Richard Dawkins — Militant Atheism’s primary argument is that religious fundamentalism has become a major justification for war and inequality. But because it is ‘faith-based’ it is considered to be inarguable — and even unquestionable, even though it has no grounding in reason or fact. RD points out that religion, being faith-based rather than fact-based, sets itself at odds with science and denies physical realities. He is promoting ‘militant atheism’ to confront militant religiousity. He challenges people to publicly ‘come-out’ as atheists and support science, fact and the complexity of the world.
My interpretation of our Richard Dawkins discussion:
Some of us felt there is value in RD’s strident, militant approach because taking a softer line has resulted in the bulldozing of reason and blind faith leading to war and planetary degradation. In contrast, some felt that all people should be able to express their faith as they like. Those leaning more towards RD’s perspective felt that that approach makes assumption that those with ‘faith’ will play fair and allow others their own freedom of different religiosity or spiritualism. RD points out that faith-based people are not playing fair by requiring their leaders to also be ‘faith-based’, which denies science, fact and what might be called truth.
We argued whether RD’s extreme approach is an attempt to ‘correct’ the centre point of the argument. He believes (and supports with reasonable evidence) that he debate is well and truly skewed towards the faith-based end of the spectrum and that reasonable, fact-based points of view are portrayed as fringe by the faith-based.
Our conversation roamed over the people in our lives who are either activity faith-based or are actively non-faith-based. Some of us agreed that both extremes become dogmatic and either inarguable from the outset, or if debate takes place it will reach of a point of impasse. We acknowledged that religion and spirituality is something that is not widely discussed from a personal perspective, possibly (in part) because of this.
Semantics is an important part of this topic. One controversial point is the use of the terms God, god, atheist and agnostic. We looked these terms up in the (highly recommended) New Zealand Oxford Dictionary 2005. This dictionary was specific that ‘God’ is based around monotheist religions and ‘god’ refers to a superhuman being that has power over nature and events. Even so, some people have strong attachment to the term. Others are more comfortable with spirituality. We agreed that it is essential to clearly define words so people can begin to communicate. We also acknowledged that an oratory is more than the sum of the meaning of each word and that the combination of words and context (the space between) is where meaning lies.
We don’t think any of us considers ourselves non-spiritual but several of us say they don’t believe in god or God as defined in the dictionary. However, no one seemed to be comfortable to take on RD’s next step and saying they are atheist, or at least not a militant atheist. Atheism is a very confrontational term and has a sense of anti-social or at least anti-cultural bias to it. One has to wonder if this the flip-side or shadow of the cultural pervasiveness of faith-based God believers?
Someone pointed out how, as humans were developing around 2000 years ago, a number of ‘prophets’ emerged, all saying essentially the same thing: “treat other people like you would like them to treat you.” This was a significant departure from the brutality of the previous tenet that the strong survive and subjugate the weaker. Today’s big religions are built around these prophets. We also noted that religions are a product of their culture and those that promote them. It is possible that they lose their relevance, or become dangerous, if they remain dogmatic and unwilling or unable to change as culture changes.
Tonight's song "Kuna Kunungi" from Hukwe Zawose & Michael Brook is from the CD Assembly
