The Atheist Delusion

March 15, 2008 5:47 PM

The Atheist Delusion. John Gray on why the 'secular fundamentalists' have got it all wrong.

via.

posted by wemayfreeze (40 comments total)

"Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach."

So the unthinking and gullible have won and the world, for its endgame, is turning back toward the darkness. Rejoice. Rejoice.
posted by sonic meat machine at 5:56 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]

LOL. I don't feel stranded. I feel sorry for the idiots who think God is going to save their sorry asses.
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:57 PM on March 15

Secular fundamentalists?

First we start calling garbagemen "sanitation engineers," now we're calling mathematicians and physicists "secular fundamentalists?"
posted by porpoise at 5:59 PM on March 15

Before this post gets deleted, let me just quote this from the article:

On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why.

There is an entire section of Barnes & Noble and Borders entirely for religious books. Bible printing and religious texts are a huge business and are in no way being shoved aside by anti-religious books. At the same time, the arrival of best selling books criticizing religion are also nothing new (see Paine, Hume, etc).

This all has been going on since the enlightenment and neither side is going anywhere. So, stop bloody pretending that any of this is new and go about your business.
posted by boubelium at 6:00 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

John Gray is an imbecile.

That is all.
posted by Floach at 6:01 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

The article reads like the author tried to squash every single argument against athiesm from his book into a 1,500 word deadline.
posted by dydecker at 6:03 PM on March 15

er, word limit.
posted by dydecker at 6:03 PM on March 15

He's probably right. The "secular fundamentalists" have got it all wrong. Let me do a Google search and see who this describes.

Oh, nobody. He just made up a phrase.
posted by Astro Zombie at 6:03 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils.

I'm pretty sure he's quoting Cicero here...


Also, "secular fundamentalist" is pretty weak. "fundamentalist atheists" on the other hand score every bit as high on the annoying-your-fellow-man scale as fundamentalists of all other stripes. I'm looking at you, Dawkins.
posted by tkolar at 6:05 PM on March 15

Is this the "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" idiot, or a different idiot?
posted by nicwolff at 6:05 PM on March 15

There is one interesting fact: believers tend to have more children than unbelievers. Countries where agnosticism and/or atheism become the norm suffer population collapses.

You can't own the future if you die out.
posted by Class Goat at 6:06 PM on March 15

LOLATHEISTS?
posted by SansPoint at 6:07 PM on March 15

There is one interesting fact: believers tend to have more children than unbelievers. Countries where agnosticism and/or atheism become the norm suffer population collapses.

Sources?
posted by odinsdream at 6:07 PM on March 15

This is why I love Metafilter!
posted by roll truck roll at 6:08 PM on March 15

Already torn apart at Pharyngula in The Delusions of John Gray.
posted by kiltedtaco at 6:11 PM on March 15

It's not the mars-venus guy.
posted by CKmtl at 6:11 PM on March 15

Watching the frothing hordes, described with considerable accuracy in the article that most of them have not read, descend upon this thread is truly fascinating.
posted by Krrrlson at 6:11 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]

Is this the "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" idiot, or a different idiot?

Same idiot. The article is publicity press for the upcoming release of John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.

As always I feel a tremendous pang of jealously that he's faster, more opportunistic, and more shameless than I am. Even I had even a smidgeon less shame I'd be busy writing "The Spock Effect: How Belief In Logic Stunted The Moral Development Of A Generation".
posted by tkolar at 6:12 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]

I wish we would have a population collapse.
posted by jkafka at 6:14 PM on March 15

Gray is making the usual mistake of taking the hobby horses of public atheists as 'gospel' for those who share similar views. The only idea atheists have in common is that There Is No God. How a society that has utilised god belief as a touchstone for millennia should act, when that touchstone is taken away, is a difficult question.

Ultimately, Gray's mistake is failing to recognise that atheists are not wanting to change the world, they are wanting one less pollutant in the global thought process.
posted by Sparx at 6:14 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

Goat, the idea that reproduction is required for ideas to survive is a fallacy. If kids have to be trained to believe your ideology, you're not doing it right. Atheism springs up in every culture--it's just had a much better time of it in the West since the Enlightenment.

Look at Immanuel Kant. He had no children, and yet his thought has spread so that it influences all modern scientific doctrines. Unless you think science is going to die out, his thought will continue to influence the world.

And if you think that science is going to die out, how can you call religion anything but evil?
posted by sonic meat machine at 6:14 PM on March 15

Same idiot.

Nay. John N. Gray.
posted by CKmtl at 6:15 PM on March 15

Already torn apart at Pharyngula in The Delusions of John Gray.

Over and over again, what we hear from them is desperate attempts to pigeonhole atheism as just another religion; they squat uncomprehendingly in their hovels built of faith and peer quizzically at the godless, seeking correspondence with their familiar theological nonsense, and crow in triumph when they find something that they can sort of line up with their experiences.

About the only thing torn apart in that boilerplate screed was the author's thesaurus.
posted by Krrrlson at 6:15 PM on March 15

CKmtl wrote...
It's not the mars-venus guy.

I stand corrected. Amazon steered me wrong.
posted by tkolar at 6:16 PM on March 15

Is this the "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" idiot, or a different idiot?

I didn't even recognise the name. Same idiot, same truthiness.
posted by Sparx at 6:17 PM on March 15

It's not the mars-venus guy.

