But faith is very much a movable feast: Hitchens himself, in his sad late persona as a useful idiot for the Bush-Cheney regime in the mids, notably kept insisting — in the face of no evidence — that Saddam Hussein had possessed a working nuclear-weapons programme, which proved that it had been right all along to invade Iraq. For all that, Hitchens is plainly the most cultured thinker at the table.
Without religion, would we have had the music of Bach or the paintings of Michelangelo? What did they all do next? Dennett let the subject lie and returned to questions of evolution and philosophy, most recently with his excellent book From Bacteria to Bach and Back.
The intellectual path followed by Harris is most balefully illustrative of the poisonous seeds that were always present in New Atheism. At one point here, the men admire themselves for their willingness to consider truths that might be politically dangerous.
And in specific reference to the Afghan war, Harris adds p. There is in fact no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified killing them in self defence.
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. We argue that the three supported this war because they read global politics through the lens of their atheism. They appear to see the West as locked in an existential war with religion, particularly Islam. There are four striking aspects of this atheist vision of global geopolitics.
First, they see religion as essentially violent. This analysis obscures the murky role of foreign powers and corrupt rulers in the Middle East and the ability of charismatic leaders to co-opt religion and fuse it with legitimate grievances.
The New Atheists are convinced that their version of Western civilisation is superior to what they understand to be the religious-based cultures of the Middle East. He reasons they are immune to the usual logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. The irony in this argument, which began with the declaration that religion is uniquely violent, is apparently missed by Harris, who has since qualified his position on torture as this :.
Our research demonstrates the paradox that although New Atheists claim that their ideology is more enlightened and peaceful than religion, they often end up advocating violence. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Attend our virtual open week to explore our subjects and get a taste of life at King's. Browser does not support script. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins Shutterstock.
While it would be comforting to believe that our dialogue with the Muslim world has, as one of its possible outcomes, a future of mutual tolerance, nothing guarantees this result — least of all tenets of Islam.
Given the constraints of Muslim orthodoxy, given the penalties within Islam for radical and reasonable adaption to modernity, I think it is clear that Islam must find some way to revise itself, peacefully or otherwise.
What this will mean is not all obvious. What is obvious, however, is that the West must win the argument or win the war. All else will be bondage.
There is in fact no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified killing them in self-defence. 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. Latest news.
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