Oy vey! As an atheist but also a cultural Jew, I have to say that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is an embarrassment. As he was the Commonwealth’s Chief Rabbi for 22 years, a member of the House of Lords, a Ph.D. graduate in philosophy, and now a professor at Yeshiva University and New York University in New York, I would have expected better than his inane pronouncements in an interview in Saturday’s Salon. The title of the piece is below; click on the screenshot to get to the piece:
I am continually disappointed in my expectation that religious Jews will behave better than, say, religious Christians. True, most liberal Jews are a hairsbreadth from atheism (there’s the old joke: “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?”, with the answer being, “A Jew”), but Sacks is an Orthodox rabbi and the orthodox, as we’ll see later today, are the most retrograde and misogynistic branch of Judaism (I suspect Sacks is not nearly as conservative as most Orthodox, though).
At any rate, the first screwup is not Sack’s but Salon’s: the interview is about many things, and Dawkins is mentioned only briefly. Further, Dawkins is not accused specifically of lacking a sense of humor as the title implies. It’s all of us atheists who lack a sense of humor. The headline is clearly meant to draw clicks—or else the headline writer (generally not the piece’s author) is totally clueless.
I’ll try not to bash the good rabbi too hard, but here are a few snippets (indented) from his interview with the writer, Michael Schulson, a freelance writer with a degree in religious studies). Schulson’s questions are in bold, and Sacks’s answers are in plain type.
You write that “the mutual hostility between religion and science is one of the curses of our age.” What’s made this relationship so fraught?
There was a time when the church felt it could censure truths that it felt to be inconsistent with its own deeply held beliefs. Now it’s as if it were almost a mirror image. Science is claiming a monopoly of knowledge, and thus some scientific atheists are intent on depriving religion of any cognitive status. I think this has been a swing of a pendulum, and I think it has more to do with power than with intellectual integrity.
I will indeed claim that science broadly construed (i.e., the use of reason, evidence, observation, hypothesis testing, and replication) has a monopoly on knowledge about the world and Universe. If religion can give us knowledge, then do tell us, Rabbi Sacks, exactly what that knowledge is, and how it’s unique to faith. I will grant that religion appeals to emotionality, and can give some people a sense of community and solace, but knowledge? I still have not heard from anyone, though I’ve asked several times, about what knowledge religion imparts about the world that can’t be derived from empirical observation. (Or, if you consider philosophy to be “knowledge,” what does religion tell us that secular philosophy doesn’t?)
Well, at least Sacks tacitly admits above that “scientific atheism” is gaining power. Good for us.
In a recent interview, Richard Dawkins described you as very nice, but he said that attacking you was “like attacking a wet sponge.” Why does Dawkins have such trouble with your arguments?
Because Richard, who is a brilliant scientist, thinks that morality is a simple matter. Oh, we’ll get a few scientists and we’ll work out what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. And quite frankly, the whole history of humankind has borne testimony to the fact that we may quite reasonably know what is the right thing to do. Actually getting people to do the right thing is the hardest thing on earth. I really admire Richard Dawkins’ work within his field, but when he moves beyond his field, he must understand that we may feel that he’s talking on a subject in which he lacks expertise.
Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts them together to see what they mean. And I think the people who spend their lives taking things apart to see how they work sometimes find it difficult to understand the people who put things together to see what they mean.
See? No mention of Dawkins’s humorlessness. In fact, I find Richard funnier than Rabbi Sacks, who has never made me chuckle even once. Dawkins, like Sam Harris, has a sort of dry humor that comes across in their prose. But that aside, I don’t recall Dawkins every saying that “morality is a simple matter,” nor even that science will settle all moral questions. If a reader can find a quote to this effect, by all means cite it. But I’ve written Richard with the link to this piece, and perhaps he’ll deign to give us his take.
As for the sentence, “the whole history of humankind has borne testimony to the fact that we may quite reasonably know what is the right thing to do,” well that’s just crazy. Is Sacks ignorant of history, or how morality has changed so much over the centuries? Perhaps he could do with a read of Steve Pinker’s last book that shows exactly the huge temporal changes in our feeling of what is moral. For, after all, it wasn’t so long ago that the “right thing to do” was to treat women like chattel, kill gays, torture animals, mete out terrible punishment for crimes, and possess slaves. It was also right (indeed, an obligation) to kill blasphemers and heretics.
