Chris Hedges: Religious Extremism and New Atheism

Chris Hedges: Religious Extremism and New Atheism

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Chris
• Hedges
• Religious
• Extremism
• New
• Atheism

[CorrectingReligion]

Hedges = Antiwar

Hitchens = Prowar

Hedges = Anti-Torture

Harris = Pro- Torture

Lesson of the day? Religious labels are meaningless. Values are what matter. And the values of Hedges are closer to the liberal ones held by most free thinkers. His writings on the War on Terror are vastly more intelligent than the Fox News propaganda of the big bad Muslims recycled by Hitchens and other such backers of the Pentagon. Harris supports the Israeli war on Arabs in The End of Faith. A Zionist fool.

[AtheistGallant]

Chris Hedges towers over the neocon frauds like Hitchens and Harris who share the same foreign policy objectives as the Christian Right on which Chris Hedges trains his artillery fire. He speaks in the tradition of Bertrand Russell and Carl Sagan in exposing the corporate drive for profits and empire building in the true spirit of the Enlightenment. The new atheists would have been laughed at by the old atheists for their nationalism. Hedges belongs to the old atheism of opposing imperialism..

[ritchloui]

@freeshyne1234 Ah yes, you who are so expert that you didn't even know who Ayatollah Khomeini was. Well, sadly, nor did the Iranians until it was too late. As usual with revisionists, you seem to have a very ahistorical view of reality. If you weren't so naive and simplistic then you might perhaps notice that there is more than one player in the game.

[freeshyne1234]

@ritchloui

Please save your moron™ version of history for the bigotry echo chamber you got that fantasy from.

Iran was one of the most promising democracies under the highly popular president Mosadegh, who promised to remove BP's theft of Iranian oil. The British tried to organize a coup which failed, and so they got Wilson in the US to organize the CIA run coup which brought the hated dictator Shah to power. That is what resulted in the 1979 revolution. Fucking idiot

[ritchloui]

@RationalWaves Yes. I agree. Richard Carrier gives an exceptionally good explanation of the religious versus the scientific form of reasoning. He shows that the scientific approach is not only more fruitful and always has been but that it is also more morally coherent. Unfortunately Hedges' sympathies tend more toward those who 'answer to God/Allah alone than to those who concede ultimate authority to evidence and facts.

[ritchloui]

@freeshyne1234 Unfortunately I think Hedges, as a Christian, at some level, has already rejected and fears scientific reasoning, hence his tendency to straw man the scientific approach, whilst keeping the door ajar for the Islamic cause. Check out Richard Carrier on religion and science. Like a lot of 'lefties' Hedges is dangerously naive about the Islamic project and still regards Islam to be essentially misunderstood and fundamentally benign. The banking debacle is useful to such people.

[ritchloui]

@freeshyne1234 LOL. If you think the Ayatollah Khomeini was a 'solitary obscure figure of the past' then you are sadly mistaken. It was he, if you remember, ensured that the 1979 Iranian 'revolution' turned into a theocratic tyranny that set about killing all the secularists who had put in him power. As for your idiotic and tiresome accusation of 'racism', time you grew up and realised that being critical of a supremacist ideology is far from racist.

[RationalWaves]

@freeshyne1234 If he's talking about Hitchens' views, I agree. He did tend to think that way. Otherwise, he's building a straw-man. I think most atheists make it exceedingly clear that people are not the sum total of their religious identity and that it's the ideas of religion that deserve criticism, not the people themselves. Also, "religion" *is* a major impediment to progress, but not the sole one by any stretch of the imagination. This idea that new atheism advocates violence is incorrect.

[freeshyne1234]

@ritchloui

I can never tell if people like you are actually serious. Are you really stupid enough to think quoting solitary obscure figures in the past explains/justifies your bigotry? One could quote pages and pages and pages of Jewish/Christian/Western-secul­ar individuals in history who made equally and far more insidious claims.

Of-course it is pointless to highlight that to people who are fundamentally racists and hypocrites at heart.

[freeshyne1234]

@RationalWaves

You missed the subtle point he was making. He wasn't saying that new athiests say "all evil comes from religion". He was alluding to the ideology that has driven past abuses of power, where people say "all our problems stem from x/y/z" and then use that as a justification to persecute that particular group. Likewise new athiests equally identify "religion" as the impediment to progress. Essentially arguing that our problems stem largely from religion. Hedges is dead-on

[RationalWaves]

I agree with some of his attacks on the views of Hitchens and Harris, but some of the statements he makes are just idiotic. Basically everything from 8:58 to 9:54 is just utter bull crap. There's no reason that convictions that other people are wrong must be taken to the extremes he describes. He ignores the religious underpinnings of Hitler's actions.

I get the feeling that Hedges has no fucking clue what science is. It's not dogmatic. It has no agenda. It's a discovery process not a thing.

[RationalWaves]

I've agree with many things Hedges says politically, but this talk is very dishonest. He is straw-manning 'new' atheism, particularly when he says: "And what they've done is take evolutionary biology ... and use it as a kind of blueprint for human behavior. They have essentially created a definition of religion that embodies all evil" (11:39). This is just absurd. None of the new atheists advocate social Darwinism and all of them recognize religions' positive effects (except Hitchens arguably).