Us Fanatical Atheists

In another passage Harris goes even further, and reaches a disturbing conclusion that "some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them". This sounds like exactly the kind of argument put forward by those who ran the Inquisition.  

The link between belief and behavior raise the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas. 

Scientists have argued that faith was a byproduct of our development of the imagination or a way of increasing the social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step but now no longer needed – the equivalent of the appendix? Or a crucial part of the explanation for successful human evolution to date? Does religion still have an important role in human wellbeing? In recent years, research has thrown up some remarkable benefits – the faithful live longer, recover from surgery quicker, are happier, less prone to mental illness and so the list goes on. If religion declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?

This isn’t the kind of debate that the New Atheists are interested in (with the possible exception of Dennett, who in an interview last year was far more open to discussion than his book would indicate); theirs is a political battle, not an attempt to advance human understanding.

I’m sorry if other commentors have already pointed this out, as I don’t have time to read through all of the comments, but Ms. Bunting blatantly misrepresents what Mr. Hitchens says about these historical figures. He points that various Christian critics (he calls them heartless) have argued that Muhammad had epilepsy, and calls such debates pointless and irrelevant. His critique of Gandhi is not that he was an obscurantist, but that he was an anti-modern traditionalist who wanted to retard the process of economic and technological development in India. He idealized the Indian village, poverty-stricken thought it may have been (and still is). He was also, according to Hitchens, opposed to conciliation with Muslims, and his intransigence in turn gave the upper hand to Muslim hardliners and facilitated partition. Finally, Ms. Bunting’s distortion of what Hitchens says about Martin Luther King is probably the most grotesque. Hitchens writes a glowing, respectful section on King. His main point is to contrast the humanistic, compassionate spirituality of King with the parochial, dogmatic, hateful Christianity of many of those who opposed the Civil Rights Movement (often based on biblical convictions). Hitchens states that, to the extent that Christians must necessarily believe in a hell for non-believers (something that Jesus spoke of on several occasions), King, who never spoke of such punishment even for his political opponents, cannot be considered a true Christian. That is the gist of Hitchens’s argument. One might disagree with it, but Ms. Bunting completely distorts it, willingly or not I can’t tell. Finally, she writes that Hitchens suggests that King plagiarized his doctoral dissertation. This is an accusation that many who seek to demonize King and his legacy has made. Hitchens’s point is that this very well might be true, but that it doesn’t really matter, because it doesn’t detract from King’s moral character and accomplishments. His point was that King, like the rest of us, was a human with his own foibles, and that King’s critics (mostly ignorant, outright racist southerners nostalgic for the old days) are wrong to use these foibles as evidence of King’s corruption.

 

Bunting may or may not have a point regarding whether these atheists will have much success in converting others to their unbelief, rather than merely preaching to the choir. But the fact that she manages to so completely misread one of the books that she attacks makes me far less likely to give her much attention.