Bill's Comments

....there was Homer W. Smith, fifty years before, in fact. In 1952 Homer W. Smith published his book, "Man and His Gods." The book is out of print, and is not available from the used-book dealers that Barnes and Noble associate with. Smith was a renal physiologist and was sufficiently notable that he was able to ask Albert Einstein to write a forward to the book.

The essence of the book is that all religion is oppressive and that pure intellect is the saving of humankind. He also tries to make the case that religions are simply warmed-over and co-opted versions of other religions, especially Christianity, towards which he has a particular animosity. He considers Christianity to be co-opted Mithraism. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he cherry-picks the worst cases, in fact he goes in for sensationalism to such a degree that one could characterize the book as, Western religious history as told by The National Inquirer.

Unlike Dawkins and Hitchens, however, or any of the other Evangelical Atheists, he has actually read widely and deeply, including the historical Christian literature. He read with a jaundiced eye, but nonetheless, he covered a lot of detail and presented a highly detailed history from ancient Egypt to the turn of the twentieth century. He writes well, but I often became fatigued by the constant drumming of a point of view that considered all religious leaders to be con artists and in it for power and money, essentially hypocrites. He never fails to provide exquisite detail of the failings of religions, but never once presents any good. His discussion of the use of torture in the Middle Ages is the exemplar, with many pages listing of all the possible tortures that could be applied and the rules by which they were to be used. I also think his numbers of victims are exaggerated.

There are no credits given for the sources of his material until the final semi-autobiographical afterword called "About This Book." There he lists many of the authors and books he read over the years. Notable was that most of them were nineteenth and only early twentieth century. The latest I saw was 1932. This means that his interpretations were definitely out of date compared even to his years of publication. From the 1950's on, there has been a great revisiting of the relationship of religion to society over time. One of the casualties was an author that Smith seems to give much credit to and who appeared to have a great influence on Smith's thinking of the relation of religion to science--Draper. Draper's conflict scenario of science suppressed by religion has been very thoroughly discredited in recent times.

Homer Smith would not be considered as one of the "New Atheists," despite his obvious hostility to Christianity. He is too well-read, and not sufficiently rabid in his rhetoric. He does have the same filters operating on what he takes in and writes about. He, like almost all the intellectual atheists, places science and reason on a pedestal, failing to consider that the intellectual effort they exert to arive at their life positions via reason are beyond most people, nor do most people have the time or inclination to spend their energy on such efforts. They are ideologues for reason, failing to see that life is much messier than they know.

Wretchard (Richard Fernandez) in a post entitled " Only the Good Die Young " embedded a clip of the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. Of all the men in recent history, he can arguably be considered responsible for saving the world through his leadership in WW II. (He died old, almost 90)

It strikes me that we won't see a Churchill or much of any other heroic type of leader anymore. We would have condemned him long before he became Prime Minister for his personality, his abrasiveness, his smoking, his appearance. We are obsessed with appearances now--and look what we elected as a leader--an incompetent classic narcissist. Anyone that shows competency is hounded by the press and pilloried in any way possible, even to the creation of lies. The Republicans have a whole group of competent people vying for the candidacy for President, but all of them except Romney, a pretty-boy, Obama-lite politician, are constantly subjected to insult, dismissal, and contempt.

We have no idea anymore of what a hero is, what he/she looks like, or what she/he acts like. We want perfection or nothing, being unable to prioritize our needs and desires in a leader, and as a consequence being unable to compromise effectively.

It is no wonder the barbarians are at the gates.

The allusion in the title is to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to which the four most widely known atheists, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett have been compared, callling them the Four Horsemen of Atheism. I have discussed Dawkins and Hitchens here, and Harris, briefly, here. This post concerns Daniel Dennett.

Dennett's book, Breaking the Spell[1], is what places him with the other three atheists, but I don't think it is a fair characterization of his writing. Actually the whole allusion to the four horsemen is unfair to both Harris and Dennett, much like lumping Fundamentalism, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism together and calling them Christian. In many ways the differences are just as great among the atheists as among the three types of Christianity.

Dennett is an atheist, but he doesn't rub one's nose in it like Dawkins or Hitchens, nor does he outright condemn belief in God as do the other three, nor does he attempt to destroy religious belief. As a philosopher, he is stepping back a bit and in effect saying, "Religion is a big deal in the lives of many if not most people, we should understand why." He is proposing that religion should be studied like any other natural phenomenon, such as reproduction or social structures, with a view to understanding both what is beneficial and what is detrimental to people. He is also aware that in the studying of it, it is possible that it might be broken, that a part of its efficacy is its mystery.

