NYT; Kristof on Religion, blasting Dawkins and Harris

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html?hp
"That site is part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive led in part by Professor Dawkins — the Oxford scientist who is author of the new best seller “The God Delusion.” It’s a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism that he and others are proselytizing for.

I wrote an email response basically calling him on his Right Wing tactics. He doesn't refute Dawkins and Harris, rather he just calls them hateful and obnoxious. It's the old "why are atheist so angry" crap.

I guess he has no problem with the assertive, obnoxious, angry, offensive proselytizing of American Taliban on the right.

My wife and I were watching his clips on youtube the other day, and she said, "You know, he has a very good point about the need for non-theists to stand up and be heard. We have suppressed our own voices because of fear of being intolerant, or fear of being attacked. When religion of any kind threatens our society because of a suppression of scientific thought, then we must stand up and attempt to be heard."

While my wife is a non-theist, she is a very quiet one who practices tolerance as best as possible. Dawkins made her think about her responsibility as a scientist and non-theist to challenge damaging religious belief in our society. Let me be clear, not all religious belief is damaging to society, but those beliefs held by fundamentalist of any stripe that lead to suppression of scientific thought are rather damaging. The question is how to challenge those beliefs while affirming the right of all people to believe what they will.

Atheists have every right to be angry.

if they would just mind their own business and let me mind mine. Never had an atheist come to my door passing out literature, never heard an atheist preaching on a street corner about how evil my partner and I are, never heard an atheist say that we needed to pass this law or that simply because it was the will of some invisible being who lives in the sky.

which two of those groups has raped tortutured and murdered hundreds of millions of innocent people in the past say 2000 or 1600 years?

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

Don't forget that communists were atheists.

In answer to your question, atheists clearly win the competition in killing innocents. Consider just Communist Russia/Soviet Union, China, Cambodia under the Khemer Rouge, and Nazi Germany. All these were official atheist governments, and killed many time over more people than the sum total of religion-based killings in world history.


Perhaps surprising, but true.

Far from being "an official atheist government", Nazi Germany used religion to further its aims. The Soviet Union's leadership was atheist, but it was not killing people for the sake of atheism. You are counting all deaths caused by atheist governments on one side; so therefore we should count all deaths caused by theist governments, whether or not for the sake of religion, on the other. That would then include all deaths caused by the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Tsarist Russia, pre-communist China, Japan, etc., all the way back through history. These outweigh those cause by atheist governments.

Are you saying that when a government officially endorses atheism everyone who lives under that government automatically becomes an atheist and ceases to have religious motivation for any of their actions or that atheistic governments do not capitalize on preexisting religious prejudice in accomplishing their goals?

What site is he referring to?

Thanks for the URL.

Kristof needs to answer the question posed by that site, not resort to ad hominem attacks.

Here's the concluding two paragraphs.

I'm hoping that atheists (not the Atheist Left; I have no idea what that is) will indeed become more agressive and open. For the sake of civilization, we have to finally relegate religion to total irrelevance.

Viva atheism! Screw religion.

Time and time again, it gets shown that nothing turns someone to fundamentalism like being threatened. Just look at the US in 2003-04. Why did the Iraq war get so much support? People were scared of terrorists, and fear makes people stop thinking. When people think their way of life is in danger they will rally behind any idiot who says he's fighting the threat.

People like Dawkins and Harris are the best evangelists the religious right could possibly have.

I'm sorry, but I just have to address this common fallacy. First of all, atheism is non-belief in a God or Gods. Period. Unlike Christians, or Muslims, or Buddhists, or Hindus, etc. etc., who share a common set of values and a written set of religious tenets, This is not true of those who simply agree that they don't believe in the existence of a supernatural entity.

For example, there are many of us - atheists, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, The Pope, The Dalai Lama - who I would venture a guess, don't believe that Santa Claus is a real person. Just because we have that singular non-belief in common, does not mean we have ANYTHING else in common. Our common non-belief in Santa Claus has not somehow magically become a shared affirmative belief system. Certainly no one would seriously suggest that because Hitler didn't believe in Santa Claus, and YOU (or me) don't believe in Santa Claus, that we are also Nazis. Think how ridiculous it sounds to say, "well communists were Santa Clause (atheists) or (non-believers) too, and look at what they did! We all have common atheistic (non-belief) attitudes that we share. Most don't believe that the earth is flat, they don't believe the moon is made of green cheese, they don't believe that fairys or leprechauns or werewolves, or vampires are real beings. In fact, most believers don't believe that any other religion (but their own) is true. So atheists just believe in one less religion than most believers!

This is not at all the same as claiming a shared theology or philosophy and identifying yourself as a member of that philosophical or religious group, claiming all of its tenets as your own. And this is exactlly where Dawkins (for example - many have preceded him) is headed. If one claims that the Bible is literally true, and that what God does is automatically good, then it is a legitimate question as to how the slaughter of innocents (Jericho, the flood, etc.) endorsed and commanded by God is not simply genocide. Of course, folks become uncomfortable when they have to confront the facts, but by raising these questions with them should do a lot to check that superiority complex so many of 'em seem to have.

Kristof thinks that atheists should just shut up, and not raise these issues, because it makes people uncomfortable. Too bad.