And I wonder if Sacks isn’t “talking beyond his expertise” when he pronounces on science. Really, there’s too much credential-mongering going around in both the religious and atheist communities. Can’t we just deal with people’s arguments and not attack their credentials?
Finally, science is essentially reductionist, as Sacks says, but that’s because we need to see how the individual parts work before we put things together. After all, the Big Bang is a Big Thing, but is understood via reductionist physics. The claim that religion “puts things together to see what they mean” can’t possibly apply to the same questions that science engages (the reductionist bits), but must mean “religion gives us the big picture of life, and answers questions about meaning and purpose.” But religion doesn’t do that in any way that’s dispositive. Really, Rabbi Sacks, how do you know that your own way of “putting stuff together” gives the same results as, say, that of a Muslim imam or a Southern Baptist preacher? It doesn’t of course. That’s because different faiths (or even different branches of a single faith, like Sunni and Shia Muslims) come to different conclusions when they “put things together”, showing that religion does not have any valid cognitive status.
Now for Sack’s atheist bashing:
In the past few years, there’s been a tendency to compare the New Atheists to certain fundamentalist religious groups. Is that a worthwhile comparison? Do you think that, when you look at the extremes of religiosity and scientism, you see a kind of kinship?
A fundamentalist is somebody who can’t really understand a point of view opposite to his own. He can’t really hear in stereo, he can’t really see 3-D. Whereas a really great scientist like Niels Bohr will say that the opposite of a superficial truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is very often another profound truth. Niels Bohr really got it. But some of today’s atheists don’t get it. They know that science is a profound truth, but they can’t understand that something opposite can also be a profound truth.
Sorry, Lord Rabbi Sacks, but many of us atheists can and have understood the point of view opposite to our own. For many atheists were formerly religious, often very religious. Look at Dan Barker, Mike Aus, Jerry DeWitt, and John Loftus: all former evangelical Christians, and now all nonbelievers and vociferous critics of religion. They don’t understand the religious mindet? PIFFLE! And of course while I’ve never been deeply religious, I have tried hard to understand where the faithful are coming from. But that doesn’t mean that I will agree with their claims—claims for which I’ll demand evidence. Finally, the stuff about the profound truth of science being met by the profound truth of religion is just word salad. If there are “profound truths” in Judaism, I want to hear them!
Here’s the best trope: the exhuming of poor old Nietzsche as an example of the best atheist ever. Why? Because he took its implications seriously: we’re supposed to be all melancholy and nihilistic when we truly realize that there is no God. The funny bit (unintentionally funny, because Sacks has no discernible sense of humor) is that at the same time he takes atheists to task for not being funny enough. We’re faulted for not being dolorous enough, but also for not being funny enough. What has the rabbi been smoking?
You write that “atheism deserves better than the new atheists.” What kind of thinkers do atheists deserve? Is there a type of atheism that our society needs?
Well, you know, Bertrand Russell was an atheist with a sense of humor. And the new atheists tend either to lack a sense of humor, or the only humor they’re capable of is sarcasm. I mean, somebody with a little intellectual humility does not say, “Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid.” That is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is the attempt to impose a single truth on the plural world.
There’s no question, Nietzsche was the greatest of all atheists. Because it wasn’t just that he didn’t believe in God, he tried to understand what is at stake in the belief or disbelief in God. His fundamental value was the will to power. So I think right now, for instance, if we’re looking at the jihadists in Iraq and Syria, I think that is a desecration of religion, and they are really Nietzscheans. Because religion can mutate into idolatry really quite easily.
Well, Rabbi Sacks isn’t exactly Steve Martin, either. And if you read Bertrand Russell, and believe me, I’ve read plenty of him, he has the dry sense of humor that you can see in Dawkins and Harris. And Russell is full of sarcasm: here’s one quote from The Albatross; it’s the first sentence in Russell’s collection Sceptical Essays (“Why I am not a Christian” is also full of sarcasm.):
I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. (Russell 1928, p. 1)
And to claim that Christopher Hitchens wasn’t funny? That’s insane: the guy could be a laugh riot. But really, Sacks just doesn’t like atheists, and is throwing every bit of mud he can at them, hoping some will stick.
By the way, who has said “Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid”? I think Dawkins said something about those who believe in creationism being ignorant, stupid, or deluded, but that was a one-off statement (and not far from the truth). New Atheists don’t go around saying what Rabbi Sacks claims.
