalism, the
Mughals destroyed temples; they also built and patronized them. Not
only is there 'no evidence of massive coercive conversion' to Islam,
but also so much of what we know as popular Hinduism - the currently
popular devotional cults of Rama and Krishna, the network of
pilgrimages, ashrams and sects - acquired its distinctive form during
Mughal rule. ...
"This book will no doubt further expose [Doniger] to the fury of
the modern-day Indian heirs of the British imperialists who invented
'Hinduism.' Happily, it will also serve as a salutary antidote to the
fanatics who perceive - correctly - the fluid existential identities
and commodious metaphysic of practiced Indian religions as a threat to
their project of a culturally homogenous and militant nation-state."
New York Times Book Review, Apr 26 '09, p20. <www.tinyurl.com/ddwnt5>
A review by Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal (Apr 1
'09, n.p.) is well worth reading though it is also odd in that it
tells us more about Doniger than about her book.
---
RELIGION, GENERAL
God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World,
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge [3] -- Hanna Rosin's review
notes that "The Americans led the way by becoming both 'the
quintessentially modern country' and a very devout one, ... and most
of the world has followed that model. In rich countries and poorer
ones, democratic and undemocratic, primarily Islamic and primarily
Christian - everywhere, basically, except Europe — devotion to God has
remained surprisingly robust.
"'The very things that were supposed to destroy religion -
democracy and markets, technology and reason - are combining to make
it stronger,' write Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist
[4], and Wooldridge, the magazine's Washington bureau chief, who
together have written previous books about globalization and American
conservatism, two similarly sweeping topics.
"To anyone who lives outside Europe, the Harvard campus or
Manhattan (all faith-free zones singled out by the authors), this
conclusion is not exactly startling. ...
"While fundamentalists of all kinds get most of the attention, the
authors zero in on another phenomenon: the growth and global spread of
the American megachurch," in which "[t]he surge of religion was
'driven by the same forces driving the success of market capitalism:
competition and choice.'
"The market that niche religious leaders stepped into was the hole
opened up by modernity, and their product was something the authors
call 'soulcraft.' ...
"All the while, religion began shedding its association with
anti-intellectualism, and became the province of the upwardly mobile
middle class. Evangelicals began graduating from college in record
numbers, and Christian philanthropists began building an 'intellectual
infrastructure,' including programs and endowed chairs in the Ivy
League. A new class of thinkers emerged representing what some have
called 'the opening of the evangelical mind'....
"The authors track the explosion of Pentecostalism - with its
perfect mix of 'raw emotion and self-improvement' - to Brazil and
South Korea. The American style even has converts in the Muslim world.
[Examples include] Indonesia's Abdullah Gymnastiar.... [and] Amr
Khaled, 'Egypt's answer to Billy Graham,' [who] is ushering his
followers into the televangelist age." In all cases, "The trick they
try to pull off is making concessions to modernity without diluting
their message, but in the Muslim world, especially, it's not clear how
much influence they have. ...
"[T]he authors ultimately conclude that 'God is back, for better.'
By this they mean that religion is now a matter of choice for most
people, and not a forced or inherited identity." New York Times Book
Review, Apr 26 '09, p14, <www.tinyurl.com/cddsgd>
For an extended excerpt, see <www.tinyurl.com/qc7yhp>
-------
Sources, Monographs:
1 - Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by
Terry Eagleton (Yale Univ Prs, 2009, hardcover, 200 pages)
2 - The Hindus: An Alternative History, by Wendy Doniger (Penguin,
2009, hardcover, 800 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/c35ush>
3 - God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the
World, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin, 2009,
hardcover, 416 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/dd2kpm>
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