Can we talk?
I mean, instead of shouting or accusing or threatening? Geesh, there’s so much of that going on, I have to keep the TV remote control in hand just to get some good, substantive news without the trash-talking. Channel hopping last night for that very reason, I came upon a decent sounding conversation on Glenn Beck’s show, and this was his topic – a culture that has devolved into mean spiritedness. That’s not new, but what is suddenly emerging is the terminology for it. “Gladiator TV” is out there new as a new buzz term for this type of banter….no, brawling…that’s going on everywhere. Beck asked if we can’t just get back to talking with each other and listening, which is a good question, but even that’s starting to sound like well-intended rhetoric. Instead of talking about talking, I propose we each just start right here and now finding our manners.
Everyone’s so angry. Especially the atheists right now.
The time for polite debate is over.
We haven’t had polite debate for a long time now, so that’s not news. But it is if this AP writer is making a declarative statement, throwing down the gauntlet, so to speak.
Militant, atheist writers are making an all-out assault on religious faith and reaching the top of the best-seller list, a sign of widespread resentment over the influence of religion in the world among nonbelievers.
Hm…interesting reporting here. This is cast as a news item, not an opinion piece.
Christopher Hitchens’ book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” has sold briskly ever since it was published last month, and his debates with clergy are drawing crowds at every stop.
Hitchens is looking unhinged at some of these. And people also might possibly be drawn to the showdowns eager to hear some strong arguments articulated by the defenders of the faith that is so unabashedly under assault.
Sam Harris was a little-known graduate student until he wrote the phenomenally successful “The End of Faith” and its follow-up, “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” struck similar themes – and sold.
“There is something like a change in the Zeitgeist,” Hitchens said, noting that sales of his latest book far outnumber those for his earlier work that had challenged faith. “There are a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying.”
Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., said the books’ success reflect a new vehemence in the atheist critique.
“I don’t believe in conspiracy theories,” Mouw said, “but it’s almost like they all had a meeting and said, ‘Let’s counterattack.'”
The war metaphor is apt. The writers see themselves in a battle for reason in a world crippled by superstition.
It’s crippled, alright. Benedict talks about that – and engages the battle between faith and reason – all the time. This summarizes well. So does this.
And then there’s that Regensburg address…
In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.
A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.
Emphasis added. For good reason.
For philosophy,…listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss”.