Finally, there’s this:
I want to go a bit deeper into this relationship between religion and power. In your writing, you’ve made it clear that you believe individuals can be good without God. But you argue that societies can’t thrive without religion. So, for you, religion must play some role in politics, right?
Religion creates communities, and communities are essential for the moral life. They’re not essential for individuals, but they’re essential for any group cohesion. . .
My answer is this: Sweden and Denmark, dear Rabbi. Are those countries, which are largely atheistic, immoral and falling apart? I don’t think so.
Oy, my kishkas are in knots!
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Just by reading the tweet I knew it would be in Salon.
And what about the author of “Jesus and Mo” – he’s funny!
Moses doesn’t get much of look in, though.
I made the following list of Bible humor:
Is there anything I left out?
You forgot the one about the gnat and the camel.
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Yes, what about the children taunting the bald man. Ha!
Well, up until the devouring I guess.
That was probably funny if you like seeing obnoxious little a**holes get what’s coming to them. In a sadistic sort of way…
Or maybe not.
Abraham was a laff riot, traipsing round pimping out his wife (psst, King, wanna ‘marry’ my sister?).
And Noah (or was it Lot?) getting pissed and passing out/exposing himself to his sons/sleeping with his daughters.
And the bit where the concubine got carved into little pieces and scattered up and down the road.
Good times.
A commendable demolition of Sacks, as usual Jerry. Though you rather let him off for his suggestion that ISIS are atheists!
Nietschean atheists, so much nicer than the Dawkinsian kind!
Well Sweden’s morality has taken a bit of a dive since the Muslims arrived in numbers and took to raping the native Swedish girls.
So it appears to me that religion can have a deleterious effect on the Swede’s sense of community.
Touche!
This doesn’t happen of course. Immigrants are no more prone to violence than others in their neighborhood.
[Sorry, I don’t find rape a funny subject. :-/]
Torbjörn, I’m presuming you’re Swedish and so you would know better than I. Is what I hear about a “Muslim rape wave” in Sweden true or not? I’m asking this in earnest.
Sweden’s government won’t publish the statistics that might answer your question (i.e., what percentage of the rapes are committed by Muslims?).
I don’t think Jeffrey intended to be funny.
“I think Dawkins said something about those who believe in creationism being ignorant, stupid, or deluded….”
This is the one: “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
Substitute “gravity” and it’s obviously true. See #31.
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Silly Rabbi. This is a common complaint from believers, going hand in hand with “atheists are arrogant.” These claims say a lot about the believers who make them, but in my experience they are inaccurate. Particularly in comparison.
I have to agree with Jerry, this Rabbi is no more impressive than any other religion’s top thinkers. Same old, same old.
And really, the good Rabbi thinks atheists should be acting like ISIS? I have to agree with Jerry again. That is so hyperbolic, so clearly against the evident reality, that it can only be intended as a gratuitous insult. Or possibly delusion, I suppose.
Also, sometimes people are stupid. Are we to really believe that all Creationists are intellectual powerhouses, especially when we see how they behave in the face of evidence? It is possible that some of them are just stupid. That’s why Richard listed it with the other possibilities.
I think that believers like Sacks might have an inferiority complex. Perhaps they sum up atheists as saying “believers are all stupid”, because they themselves suspect that that might be the case.
I remember, I think it was Dan Dennett, who suggested that some believers, overwhelmed with doubt, ossify in their faith because they simply cannot accept that their entire lives have been wasted on a fairy tail.
Yes it’s called the Sunken Cost Fallacy
http://www.skepdic.com/sunkcost.html
Also on sub-conscious level, Cognitive Dissonance…
http://www.skepdic.com/cognitivedissonance.html
Please don’t mention fairy tail just before bed time. It excites the household!
Woops! 😎
I agree, that seems likely to me. That kind of reaction is fairly common among humans generally in contexts other than religion too, in my experience. I don’t say that to excuse the good Rabbi. On the contrary, I mean it as additional criticism, because some one as learned as the Rabbi should be more aware of such typical human behaviors than the average person and be better able to guard against them.
Of course, he may very well be and may have made the claim for another, calculated, reason. Like, to reinforce a certain kind of image of atheists that is held by many theists.
Typical Salon drivel. I don’t think Sacks managed one criticism that wasn’t trite and fatuous. The only criticism he made that I hadn’t actually heard before, which is wrong, is the one about atheists not being funny.I guess nobody told Tim Minchin, David Cross or George Carlin, to name but a few about that huh?
