Who Is IOZ?: Ender's Game

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Ender's Game

The Tea Party is racist. Occupy Wall Street is antisemitic. Religion is apology for genocide.

Richard Dawkins is such a twit. Accusations of genocide apologism are the that's gay of adult politics. Here you have some nonentity trying to raise his own lantern a little by harrassing a famous atheist into debating him, and the famous atheist accuses him of supporting genocide . . . because of his theological interpretation of a fictional, ahistoric event mentioned in passing in a book of myths and legends. I mean, does my affection for the Iliad make me an apologist for genocide? Is there anything lazier than digging through the toybox of religious literature to find the textual inconsistencies and then using them, of all things, as a trump in the eternal debate over the gods of the sky? The Midrash got there over a thousand years ago, guys. Jesus Christ, ahem, you can't simultaneously say that the Bible is fake and then castigate a believer for his expalanation of events that didn't actually happen.

34 comments:

Leonard Hatred said...: Preach it!; 9:51 AM
Anonymous said...: the reason i never debate dawkins is because he's an apologist for extinctions; 9:58 AM
IOZ said...: SO, APPARENTLY, IT WAS THE PRECAMBRIAN ERA'S FLORA'S AND FAUNA'S OWN FAULT FOR NOT ADAPTING. RIGHT.; 10:09 AM
EVOLUTION said...: they were not "fit" enough to survive, so we killed 'em; 10:33 AM
Leonard said...: I don't find Dawkins' criticism of Craig unfair. Craig is apologizing for genocide, and deserves to be mocked for being unwilling to admit it. (At least by Dawkins' telling -- I did not bother to check the original.)

I agree with IOZ's final sentence. What I find offputting is Dawkins' lack of interpretive charity; his unwillingness to see it from Craig's POV. If you believe in the Bible, then, yeah, you believe that there is a living God who was highly interventionist in the B.C., and also that He is, morally speaking, beyond our judgment. He can command things that to us would be immoral. So genocide by divine command is OK. As Craig argues: if God is really concerned about the fairness of it, he can always rapture up to eternal reward those he commands to be killed, tortured, raped, etc.

Dawkins' complain here echos that of Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife, in Catch 22, in the pivotal hospital flashback scene where Yossarian has criticized God in the harshest terms:

'What the hell are you so upset about?' he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. 'I thought you didn't believe in God.'

'I don't,' she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. 'But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.'

Yossarian laughed and turned her arm loose. 'Let's have a little more religious freedom between us,' he proposed obligingly. 'You don't believe in the God you want to, and I won't believe in the God I want to. Is that a deal?'

That's Dawkins: the God he doesn't believe in is not the God of the Bible. Yeah. Right.

Moldbug wrote a series on how Dawkins Got Pwned.; 10:42 AM
Anonymous said...: This is typical Dawkins. Reminds me of when he said that a woman being upset about being propositioned by a stranger in an elevator late at night is ridiculous because muslim women are treated as slaves. I mean, if you're going to be a scientist in the public arena you can't be meek, but he seems to come off as an asshole more often than not.; 10:46 AM
Anonymous said...: prolly cuz he carries the asshole gene; 10:51 AM
Amnonymous said...: because a political movement that targets bankers couldn't possibly develop antisemitic overtones.; 11:38 AM
President Gas said...: Leonard, re: the excerpt, I saw what you did there.

(And, if Dawkins were white, would you have still gone to Heller?); 11:48 AM
Anonymous said...: Slamming Dawkins is the that's-gay of blog commentary. Nothing reveals the academy leftist lurking underneath the cynical anarchist exterior like gratuitous Dawkins-bashing.; 12:29 PM
IOZ said...: Dawkins is an academic leftist, whose work principally appeals to college-educated academic and post-academic leftists, so calling him an idiot makes a person also an academic leftist? How?; 12:32 PM
Karl Franz Ochstradt said...: I like how 12:29 Nonny tries to shame others into admiring Dawkins... not for the strength of Dawkins' rhetorical observations, but for the shame of being a "secret leftist academic".

