Here’s our favorite avuncular atheist, Dan Dennett, engaging in a five-minute debate at the Guardian site with our most despiséd faitheist, Andrew Brown. The topic is “Do the New Atheists have any new ideas?”
It’s short and sweet, and Dennett admirably keeps his cool. (Notice, though, the piercing gaze that lasers out of Dan’s Santa-like visage when Brown says something stupid.)
Among Brown’s amusing claims are that there’s nothing new in New Atheism (Dennett’s response is that “What we [the New Atheists] gave [the American public] was permission to declare their lack of interest in religion”); that New Atheism is a “quasi-religion” that engages in “heresy hunts” (Dennett really takes Brown down on this one); and the assertion that if moderate religionists provide cover for more extreme ones, as some New Atheists claim, so the”good atheists” provide cover for the “bad atheists” (e.g., Communists).
Oh, and the readers’ comments are heartening.
I saw that clip a week ago or so, without realizing that it was Andrew Brown playing the role of yo-yo. Now I know and it all makes sense.
I would be happy to see an hours worth of Dennett embarrassing Brown in this way. 5 minutes is just not enough.
My feelings exactly, where is the rest of it? Surely they didn’t just sit down for this little snippet?
haha. “surely! ding!”
perfect.
I find the communism argument as an example of atheists doing evil so ridiculous. Maybe I learned about the wars of ideology and the rise of the modern state wrong but I don’t remember learning that anyone was killing in the name of atheism. I do remember learning about totalitarian states committing genocide.
It’s even sillier than that.
Oh, but if only Stalin had abandoned his wicked atheism and become a true-believing theists and welcomed the warm, loving embrace of Quetzalcoatl; Russia would have then been spared the horrors of the Purges and instead would have been blessed with a revival of colorful Aztec rituals such as mass human sacrifices.
Wait — what?
The “so-and-so was evil because he was an atheist” rant is very thinly veiled code for, “so-and-so didn’t worship my gods.” At best, it shows that the complainant hasn’t a clue as to what atheism really is.
That, and it ignores the fact that Stalin was himself a seminarian and that he was indistinguishable from any of the emperor gods of tyrannies past.
b&
…and all the while everyone forgets Gott mit uns which had a history all the way back to the Prussian Empire (further if you want to stretch it a bit).
Hell, if Stalin had embraced the Russian Orthodox Church (which he did, when convenient for him), it would hardly have stopped him from killing people. It certainly didn’t stop the czars from gunning down starving people gathered in front of the palace asking for help.
Andrew Brown is the most lugubrious, round-faced nar-nar. And it pains me to say that since my brother shares the same name.
I can’t remember when I’ve seen a description more apt. Or hilarious.
Very reminiscent of an anglican bishop. That lazy, phony-accented way of talking which is the very hallmark of pompous snobbery and unconscious privilege. Andrew Brown is no atheist.
This discussion looks a lot better on Brown’s CV than on Dan Dennett’s.
Andrew Brown’s demeanour reminds me of that of an aristocrat conversing with a labourer on his estate. The aristocrat is determined to be pleasant but his facial expression shows his distaste for the labourer’s offensive odour.
Of course the New Atheists are still saying the same things that atheists have been saying for millennia.
Centuries before the invention of Christianity, Epicurus had already conclusively demonstrated the folly of the central thesis of all religions, that there are one or more powerful beings with our best interests at heart looking out for us. The theistic response has been to declare that their gods aren’t so powerful or inclined after all, but to make those declarations in an obfuscatory way. The gods could help us, but that would deprive us of the joy of helping ourselves. And then, as soon as the nasty atheists leave them alone, it’s right back to the neverending ineffable ultimate loving power of their gods.
When theists concede and ignore arguments at best, and often simply outright lie and ignore logic, there’s neither need nor point to come up with brilliant new counterarguments. The conflict isn’t over the merits of the matter; it’s over whether merits even matter at all.