Most of the time when Salon publishes a piece about atheism, it is a waste of pixels.
I’ll pitch in John Cleese, “Life of Brian” is already mentioned in comments below. (Cleese defended the movie against christianist attacks. Not so funny as the movie though.)
Mark Twain.
Stephen Fry
Sarah Silverman.
Betty Bowers.
Ricky Gervais.
Billy Connolly.
i think salon’s editors really think that atheists don’t understand religious people, I believe they are sincere, but that just makes them useful idiots for religious people.
I disagree. I think Salon’s editors have discovered they get more clicks when they write about mean atheists, they’re running with it, and that is the extent of their interest in the matter. They could care less whether atheists do or do not understand religious people.
Correct. Money leads. Editors drink booze and count their money.
It is the very definition of click bait.
Actually, what Dawkins said was that one who rejects the Theory of Evolution was either ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked (but he didn’t want to consider that) This was after suffering through a lecture by David Berlinski, the faux mathematician. He then added that Berlinski was neither ignorant, stupid, or insane, implying wickedness on the latter’s part.
poor kishkas, tch! tch!
Of course one can counter this sort of thing with humor. Perhaps Dawkins can insert more jokes and cartoons into his talks?
This is the “you’re doing it wrong” argument. I grow tired of these statements (some of them from philosophers) that never seem to come with specific examples of what exactly I’m doing wrong and how I go about doing it right.
If his sentence just sounds profound. It could be rewritten: “my facts are the opposite of the truth but also true”. In other words: nonsense.
Or if the opposite of true is true then what is false? That’s how they suck you in. 🙂
“Opposite” – you keep using that word, rabbi. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yeah, that’s the problem with his statement. Religion is not the opposite of science, they are not involved in a zero-sum game where a truth in science’s column necessitates a falsehood in religion’s. It’s just that many of the truths science has established happen to contradict religious doctrines.
Sadly for the rabbi, it is a fundamental principal of logic that “A” and “not A” cannot both be true. That means that a scientific “truth” (if there is such a thing) and the opposite of that truth cannot both be true. But then again, in the immortal words of Dr. House: “If religious people were reasonable, there wouldn’t be any religious people.”
Least funny people: conservative religious types. The more religious, the less a sense of humor! Ipso Facto: Atheists have to have the best sense of humor.
BOOM!
Looking at the last and the first quoted questions: When religion creates communities, they seek uniformity, and become intolerant of dissent or difference. This close-mindedness is not uniquely religious. However, only religion, and philosophies which teach that perfection is possible (which inludes communism and nazism), tell people that the stakes are high enough that they should kill the non-communicant.
Anyone who thinks religious people have a sense of humour should try publishing a cartoon of Mohammed.
Or look back at the Christian response to The Life of Brian
But appreciate the response to the response:
Sorry – I didn’t mean to embed that
Here it is as a tiny url – lets hope it doesn’t do it again
http://tinyurl.com/puzetw6
Brilliant! I had not seen this from Not the Nine O’Clock News. Thank you very much for providing me with new YouTube threads to pursue.
Ditto and ditto. I don’t recall that NtNO’CN was ever repeated on TV (here in Oz), so some is only distantly remembered and much is yet to be seen…
Yes that is a classic clip.
“Even the initials, J.C., are exactly the same.”!
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They know that science is a profound truth, but they can’t understand that something opposite can also be a profound truth.
Most of the time the opposite of a profound truth is bullshit.
THAT is the truth!
More atheist comedians: Billy Connolly, Jon Stewart, Kathy Griffin, Bill Maher, Ben Elton, Ricky Gervais, Seth McFarlane, Tim Minchin, Dermot Morgan (the late, great Father Ted). There are dozens more.
I’m also constantly annoyed by this idea that people can’t comment on stuff outside their area of academic expertise. One of the benefits of a university education is it trains you in rigorous research and analysis methods – those skills are valuable whatever you do. Richard Dawkins’ qualifications as a biologist, for example, do not render him incapable of carrying out competent research in another field. This idea that we need qualifications in a particular field to comment on it to me harks back to the congregation having to listen to the Bible read to them in Latin and not being allowed to read it for themselves in the vernacular, or question the Church’s interpretation without risking being branded a heretic. It smacks of the arrogance and elitism atheists are often accused of.
…Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Doug Stanhope, Joe Rogan, Maria Bamford, Paula Poundstone…
Yes, and besides the point you made, in the case of religion there are additional problems with the “you have to be an expert” claim.
For example, in matters where empirical claims are made, which, despite the protestations of believers (particularly the more liberal and sophisticated ones), is very common for religions / believers, no amount of religious or theological education is applicable in the way Sacks implies.
And one of the primary purpose of most all religions, past and present, is to define reality. And they do it by making lots of empirical claims.
I always like to ask the more liberal believers, on the rare occassion I have religious discussions with them, if you don’t believe the history of the founding and origins of your religion as taught by your religion, what good reason is there to believe any of it?
“In fact, I find Richard funnier than Rabbi Sacks, who has never made me chuckle even once.”
Rabbi Sacks made me chuckle with “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts them together to see what they mean.”, but, of course, he wasn’t intending to be humorous, but serious. I suppose he believes his statement to be true. I don’t understand how the religious think anything positive is produced from their cults of delusion. It seems to me that anything they point to as a true and positive result of following their so called spiritual guidelines can be ascribed to the deeper aspect of being human.
“And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
Sacks as Gandalf to Dawkins’s Saruman!
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Yeah. Everywhere else Tolkien comes over as a deeply confused apologist, but there he trip into irrationality (or “anti-intellectualism” as some calls it).
The rainbow _is_ the Enlightenment to Tolkien’s white Endarkenment.
Herbert’s Fremen amtal rule, to know a thing well it must be tested to destruction.
I hate it when people write things like this. Yes, that sounded lovely but it’s complete BS.
Jerry, your posts on Rabbi Sacks always make me chuckle.
Yeah, the Rabbi is right, no atheist has ever gone into comedy.
Thanks for the link, which has several lists (businessmen, historians etc.) of prominent atheists. One obvious omission is a list of scientists – presumably there wasn’t enough space on the internet for that.
There is a separate List of atheists in science and technology …
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I also love that they have a list of criminals and have managed to come up with two. The list of criminals in the United States who have “found Jesus” would fill volumes according to poll data…
Sacks seems to be confusing fundamentalism wish fanaticism. Is it possible he’s also confusing New Atheists with SJW atheists?
Sacks often turns up on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day slot. I don’t remember him cracking one joke, unlike his gay predecessor Rabbi Lionel Blue who *always* came up with a good Jewish joke.
Maybe his whole schtick is the joke & we just aren’t seeing.
Like a clown or mime artist, who as far as anyone can tell is just creepy and annoying, but deep down – really deep – is profoundly humorous.
Rabbi Sacks wrote: “Science is claiming a monopoly of knowledge, and thus some scientific atheists are intent on depriving religion of any cognitive status.”
On the contrary, this is the tactic of some liberal religious folks and the point of NOMA, etc. I, instead, insist that many key religious claims have cognitive status, just like most believers do. I however also came to the conclusion (via science/philosophy) that most of these claims are false.
Here’s some delicious irony: Sacks is making this comment to an interviewer who has a B.A. in religious studies, and no (other) formal training as a journalist. If you really think formal professional expertise matters that much, why did you let Schulson interview you in the first place?
The good Rabbi:
The good Rabbi’s God:
Sounds pretty fundamentalist to me, Rabbi.
Two words:
Dave. Allen
“Oy, my kishkas are in knots!”
Give’m hell, Jerry! Jonathon Sacks has nothing new here to deliver except insults. I can imagine if Bertrand Russell were still alive, he would pop in at this point (in true Woody Allen fashion) to back you up: “You, sir, know nothing of my work.”
If anyone doubts his humour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2xGIwQfik
Insulted by NdT
Apologies if I broke a house rool, but it nails the ‘unfunny’ tag
hhmph, one more liar for his god. nice to see that false witnessing is okay with the rabbi.
“Fundamentalism is the attempt to impose a single truth on the plural world.”
Then the real world must be (lethally) fundamentalist.
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That is profound: nature is the prime fundamentalist. Go against nature, you go against existence.
Nature imposes the truth on science. Science, is, by definition, submissive. It reports, only, the declaratives of existence.
Religion imposes the truth on nature. Religion, is by definition, arbitrarily authoritative. It promotes, only, caustic and provincial imperatives upon one species among the inhabitants of a small rock orbiting a rather common star.
