[MD] Dawkins' anti-theism campaign

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

Greetings Ham,

[Ham wrote]
I ran across his (Dawkins) latest article in the Commentary pages of my Sunday
Inquirer.  It was titled: "Is religion the root of all evil?", and you can find
the entire text at (snip). What Dawkins is actually attacking under the banner
of "scientific reason" is belief in God.

[Arlo]
I'll chime in with my two cents, since you asked, but since I am not familiar
with Dawkins (beyond a passing recognition), I can't really respond to Dawkins'
directly. So this may be tangental, but so be it...

For me, "theism" is initially divisible into two primary camps. First, are those
that personally believe in some transcendent force. Second are those that
further this belief by thinking that said transcendent force "priviliges them".

I, personally, have no problem with the first camp. In it, I believe, are those
who ascribe to a Pirsigian- or Campbellian-like understanding that whatever
miraculous force transcends our "reality" is only appreciable within our
reality through analogy and metaphor. The people in this camp tend to not
accept the notion that certain cultural analogies for understanding the
transcendent are not privileged by the transcendent. That is, whether one uses
the analogy of the Occidental Genesis, or the analogy of creation given in the
Icelandic Edda, is of only cultural difference, nothing more. One is not "true"
and the other "false". To limit the transcendent into socio-historical tribal
affiliations is to demean, and not understand, the transcendent.

I have significant problems with those in the second camp, and this is where I
feel Dawkins is directing disdain with which I agree. In the second camp, the
transcendent is used to justify historical privilege, given to a certain
segment of people, who must blindly obey the dogma of an established social
heirarchy. It is this transference of privilige that undergirds the problems
associated with "religion" that Dawkins addresses. For it is never enough to
"believe", one must also either punish or convert "non-believers". In this
camp, the transcendent is understood "literally", not through analogy or
metaphor. Different "other" cultural representations of the transcendent are
"wrong", the creation story of "my" religion is "literal truth", while the
creation story of yours is "misguided fiction".

What I believe we are witnessing on a societal scale, not only in the Middle
East, but in Western culture as well, is a large scale migration towards this
second camp, where "God" is NOT represented equally, but culturally distinct,
instead, "we" are "right" and "they" are "wrong" (or vice versa). This second
camp, exists primarily to reify the social-level power hierarchies that sustain
and propagate that religion.

Reading that article, it seemed to me that it is not necessarily the belief in a
transcendent force per se that Dawkins decries, but the belief that somehow "I"
am privileged by that force, both in terms of a solidifying
culturally-different analogies into "true" and "false", and in believing that
it is our "duty" to convert or punish anyone who deviates from "my" belief.

Like Dawkins, I think it is time we move beyond such tribal-social power
concerns, and realize that these are not institutions of "privilege" but
culturally-significant manifestations (analogy and metaphor) that may define us
and give us meaning "as a cultural group", but do not bestow on us any
"privilege" from above. 

Arlo