Now that Nonny's painted himself into a corner, will he keep painting right over himself... or put footprints on the fresh paint and dirty his fancy shoes?; 12:34 PM
JC said...: Yes, but it is THE book of myths and legends.; 1:12 PM
Leonard said...: Gas, perhaps you could say what you think I did there, because I don't know. (I mean, other than what I thought I was doing: comparing Dawkins to a risibly contradictory character in a novel I love.)

The answer to your parenthetical question is Yes -- your antecedent condition is in fact true.; 1:14 PM
Justin said...: Here is my race baiting. Being in prison is a heritable trait, just like IQ.; 1:17 PM
fish said...: Dawkins is an academic leftist, whose work principally appeals to college-educated academic and post-academic leftists, so calling him an idiot makes a person also an academic leftist? How?

SPLITTER!!!!; 1:55 PM
Anonymous said...: I love you (platonically); 2:09 PM
demize! said...: He's a fucking nob, doesn't he hang about wiff Chris Hitchens and Sam Harris. Talk about rhetorical genocideres. The proof that Darwinism is a sham is that I'm not dead yet and neither is Hitch.; 2:23 PM
demize! said...: "Dawkins is an academic leftist, whose work principally appeals to college-educated academic and post-academic leftists, so calling him an idiot makes a person also an academic leftist? How? 12:32 PM"
Because he gives an academic gloss to reactionary Islamophobes? You have an entire cadre of imbeciles like EDL members et al who love this guy and his ilk for the reason that they dislike religion, but certain ones in particular.; 2:30 PM
Saurs said...: Yah, well I can one-up all of that IOZ, so prepare to be dazzled: Dawkins is a misogynist.

Boo!; 3:50 PM
Christopher said...: I don't find Dawkins' criticism of Craig unfair. Craig is apologizing for genocide, and deserves to be mocked for being unwilling to admit it. (At least by Dawkins' telling -- I did not bother to check the original.)

Word. I read the first Craig post Dawkins linked to, and his reaction to the slaughter is basically exactly what you said; God has no moral obligations, so whatever he orders the Israelites to do is just.

What about Islamic terrorists who also claim that God has justified their actions?

Well, see, they just have the wrong God.

It's, uh, not too terribly convincing, honestly.

I can't really fault Dawkins on this one, though I don't care for him much myself. My favorite "Dawkins is a Jerk" post is this BoingBoing post, where he asks, "If you were an employer, don't you think it would be a good idea to fire an eye doctor who believed in the stork theory of reproduction, even if he was clearly a great eye doctor?"

Me and a lot of other people replied that we were much more likely to be the good worker who gets fired for what he writes on his blog then we were to be the administrator worrying about our institutions, and letting people who have deviant views keep their jobs was a matter of self-protection, and he just absolutely could not understand it.; 4:00 PM
The Promiscuous Reader said...: I mean, does my affection for the Iliad make me an apologist for genocide?

Of course not, but Craig doesn't simply regard the Bible with affection. He claims that it has supreme moral authority, because it comes from God. If you argued that wiping out a city was moral because Athene approved it, you'd be an apologist for genocide too.

Not that Dawkins is in a position to cast the first stone, of course. In fact, he's happy to make common cause with Christian "apologists for genocide" against Muslim "apologists for genocide."

Jesus Christ, ahem, you can't simultaneously say that the Bible is fake and then castigate a believer for his expalanation of events that didn't actually happen. Of course you can, if the believer wants to use those fictional events as a warrant and model for events in the real world. For that matter, if Dawkins were to claim that his selfish gene made him want to wipe out Mooslims, it wouldn't matter that he's appealing to a fictional entity.

In fact, Dawkins (like many atheists) does claim that "religion" -- a fictional entity -- makes people do awful things. As an atheist, shouldn't he be saying that people invent religion to give themselves excuses for doing awful things? Or sometimes good things. "Religion" isn't the cause of human evil, it's the effect.; 4:47 PM
Inkberrow said...: TPR---

"As an atheist, shouldn't he be saying that people invent religion to give themselves excuses for doing awful things?"