Which of these two organized efforts will lead to a purposeful existence for humanity?
The good rabbi should read some of Mark Twain’s work to see satire used to expose the absurdity of religion.
Science and society are held together by secular means. What intelligent religious person could read the Rabbi’s words and not feel immediately insecure about the illogical statements he makes and how they are the best that all theological thinkers are putting together to save their sinking ship?
Ha! Sacks is in bed with Nietzsche. Now that’s funny!
I read that differently from Jerry.
To me it doesn’t read as much a claim that religion explain meaning of life as a claim that there is meaning (purpose) in existence beyond simply existing. This is an attempt to sneak an unwarranted creationist claim in by equivocating on the meaning of “meaning”, what things do.
In other words, it reads to me as a typical religious deepity. As The Bard says:
… “a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
[ http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.5.5.html ]
Let’s put the Rabi into Measure for Measure:
Rabbi Sacks: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
ATHEIST: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
Show me the money, Rabbi?
Pedantic point – it’s in the history plays (Henry IV, I think), rather than Measure for Measure; Hotspur talking to the Welsh wizard Owen Glendower.
One of my favourite Shakespeare lines!
Riiiight. A car mechanic simply can’t understand the value of a car as a means of transportation, or social status object, or whatever? Makes. No. Sense.
Some atheist humour:
My dog’s got to nose.
How does he smell?
No problem. He’s a young earth creationist dog. He just has faith. He doesn’t need an actual nose in order to smell.
that’s “My dog’s got no nose”
As he was the Commonwealth’s Chief Rabbi for 22 years, a member of the House of Lords, a Ph.D. graduate in philosophy, and now a professor at Yeshiva University and New York University in New York, I would have expected better than his inane pronouncements in an interview in Saturday’s Salon.
Why would you? The first two “qualifications” aren’t really qualifications, the third one is iffy depending on what philosophy he studied, and the fourth and fifth are unclear as to what he was a “professor” in at either of those universities.
At any rate, the first screwup is not Sack’s but Salon’s: the interview is about many things, and Dawkins is mentioned only briefly.
Figures. Dawkins-bashing apparently sells. I’m not sure even the public take it seriously any more. My expectations aren’t high on that last one, though.
I think it has more to do with power than with intellectual integrity.
Oh yes, because everyone knows the atheists hold the true political and social power. Just look at the demographics and public attitudes towards atheists for the United States.
The rest of Sacks’ comments are the usual half-baked fare of fallacies. So what’s new?
Pertinent logical fallacies (short versions).
Straw Man Argument: Misrepresenting someone’s argument to make it easier to attack.
Ad Hominem: Attacking your opponent’s character or personal traits instead of engaging their argument.
Appeal to Emotion: Manipulating an emotional response in place of a valid or compelling argument.
Sacks manages to create a Straw-Man-Ad-Hominem-Appeal-To-Emotion fallacy by making up a personal trait (of Dawkins) and attacking it in order to make one personally dislike him.
Science is the only path to knowledge because – in its very broadest sense – it is nothing more than What Animals Do. The first animal who tested the water, the food, the branch, the cliff, the air, was doing science.
Even Bugs Bunny, ” Hare We Go ” 1951 cartoon has more clarity about explaining the shape of the Earth than the whole Bible manages. In the first minute the Christopher Columbus character says the Earth is round like an apple or like his head. If Jesus existed then he hadn’t read the works of Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Cicero, Strabo on the topic of spherical Earth. If Jesus had had Wikipedia then he might never have ended up on a cross. He’d have done something more useful like carving globes. Or painting maps on ostrich eggs. ( Job 39v14 mentions O. egg)
With most of the scriptures all that is left is to laugh at it. ” Our ancestors thought like that ?” How could I not have spotted the deliberate mistakes sooner ?
The school teachers skirted round the issues, perhaps out of fear of upsetting parents ?
Love your neighbour = deceive them like crazy ?
Never fear google box to the rescue. Discover WEIT and you are virtually on a home run.
Mark Twain satirized the absurdities of religion? Sorry, he did not. Yes, he attacked the Catholic church and Mary Baker Eddy’s and Joseph Smith’s creations, but he was a very orthodox American protestant. I just learned this recently, when I spent 99 cents for the complete works for my kindle. Read Innocents Abroad, which was his most popular book, by far, during his life-time. He was part of a tour of the Med and the “Holy Land”. While he joked about all the multiple relics of the “true cross” and others, and ridiculed the rivalries of the various custodians of the “holy” places, he takes all the OT and NT bible stories at face value, from the flood, the military exploits of Joshua and others, to all the events of Jesus’ “ministry”.