And, so long as people gravitate to the gratuitous pablum that wishes matter more than reality, that faith trumps reason, that it’s better to live a pleasing fantasy than a real life, we’ll keep hearing the tired old long-since debunked “arguments” from the faithful fools, and they’ll continue to ignore the bleedin’ obvious rebuttals we effortlessly reply with.
What’s new about the New Atheists is their popularity. The press likes us. We’re the current fad.
Maybe we can continue to play off that in such a way as to suppress irrationality in a significant way. One can hope…but, perhaps, not much more. I certainly don’t have any faith in the matter.
Cheers,
b&
A few to several years back, when “New Atheism” was still a freshly coined term (epithet?) I remember a lot of prominent atheists really flogging your main point: atheism ain’t new. Not nohow.
I liked this response because it seemed, and continues to seem, to me that the term was intended to reduce atheism to a fad. An immature, rebellious phase. Once Dawkins grows up he’ll see the light. “Gnu” was meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the term.
But many (most?) atheists now, from anonymous commenters to the highest-profile, seem to have embraced it. There may be an actual phenomenon you can point to, but it’s nothing to do with atheism qua atheism. As you write it’s simply that a spate of uncompromising books were written and the media has picked up on the controversy.
For a second, there, I read “Dan Brown and Andrew Brown Have a Quick Chat”. That would have been awful.
Ben,
I think, considering the pervasiveness of religion that it’s a man bites dog kind of thing.
Also the dialog is entertaining. Would anyone have even heard of Andrew Brown if he didn’t have someone to laugh at him?
I was just bemoaning that aspect of the press yesterday morning over a cup of tea with a friend whose on a rather different spot on the political spectrum.
The press loves to “teach the controversy” and be “fair and balanced.” Not just Faux News, but all of them.
Even when the weight of opinion on an established subject is in the 90/10 range, they’ll still have one talking head from the 90% side and one talking head from the 10% side and give them both equal time, thereby creating the illusion that the nutjob fringe element is on equal footing.
Worse, they really don’t care who they pick from the lunatic fringe, just so long as they can find somebody entertaining to make the manufactured controversy somehow interesting.
Now, it’s certainly an important function of the press to report on minority and even fringe perspectives. But it is not the job of the press to artificially inflate the stature of the minority by over-representing them.
Take climate change, for example. At least 90% of reporting on climate change should just be about climate change. Every once in a while they can do a quick survey of contrarians, but that’s not what happens; ever story includes significant time and space devoted to denialist cranks.
Let the cranks buy their own printing presses. Why do “respectable” journalists have to promote crankism just to make a story more “interesting”? Why can’t they just do their jobs and present reality in an engaging manner?
b&
Sheesh…I can’t poorfeed worth a damn, can I?
I swear, I know the difference between “who’s” and “whose.” I just re-worked the sentence from something like “whose position on the political spectrum” to “who’s on a rather different position” and didn’t backspace far enough….
b&
Ha ha, I wrote “bye” instead of “buy” the other day. I’m having homophone issues lately.
Diane, don’t say your homophonic! (Yes, the “your” is intentional.)
Clever. Was the “Diane” intentional? 😉
Nope. In tne words of a Texas governor, “oops.”
There has been some outcry in the UK about this.
The ever-wonderful Steve Jones produced a report for the BBC Trust on exactly this matter:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/science_impartiality/science_impartiality.pdf
Yeah, but that’s the Beeb. Not a single major American journalistic institution is in that league.
b&
Two reasons:
(a) they are paid not to
(b) they don’t know any better
As Keith alludes to, they don’t want to alienate their audience. The fraction of people like us who would be alienated by their current style of reporting is negligible.
Also, I think rather a lot of people give far to much credence to the Argument to Moderation. I think they think it’s kind of an intellectual shibboleth.
So do I, albeit a negative one.
” . . . they don’t want to alienate their audience.”
Yes, and not because they hate to be unpopular; because they hate to be hungry. You can’t make a living being unpopularly right.