No, because that isn't really true, is it?. On occasion, certainly, but not anywhere near the point that religious observance and superstition have been or ever were primarily pretextual among rank and file or leaders. For better or worse, genuine belief drives events more than opportunism.; 5:01 PM
mark r. said...: Not many people these days affiliate themselves with the Ethical Culture Society.; 7:14 PM
demize! said...: BECAUSE THEY'RE FABIAN SOCIALIST JOO BANKERS!; 7:16 PM
Soj said...: Wait a second, so archbishops and chief rabbis DON'T believe in certain passages of Genesis?

Try to pick and choose which sections of the policy manual you're going to follow and see how well that goes over with HR ;)

Personally I'm a Book of Numbers fan, meself...; 11:14 PM
pancakes said...: Dawkins is a twit, a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and to top it all off, a not-very-good scientist. The version of evolutionary theory he's peddling is decades out of date, and informed by a kind of crackpot Hobbesianism; the man hasn't actually done any research on genetics, evolution, primatology or any of the other areas he's supposed to be an expert on since the seventies.

His appeal derives entirely from the fact that his analysis of religion comes down to "religious people are stupid, and atheists are smarter than them, ha ha," which nicely strokes the egos of white liberal academic wannabes, whose dull-as-shit "new atheist" project has culminated in a kind of schlocky identity politics for white nerds while periodically freaking the fuck out at all these darkies dirtying up Christendom with their heathen ways.; 8:13 AM
The Promiscuous Reader said...: Inkberrow, you're right that most believers don't invent their religion, but they do pick and choose the bits they take seriously. Have you noticed how quickly (historically speaking) American evangelicals dropped their opposition to divorce and remarriage, for example? That's even a firmly biblical doctrine, derived from an explicit teaching of Jesus in the gospels, but it's at best honored in the breach nowadays. Evangelicals' divorce rate is higher than that of the general population, though I don't know if that's a cause or an effect.

In the Christian mainstream, look at the way the churches have interpreted away Jesus' end-of-the-world teachings, which are a lot more important in the New Testament than "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Religion is not something external to human beings; it's something we collectively invented and collectively modify to suit our needs. People do try to split it off and pretend it's controlling them, just as little children will say that their imaginary friends are being mean to them, but that doesn't mean that imaginary friends are real either.; 11:36 AM
The Promiscuous Reader said...: Oh, and P.S.: I don't mean that religious belief is "pretextual" -- it's very important to convince oneself that it's real, and that's not as easy as it may sound; hence the large amount of religious discourse about "faith" and learning to submit to God's will. Even something like speaking in tongues (another firmly biblical practice that makes the mainline denominations uneasy) has to be learned, and most believers in the churches that value glossolalia never learn to do it.; 11:40 AM
High Arka said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 1:32 PM
High Arka said...: (Grammar edit)

IOZ, this one finds your use of "nonentity" offensive, as it suggests that Dawkins' relative fame in comparison to his debating partner makes either or both parties unworthy of making fools of themselves in front of everyone. Dawkins' opponent, and Dawkins, should both have that ability as much as the rest of us; they shouldn't lose their statuses as living entities for doing so or for wanting to do so.

Dawkins is, also, promoting his book and/or persona in front of a compliant media that is searching for a token fool "anti-God" person. He's allowed media time because, like Bachmann or Kucinich, he is a useful strawman; he presents absurd, self-contradicting atheistic faith against absurd biblical faith. He makes a lot of money and fires up his base; his religious opponents make a lot of money and fire up their base; and, neither could do as well without the other. You can't blame the guy arguing with him for trying to do the same.

In that way, he's just a simple man trying to make it in the jungle, and doing a better job of it than most. He already has more major media coverage than you, and of course, Dawkins is way ahead. Reprehensible, perhaps, and part of a reprehensible system, but still an entity. Switch out your arrowheads.; 1:50 PM
I got a Midrash. said...: pancakes wins, although, sure, that Craig guy sucks & is crazy too: Discorporate some kids, no biggie, 'tain't like death is the end. Just sayin, ye have the skygod fanatics always with you; but Dawkins ye have not always.; 2:03 PM
Anonymous said...: "A twit, a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and to top it all off, a not-very-good scientist" is just the kind of thing academy leftists always say about Dawkins.; 6:37 PM

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Ender's Game

34 comments:

Axis Mundi

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