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Wed

Nov

Episode 9: Atheistic Faith

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In this episode we dig into the topic of the so-called "New Atheists" as exemplified by Ricard Dawkins. I talk Peter Christ: Atheist. At the end, I play a short segment from a much longer talk with Lorenzo, host of the Psychedelic Salon.

The genesis for this episode came in the form of a Wired Magazine cover story: The Church of the Non-Believers: A band of intellectual brothers is mounting a crusade against belief in God. Are they winning converts, or merely preaching to the choir? by Gary Wolf.

Excerpt:

The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn't necessarily mean we've lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.

Wired put out a podcast follow-up to the article. You can find that podcast here: http://sonibyte.com/audio/raw/1569.mp3

I also read from a Time Magazine article. You can find a summary here: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/11/05/cover.story/index.html

Subscribers of the now defunct C-Realm Thought of the Day, as well as long-time readers of my blog will recognize the William Finnegan quote I read to Peter Christ:

The central ideology of "mainstream culture," the belief system that
most of us share, is liberal consumerism--a secular, individualist creed that essentially adds more shopping hours to the old exaltation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our children are being raised in this tepid faith with what amounts to fanatic zeal: the average American child, by the time he or she leaves high school, has been subjected to more than 380,000 TV commercials. The role of advertising in our daily lives has grown so immense that it has become difficult to remember what it was like before the subliminal flood of "brand synergies" came to fill every corner of public space. Billions of dollars and fantastic amounts of energy are, after all, devoted annually to the creation ex nihilo of new desires--anxieties that, by design, only more consumption can console.

The quote comes from Finnegan's book, Cold New World: Growing Up in Harder Country (Modern Library Paperbacks).

Lorenzo mentioned Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. I haven't read it yet, but check out the reviews on Amazon.com.