“…Would anyone have even heard of Andrew Brown…”
Oddly, Andrew Brown gets praise in The God Delusion from Dawkins, who describes him as “an alert journalist” (for recording Stephen Layfield’s 2001 lecture on ‘The Teaching of Science: A Biblical Perspective’ and a subsequent response).
It appears, however, that Brown doesn’t take this kind of praise very well. He’s subsequently made it his business to shoehorn into every single nonsensical, waffling, fluffed-up piece of obfuscation that he’s written some pointless Dawkins-trolling. Indeed, his ‘journalism’ is often nothing more than a series of clumsy attacks on Dawkins. To steal Denis Healey’s famous phrase: it must be like being savaged by a dead sheep…
Even if all atheists were bad and all theists were saints (why is ‘saint’ a synonym for ‘good’ after all? They did only a few miracles and miracles don’t exist.) there would be no shred of evidence for an almighty, all-knowing, all-good god. Discussion closed.
Excellent! Discussion closed? We all wish.
I was startled at how much Andrew Brown looked and acted EXACTLY how I thought he would given what he writes.
It’s like the word supercilious could have been invented for him.
Indeed, I thought maybe a harpy would swoop down any minute to punish him for his hybris!
My thoughts exactly.
Bang on.
Brown is an exceedingly difficult man to watch and not grind your teeth.
Vaal
It’s the voice that does it for me: that horrible, complacent, upper-class wailing…
My favourite bit was where Andrew Brown described himself as an “atheist butt”.
Couldn’t have said it better myself…
Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones have nothing on Dennett. If he weren’t so good at his day job, he’d be great doing readings for audio books.
I dunno. I’ve always been glad that Mr. Jones never ran for political office for the simple reason that I don’t think I or many others would be able to do other than as that voice commands.
That was powerfully reinforced when I head him narrate Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. Get him a good speechwriter (I’m assuming that, like most actors, he’s not a great writer himself) and he’d be known as one of the greatest orators in all of human history.
b&
Love his voice. His acting isn’t bad either. The opening scene in the movie Conan the Barbarian where JEJ confronts the boy Conan and his mother is in my opinion one of the best introductions to an evil character in fantasy films. Of course there are always many more people and factors involved other than the actors. A so so movie overall, at best, but I think that scene was very well done.
I dislike ad hominem as much as the next person, but isn’t Brown a supercilious, oleaginous, and sanctimonious little creep?
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Yes. Yes he is.
Come on, Ant! He isn’t little!
Intellectually.
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Yes. I know this is esoteric but I see him as erinyes bait.
Well, he infuriates me!
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Well, he infuriates me!
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😀
* apologies for repeating myself
No apologies needed. Everyone repeats themselves. But it is only you who repeats yourself.
You had my right up to “creep’. I was initially favoring “prat” over the more general “twit”. But just then, “berk”, “git”, “nit” and “simp” kept percolating up within the inner discourse, to the point where it all became hopelessly muddled.
I resolved the muddle just now, by combining my first favorite, “prat”, with “git” and “berk”. The result, “prick”, seems satisfying enough.
My first thought was different…
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How about “f*ckwit”…?
I noticed the subtle dodge when Dennett spanked him with the “I’m an atheist – but” fact.
He had clearly lost the plot when he’s pulling “the good religious condemn the bad religious” out his back side – a statement so stupid, so spectacularly and self evidently erroneous. And you know the noose is tight when he resorts to “atheist communists and fascists”. Have the “new atheists” any new ideas – Andrew – perhaps you should actually read the atheist literature before making numpty arguments like this taken straight out of the fundamentalist Christian guide book, especially seeing as the “atheist communist and fascist” “thing” still isn’t clear to you. Perhaps the follow up could be “Have the religious had any independent new ideas in the last 500 years that actually contribute to society?” Could be tough considering that in a 5 minute conversation communists STILL came up!
Andrew, just, stop. You look so so silly and foolish. It’s almost embarrassing.
Not to mention all the atheist fascists in history, if there were any, kept their atheism to themselves. They found religion useful.
