Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Munson’s comment: I am the kind of “buttery” atheist Dawkins criticizes in the following article. Rather than focus on the substance of the arguments he criticizes, Dawkins focuses on the “tone of voice” of those who make them. With respect to the “I’m an atheist, but religion is here to stay” argument, Phil Zuckerman cites a series of polls indicating that somewhere between 4 and 9 percent of Americans do not believe in God (The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, p. 48). These numbers could of course increase some day to the 31-39 percent found in Britain (p. 49). But the fact remains that if one looks at the world as a whole, trying to eradicate belief in God, or gods, is almost as futile as trying to eliminate sex. This may not always be true, but it will clearly be true for the rest of the twentieth-first century. So rather than trying to eliminate religion, a more fruitful strategy is to cooperate with moderate believers who support the kind of tolerant society favored by most atheist intellectuals.

‘I’m an atheist, BUT . . .’ by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net, Nov. 2006

I’ve noticed five variants of I’m-an-atheist-buttery, and I’ll list them in turn, in the hope that others will recognize them, be armed against them, and perhaps extend the list by contributing examples from their own experience.

1. I’m an atheist, but religion is here to stay. You think you can get rid of religion? Good luck to you! You want to get rid of religion? What planet are you living on? Religion is a fixture. Get over it!

I could bear any of these downers, if they were uttered in something approaching a tone of regret or concern. On the contrary. The tone of voice is almost always gleeful, and accompanied by a self-satisfied smirk….

2. I’m an atheist, but people need religion. What are you going to put in its place? How are you going to comfort the bereaved? How are you going to fill the need?

I dealt with this in the last chapter of The God Delusion, ‘A Much Needed Gap’ and also, at more length, in Unweaving the Rainbow. Here I’ll make one additional point. Did you notice the patronizing condescension in the quotations I just listed? You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people, hoi polloi, the Orwellian proles, the Huxleian Deltas and Epsilon semi-morons, need religion.

Former chief rabbi dies after illness - Haaretz, September 28, 2007

Former chief rabbi Abraham Shapira, 96, died yesterday after an illness.

Shapira will be remembered as one of Israel’s most political chief rabbis. During the Oslo Accords, Rabbi Shapira ruled that handing over territories, even as part of a peace agreement, was against Jewish law.

He also called on soldiers to refuse orders, an instruction he reiterated many times over the years, including during the disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

He was considered the unofficial spiritual leader of the National Religious Party.

Roger Owen, Chaos and unity in a fragmented Iraq - The Boston Globe, September 28, 2007

The major reasons why sectarian leaders cannot come together to create a united leadership for a united Iraq is that, rather than being able to control their followers outside the Green Zone, they are now, to a larger extent, controlled by them.

How and why this came about can be summed up under two related reasons. One concerns the long history of the devolution of local power by British and American authorities, first to the Kurds, then to those Iraqi sectarian parties that won a majority in the provincial elections in 2005.

In the case of the British in particular, control over the local administration and the police was simply handed to whichever Shi’ite party, or coalition of parties, gained the most electoral support. The same happened in the northern provinces, for example in the Mosul region, a process that greatly added to sectarian fighting in and around the city itself as a result of the fact that the Sunnis, by boycotting the election, had excluded themselves from the official political process.

The second, increasingly important reason is the fact that, as in the case of Lebanon during its own civil war, there were enough economic resources scattered around the country for local warlords who controlled them to maintain their own loyal militias and civilian constituencies without having to reply on the leadership’s financial support.

These included such tangible assets as police stations and armories, as well as economic assets like oil pipelines or refineries, electricity substations able to route local supplies, ports, and vital roads where traffic coming in and out of Kuwait in the south and Jordan and Syria in the east could readily be taxed, used for the smuggling of drugs and weapons or both.