Comments on: Dawkins, The God Delusion

by: Damien

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 08:13:53 +0000

I think that “imagine” was in the beginning. Later he says that the suicide bombers in Britain had no secular motivation — no lionization and support for their families, in fact abandoned a wife and toddler — *unlike* the kamikaze bombers, the Tamil Tigers, or the Palestinians. So there he’d seem to acknowledge that secular forces can also produce suicide bombers — but in the case of the British ones, when there’s no worldly support, and the bombers themselves say they expect to go to Paradise, we should take them at their word.

(The Palestinians would seem to be a dual-cause case: some worldly support, such as Saddam Hussein’s money to families, but also videotaped testimonials to the religious nature of their martyrdom.)

The British attack might also not have had a clear goal of compelling withdrawal, but I don’t really know details.

by: Dominionists and the rise of fascism at ideological criminal

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 05:51:58 +0000

[…] Hedges believes the people involved in this community to be good, earnest, and hard working people, but overwhelmed by personal despair, tragedy, and loneliness. In many ways, I see Hedges as a perfect supplement to Richard Dawkins. He is everything I found lacking in Dawkins. Whereas Dawkins is somewhat of a geopolitical ignoramus, Hedges has a deep understanding and firsthand experience. Whereas Dawkins’s religious prowess is unsophisticated, Hedges’s is not. And whereas Dawkins sees the cause for belief to be mystical, irrational, and superstitious, Hedges can explain why people embrace these things, with a basis in socioeconomic factors. On the other hand, the subject of their criticism is largely the same, and both are fighting for a tolerant society that values reason, science, diversity, etc.; their goals are largely in common. Dawkins sees “moderate” religious institutions and the unfounded respect—the off-limits status of belief—as partly to blame for allowing such bigoted and irrational movements to survive, while Hedges likewise claims that government, higher education, religious and charitable institutions have wrongly allowed the dominionists room to grow. Dawkins, like Hedges, identifies many of the same characteristics that Eco lists, and both see the dire consequences of this movement coming to power, but it is only Hedges who appeals to a convincing historical analogy. […]

by: dvanhorn

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 23:27:05 +0000

One interesting note I came across relevant to the fallacy of Dawkins’s “Imagine […] no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers” argument: Ali Abunimah points out in his book One Country (p. 156), the “groundbreaking study by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape called Dying to Win, examining all suicide attacks worldwide since 1980 (460 were included in the study), revealed that every such bombing campaign had a clear goal that was secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from territory that the suicide attackers viewed as their homeland.” Again, I’m sure that religion plays a role in some of these attacks, but it cannot be stressed enough that in each case there are political causes at work and unless they are address, suicide attacks are sure to continue.