Just as shocking to me was his rabid prejudice against brown skinned people, including southern Europeans. The Portuguese (Azores, Madeira) were filthy lying thieves who stabled their animals in their parlors. Italian and French hoteliers could not understand their desire for a bar of soap; southern Europeans clearly did not bathe.
Another of my heroes tarnished.
Oh, I think he did. Maybe in his thirties he was less a freethinker, but he certainly seems to have become at least deistic later in life. And then there’s /The Mysterious Stranger/, published after his death.
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“Innocents Abroad” was written when he was young. Read “Letters from the Earth,” which he wrote when he was older.
I certainly wouldn’t hold it against the man for coming to his senses as he aged. This site is full of such readers.
Hi Jerry,
I think at this point, you should do with S*lon like you do with Twi**er and asterisk-out part of their name. Their shameful crap has earned it by this point, surely.
I feel Jerry doesn’t give Rabbi Sacks enough credit. For an Orthodox rabbi, he is remarkably open-minded. Here he is on disagreeing with his teacher, Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was basically a Young Earth creationist:
“I didn’t agree with the Rebbe on the dating of the universe, but I didn’t do that lightly,” Sacks told me. “I did it because I knew perfectly well that the three greatest early Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages—Saadya Gaon, Yehuda Halevi, and the Rambam [Maimonides]—all three took the view that when the plain sense of scripture is contradicted by established scientific fact, then you don’t read a text ki-pshuto [in its plain sense].”
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/151762/jonathan-sacks-goes-global?all=1
Sorry, but I’m not going to give Sacks high praise for accepting what everyone knew was true decades ago. I never said he was a creationist; I said he was clueless, and he is.
Maybe religion is all just one giant exercise in justifying their clergyness. Maybe that ‘splains religion lol.
There is also an error of fact here. Atheism is older than Islam and Christianity (and almost as old as Hinduism and Judaism), and hence has been the focus of several strong philosophical traditions before Nietzsche: the Charvakas and the Epicureans, perhaps even the Confucians, the Buddhists and the orthodox Jains, and a few sects of Hinduism.
The error of fact is that contrary to what Sacks seems to believe, almost all of these traditions tackled the problem of “what is at stake”, and came to conclusions with a remarkably similar underlying theme very different from what Sacks makes out Nietzsche’s “fundamental value” to be. The theme was that it is a bad idea to cause harm to others.
What “others” meant of course varied: it might have meant friends and neighbors to Charvakas, while it encompassed the class of all living things, including plants, for the Jains. But certainly all of them, without exception, would have strongly disapproved the shenanigans of ISIS.
“But certainly all of them, without exception, would have strongly disapproved the shenanigans of ISIS.”
Indeed. Pretty sure they would have strongly disapproved of the shenanigans of Yahweh and Mohamed.
“some scientific atheists are intent on depriving religion of any cognitive status”
OK. Religion has the same “cognitive status” as Roman mythology, Greek mythology or Norse mythology. Are you happy now Rabbi?
It is very fitting that Sacks quotes Niels Bohr as a great thinker. Bohr may have been a good physicist, but his philosohy was obscurantist. Read this article to learn more.
“My answer is this: Sweden and Denmark, dear Rabbi. Are those countries, which are largely atheistic, immoral and falling apart? I don’t think so.”
I think Norway deserves to be on that list.
Pretty please? :3
Salon is a truly depressing read if you’re an atheist.
I think the first time I read an article of theirs the ‘if you liked this article…’ list at the bottom corner was almost entirely composed of links to essays with titles like ‘why the New Atheists get it pathetically, worthlessly wrong’, ‘why Christopher Hitchens is damaging the human race’ and ‘Richard fucking Dawkins – ugh’.
To actually read this stuff and respond to it on a regular basis requires a stronger stomach than mine. I want to read the opinions of people who disagree with me of course but it’s all so thuddingly predictable and consistently biased. Really, I might as well be reading something like Spiked.com(?).
Sub
You know who doesn’t have a sense of humor? God.
Nor Jesus.
Nor the religious right.
Nor all of Islam. This is testable: create some cartoons about Islam.