The concern over understanding how religion really works, is "the spell" that he is proposing to break. He spends the first chapter pointing out that from a biological perspective, religion does not make sense. He also points out that religions enjoy "traditional exemption from certain sorts of analysis and criticism." [ital in original] This exemption is the spell. The spell is also the feelings that religion inspires in some people. The danger in studying religion is that this spell will be broken. He spends most of the book making the case that the study is worth the risk. But then he is not a believer.

I am not a fan of Dennett, but neither am I a foe. I have disagreements in one of his areas of expertise, the mind, but I found much to respect in this book. If one gets around or ignores the rank egotism of his wanting to refer to the intellectual atheists as "brights" the book is generally respectful of religion and religious people. He tends to elevate evolution to the same quasi-religious plane that Dawkins does, but is less offensive about it and provides quite a bit more information along the way.

He also brings in some very different illustrations from nature than the usual ones. Being a philosopher of the mind, he is fascinated by natural events that reprogram the minds of animals. In Elbow Room, he discusses a wasp call sphix, that has a very complex behavior that it turns out is not at all thinking though it appears that way. In this book he describes an ant that is infected with a fluke that changes the ant's behavior so that the fluke will be eaten by a cow or sheep. Dennett draws upon a much broader base of knowledge than any of the other authors I have read among the atheists. It shows in that his arguments are much stronger, and at the same time more temperate, with little dependence on rhetoric.

This book has caused me to reassess my opinions of Dennett. It now behooves me to acquire his entire output and carefully read it. I don't expect to come to agreement with him, but he is important for me to understand and be able to discuss, since we have at least two common areas of interest, religion and the mind.

[1]Dennett, Daniel C., Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Viking Penguin, New York, (2006)

Being slow to catch up, I just came across this excellent piece by Paul Greenberg in Townhall. He not only accurately places Steve Jobs at the head of the pack, but also properly identifies the reasons he got there.

Read it.

This is the title of a recent book[1] by Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It is an thorough presentation of the problem of suffering in the world as discussed in the Bible. It is also a personal statement by Dr. Ehrman on why he is an agnostic. He became an agnostic in response to the argument from evil against the existence of God.

This book is a very readable and excellent guide to what the Bible says about suffering, and points out that the answers are contradictory. Along the way, Dr. Ehrman points out the illogic of people who thank God for saving them when they are among the few saved in a disaster, when many others died at the same time. The obvious question is, "Why didn't He save them also?" or "Why did He allow the disaster in the first place?"

I have discussed the problems of good and evil and theodicy in other posts, so won't repeat the discussion. My answer, rather than agnosticism or atheism, was to decide that God was not omnipotent. [My thirty years of agnosticism were due to logical, philosophical issues not the problem of evil.]

Dr. Ehrman's presentation of the problem of evil is excellent. I think his attempted resolution is a bit weak, but then many would say my resolution leads to a God that is not worth worshipping. (Actually, I can't say as I worship God so much as revere, respect, and listen to Him.)

For anyone concerned with the theodicy, this is an important book. It presents all the sides of the issue, and all of the answers that have been offered. I strongly recommend it.

[1] Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer, HarperCollins, New York, 2008

This is the title of Fredrick Forsyth's latest book, published last year. This time instead of international politics, warfare, or terrorism, he tackles the drug trade, specifically the cocaine trade. As always, he uses a story to tell us some unpleasant truths about the real world. What makes him a master at this is that the story is always primary and the message almost incidental. In telling about the world as it really is, or as he perceives it for you post-modernists out there, he illustrates some important truths that would be ignored otherwise.

Forsyth uses the President of the US as the means to start and end his story. The beginning sketch certainly resembles the current occupant of the White House, but I seriously doubt he has the fortitude to make the decisions that lead to the action in the book. His Chief of Staff has a certain similarity to Emmanual Rohm, in his personality.

The plot is one of the President providing the means, legal and financial, via declaring drug trafficking to be a form of terrorism and burying the funding in other budgets, to allow a no-holds-barred approach to stopping the cocaine trade. Entire our central character, The Cobra. The Cobra creates and executes a plan that brings the drug cartel and its clients into a destructive war with each other.

This is all under the covers until the war breaks out. It is here that Forsyth provides the unpleasant truths about our society and our politicians--when we see the actual carnage, we will do anything to make it go away, including letting the drug traffic continue.

In the Penquin Signet Edition (paperback) pp 375-379 have the punch line. Here is the one-line summary from p 378:

"Our great nation can kill up to a million abroad, but not one percent of that figure of its own gangsters without sustaining a fainting fit."

Unfortunately, from my perspective it is all too true. We get what we ask for.