And upon lack of preview I am schooled. This is getting to be a thing.
posted by Sparx at 6:20 PM on March 15

I tried to read it. I got like 17 paragraphs in, and the most coherent argument I had read had something to do with the movie "the Golden Compass."

Thus, despite being not the same guy, I offer my favorite "family guy" quote:

Peter (giving Chris some advice on gifts for women): Listen Chris, I read a book saying that women are from Venus, all right so here's what you get her. Thick layers of sulphuric acid, viscous surface rock, and coronets which seem to be collapsed domes of a large magma chamber. Here's five dollars.
posted by drjimmy11 at 6:22 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity.

Wow.

Just fucking wow.

Comparing this guy to the Mars/Venus dude is an insult to the Mars/Venus dude.
posted by tkolar at 6:23 PM on March 15

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
posted by mrmojoflying at 6:27 PM on March 15

This is why I love Metafilter!

And yet this Gray guy would fit right in here. Whenever you get an atheism thread, some xtian makes me lol by reciting this same old bunch of tired, wrong-headed, banal arguments.

If xtians want people to stop characterising them all as a bunch of dull-witted, anti-science, god-hates-fags, cherry-picking mouth breathers, they'd do well to make a distinction between themselves and this particularly weak meme. Atheists aren't all members of some big conspiratorial club. Being an atheist is mostly like being not a woman, or not a jew, or not an African. The dominant characteristic is an absolute lack of any sense of collective identity, not membership in some pseudo-religion, as the voodoo crowd are so desperate to cast us.

I give no more thought to the lack of God in my life than I do to my lack of a vagina.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 6:28 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

Oh please, more proof that the ranks of humanity overflows with rabid, unreasoning, frothing-at-the-mouth types? MOAR PLZ.
posted by WalterMitty at 6:29 PM on March 15

Is it because of the wuv of Baby Jebus?
posted by DU at 6:29 PM on March 15

Comparing this guy to the Mars/Venus dude is an insult to the Mars/Venus dude.

Seriously? Because he is pretty reprehensible.
posted by Sparx at 6:30 PM on March 15

Gray spends a lot of time thrashing with the avowed atheism of so many despots, making a fairly game effort to counter the argument of every thoughtful atheist that the crimes of those despots were not born of atheism but of despotism. But he can't seem to do any better than throw a lot of words at the problem, leading you to think that he's got a real argument just around the corner, but he never actually comes up with one. He's at his most desperate when he says that islamic terrorism is actually secular! Who knew? It takes a very special mind to do a one-eighty on the facts like that -- I'd even call it Rovian.

There's a simple reason why the regimes of Mao, Stalin, Pot, et al required atheism, a reason that's far too simple for him to confront: they could not endure a competing authority structure with competing dogma. All of them would have had their subjects believe that history began with themselves and that their truth is the only truth, and no recognized religious tradition is going to support that. So the religions had to go. But their atheism was a means to an end, not an end in itself, and not so much anti-religion as anti-competing-religion.
posted by George_Spiggott at 6:30 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]

*ranks of humanity overflow with...

ARGH.
posted by WalterMitty at 6:30 PM on March 15

This guy sounds a lot more interesting. Haven't read either book, though, so I can't say with any certainty.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:32 PM on March 15

I'm actually tempted to Fave Krrlson because his quote from Pharyngula is so spot on....
posted by DU at 6:32 PM on March 15

This will be like, what, the third post deleted in the last two hours?
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 6:35 PM on March 15

Comparing this guy to the Mars/Venus dude is an insult to the Mars/Venus dude.

Seriously? Because he is pretty reprehensible.

Seriously. Claiming that free will originated in the bible because the topic appears in Genesis? This guy is worse than Dawkins with his "Science will make the universe 100% comprehensible" crap.
posted by tkolar at 6:39 PM on March 15

I disagree with many, many things that are said in this article, but I would like to point out that this article is not attacking atheism, nor is it attacking all atheists, nor all secular philosophies, nor all liberal political views, nor all scientific hopes. The point of using a phrase like "secular fundamentalists" is not to call all secularists "fundamentalists", but rather to differentiate a particular type of very vocal, confrontational atheist from the rest of us.

Again, I could spend hours writing down all the things I disagree with in this article, and I'm sure a lot of you will do this. But it would be nice if we could debate what was actually written and not what has been written by other, less reasonable people in the past.

Porpoise, nowhere in this article does it say that all scientists and mathematicians are secular fundamentalists. I don't think his analysis of the people he is referring to is very accurate, but we should at least note who he is referring to.

Sparx, I thought that the article made a point of referring to this type of atheism and attaching modifiers like evangelical, fundamentalist, and missionary when he mentioned people. Hell, he actually went and listed the names of the sorts of people he was referring to. So while I think he does make a lot of mistakes in this article, I don't think that he's mistaking this belief as being "gospel" for all atheists.

Sonic Meat Machine, do you really believe he's claiming that science is going to die out? That seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Peter, apparently when someone does write an article with new wrong-headed arguments as John Gray did here, picking on a specific type of atheism that is very much not the kind of atheism that you and I have, we end up lumping him with all those dull-witted, anti-science, god-hates-fags, cherry-picking mouth breathers anyway. I agree that he's wrong-headed, but these are not the same arguments I've heard a million times before and if he has the decency to differentiate between different types of atheists, the least we can do is differentiate between different types of anti-atheists.
posted by ErWenn at 6:42 PM on March 15