Something of a bugbear, but fascism and tyranny aren’t synonymous.
Fascism is actually an economic system, like capitalism and communism and socialism. And modern American corporatism is actually a damned close match for idealized fascism.
Just as you can have a democracy or a republic or a monarchy or whatever managing a capitalistic or socialistic or communistic economy, you can have fascism in any political system you might wish to pair with it.
That the early states that embraced fascism were also totalitarian and tyrannical and that current American corporatism is fast headed in that same direction may indicate that fascist economies tend towards police states, but there’s at least nothing in theory that says that must be so.
Of particular note is that neither Stalin nor Mao nor Pol Pot, the three most-often cited atheist tyrants, were fascists.
Cheers,
b&
If Andrew Brown wants to take a “live and let live” attitude toward religion, why can’t he take the same attitude to toward the gnus?
Because Andrew Brown lives in a very strange world in which ‘new atheists’ are just as dangerous and reactionary as jihadist Muslims; Christian clinic-bombers and gay-killers; and women-hating, land-grabbing ultra-orthodox Jews.
He seems to have convinced himself that Richard Dawkins (his particular pariah) – for the crime of speaking plainly about the truth claims and actions of world religions – is the equivalent of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Moreover, he sees no problem at all in defending the worst excesses of religious behaviour whilst decrying any atheist that dares to open their mouth as the worst of all humans.
I suggest – if you really want to feel sick – reading Brown’s article on why the worldwide, systematic rape of children by Catholic priests was really nothing more than a storm in a teacup. Brown got completely – and appropriately – crucified in the comments over that one…
Should that last bit be reversed: good atheists provide cover for bad atheists?
(And what’s his conclusion there? To keep the analogy going you’d have to conclude that we should be rid of atheism entirely. Which is stupid. How do you get rid of a non-state?)
Well, getting rid of atheism is exactly what evangelical Christians want: to convert the entire world to Christianity.
And I fail to see how good atheists give cover to bad atheists. How many people have read Dawkins, rejected religion, and gone on to embrace…what? Stalinism? Hell, for that matter, who are today’s bad atheists? Do note that the “nones” outnumber Jews, so it’s not like there’re too few of us to register on the radar.
Contrast that with, for example, all the Christians who’ve converted to Islam and subsequently become radicalized militants, and couple it with the extreme resistance on the part of “moderate” Muslim authority figures to publicly reject death for apostasy even when pressed on the matter.
b&
Indeed. Who are these bad atheists? And how does he define a “bad atheist”? An atheist who also does something bad? That’s a classic category error.
Are there atheists who are also jackasses in one way or another? Sure. But not because of atheism. Much of the jackassery of theists is necessarily because of their religious beliefs.
Indeed.
One could make the argument that the last Pope suffered an human failing when he shielded pedophile priests from prosecution.
But the African Genocide that the Church continues to perpetuate in the form of their religiously-perverted positions on human reproduction? That’s not one or two bad apples acting in defiance of the institution’s better nature. That’s pure evil on a massive scale, and it’s the Church who lit the fire and continues to pour gasoline on the flames.
I’m not aware of any influential atheists campaigning against human rights and dignity, yet that seems to be the most important passion of huge swaths of the clergy of all religions.
b&
It’s hard to imagine a more sneering, condescending guy. The whole tone of his questions and remarks is “Dan, you can’t seriously believe [insert obviously foolish idea here]”.
Which is ironic given that Dan is a non-believer. One would think that the beliefs of the faithful are the more sneer-worthy but Andrew Brown keeps his mouth shut about that. Not that I think that’s egregious of him to do that. After all as Mencken said, “we must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
I find it fascinating that an analysis of society that atheists have done will always be mirrored a few years later by the target of the analysis. It means that a) the analysis is robust and b) the target implicitly accepts the analysis. (I note that Supercilious Andrew Brown, as I henceforth will call him, couldn’t come up with a valid evidence for rejection.)
As for intended evidence:
– Communism.
I know from history that communists were far from having an “atheist” policy. They instated religious freedom, and they variously relied on churches for capital and fought them for power. (With one exception, Albania under the dictator Hoxha was declared and enforced atheist.)
– Mexican revolution.
Brown seems to refer to actions under the Cristero War, “a mass popular uprising and attempted counter-revolution”. I didn’t know about this history. The rebellion origin is claimed to lie in that the new secular Mexican Constitution contained articles that made education, well, secular, and circumscribed the church assets and actions to what was needed for religious services only.
Re: good atheists providing cover for bad atheists, this argument doesn’t even make sense one 3 counts:
1. Who are the bad atheists? usually long dead supposed atheists are being cited.
2. Are the “bad atheists” bad because of their atheism? The parallel with bad religionists doesn’t hold because in the case of religionists, they are indeed bad because of religion while atheism is merely incidental to the badness of the “bad atheist” (like Hitler’s being mustachioed is incidental).
3. Most importantly, for “good atheists” to provide cover for the bad atheists, first the stereotype of “good atheist” has to exist in popular culture. When people automatically assume being godless means one is moral and fit for public office, that’s the time when the charge of good atheists providing cover for bad atheists can be thrown.
I like the coinage, “Atheist But”
There are a lot of Atheists But out there.
I always love watching Dan talk, but I was just a tad disappointed in how he responded to the “how could anyone have believed the meme that the moderate religious were more dangerous than the extremists because they made them more respectable?”
First, that’s Brown’s own spin. I think it should have been corrected: it hasn’t been argued (e.g. by Sam Harris’ End Of Faith) that moderates were “more dangerous,” but rather that the moderates continuing to accord merit both to religious faith, and to the Biblical God, perpetuate a dubious state of affairs that enables the extremists.
It perpetuates a system of thinking, a system of merit, that disarms it’s users from critical inquiry, and hence leaves both the liberal Christian, and the atheist, without the tools to point out “you are wrong.” (The Liberal is left only special pleading for his own brand of supernatural beliefs against the fundamentalist, and all others attempts to correct the fundamentalist are weakened by the fact the fundamentalist can point to the Liberal’s faith and say “see…I’m only doing what he’s doing, believing on faith and believing the book represents the truth about a God. If it’s ok for him it’s ok for me! And fundies LOVE to point out the hypocrisy and special pleading in their liberal counterparts).
That is the point I wish Dan had gone with. rather than with saying that good church people doing good work provide cover for bad church people doing bad work. I think that did sort of open him up to the retort Brown gave “Well, the same can be said of atheists” which led Dan down the path of “who are the bad atheists?” and then to a watered down response that the good church goers don’t decry the bad churches very vociferously. That doesn’t seem to be the strong leg to stand on. There is plenty of internal decrying of sects within Christianity, all sorts of “you aren’t a REAL Christian” stuff. I think the more important point isn’t how many churches decry other churches, but the fact that their method of believing is essentially the same and allows for all manner of contradictory conclusions, hence the “good” churches haven’t a sound leg to stand on when arguing against the “bad” churches. Each has granted the Bible undue supernatural merit, and each has allowed for the move-to-faith or subjective experience to ratify their beliefs.
Ah well. That’s just Sunday quarterbacking from a guy (me) on the couch.
Dan is great though.
Vaal
Monday morning quarterbacking?
Yes, I enjoy much of Dan’s work quite a lot.
er…right. That’s what I meant. Shows you how much football I watch.
Vaal
‘Football’ indeed. This diagram explains all:
http://i.eatliver.com/2009/3849.jpg
It was like watchiing two toothless dogs fighting over a bone.
The problem isn’t that the decent theists give cover to to groups like the Westboro Baptists it’s that both claim justification from the same source.
Very weak.
It is because the both claim justification from the same (unreasonable/unreliable/imaginary) source that decent theism gives cover to the not-so-decent versions. Once you allow “making it up”, there is no basis for denying the validity of the versions you don’t like.