What causes much of the world's conflicts?
Well, if you agree with these guys,
they'd say religion is the catalyst for almost all of the world's violence.
I think faith based religion is the mother lode of bad ideas.
People will kill each other's children for ancient books and caves and relics.
There is a logical pathway leading from religion to the committing of atrocities.
Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are considered to have launched a strain
of thought called "New Atheism".
It's a small but incredibly vocal group.
But how accurate are the New Atheists in their broad claims about religion and its
role in global strife?
"It's also the case that people do violence on behalf of nation-states and flags
and kings and oil and the list goes on and on."
Hey guys, I'm Omar. And this Sunday we're talking about the New Atheists,
their problem with religion, and how that impacts how we talk about faith.
There are many different types of atheists.
Atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of a God or divine power
and it's been around forever.
But in the United States, the number of people who say they're atheist
has doubled since 2007.
A new political movement among atheists burst onto the scene in the years following 9/11.
And they were everywhere.
I'm an atheist with respect to the Judeo-Christian God
We are absolutely at war with Muslims..
You as a level-headed guy who understands..
Journalist Gary Wolf coined the term "New Atheists" a movement among non-believers
who are united by what they believe are rationalist anti-God claims.
The New Atheists believe that religion threatens progress and ultimately breeds conflict.
They also believe that if religion were eliminated many of the world's problems
would disappear.
They're very confrontational as Professor Bill Cavanaugh explains.
It's an atheism with a certain kind of a polemical edge,
creating a distance between people who believe and people who supposedly don't believe.
So, the idea is that, "I have facts but you have mere beliefs."
In fact, the way the new atheist aggressively challenge religion is what they're most known for.
They even mock faith and believers.
Because if you believe something without evidence then that justifies anything.
But their ideas don't necessarily represent those of most atheists.
The vast majority of them - 65% - say they rarely or never discuss their views on
religion with religious people.
And some atheists like humanist chaplain Greg Epstein see New Atheist rhetoric as problematic.
There are a lot of people in this world who see religion as their
culture, their community, their family
their ancestors. And when we openly mock every aspect of it
in a way that is very likely to be interpreted as disrespectful,
then we are driving a wedge between ourselves and them.
Writer Luke Savage says New Atheists use a facade of rational arguments
to legitimize Western military interventions.
They're people that see a lot of illiberal and anti-enlightenment
tendencies in kind of modern society and culture and foremost among those is religion.
One of the New Atheist central arguments is that religion is inherently violent.
They also believe that religion is behind much of the world's violence
in both the past and the present.
And the religion they happen to be most critical of is......Islam.
But we'll talk more about that later.
Right now, let's discuss where New Atheists claim to get some of their ideas:
The Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was a period between the 17th and 19th centuries
where the idea emerged that human beings didn't need an institution
like the church to live a good moral life -
human rationality should be at the forefront of that.
These ideas emerge during a period when political corruption and tyranny were rampant
across many European monarchies. And they were propped up by the church which many
even argue was used as an instrument of oppression.
It takes on a particular sort of
polemical edge in the current context because it's really establishes divide
between social orders in a lot of ways.
One of the main critiques directed at
the New Atheists is that they examine so-called "religious violence" in a vacuum.
Critics say their arguments completely ignore the role that land, resources,
money and power playing getting two sides to use violence as a means of
achieving their goals.
The New Atheists also dismiss, ignore, and erase centuries
of history and simplistically pit complicated conflicts as simply faith
versus reason.
We never go to war for a single reason. Military historians tell
us that there are always multiple factors involved: Military, territorial,
and above all economic as well as political and social.
That's religious scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong
and in her 2014 book "Fields of Blood"
she argues religion is used as much to promote violence as it is a sanctuary
from violence.
This hasn't stopped New Atheists from having a list of go-to
conflicts that they repeatedly provide as examples that religion is synonymous
with violence.
Like the Crusades.
And then in Ireland there were "The Troubles" which
pitted Irish Catholics who wanted to reunite Northern Ireland with the
Republic of Ireland against Irish Protestants who were loyal to the United Kingdom.
New Atheist Christopher Hitchens said it was a conflict where religion
spurred much of the violence which resulted in more than 3,500 dead.
400 years and more, 400 years and more
in my own country of birth of people killing each
other's children depending on what kind of Christian they were.
And sending each other's children in rhetoric to hell.
But Savage says that argument is flawed.
The conflict in Northern Ireland which he'd actually personally observed
kind of omitting or overlooking at least you know really the the central element
in the Northern Irish conflict which was British involvement in Northern Ireland.
There's one other thing we need to highlight in this debate about religious violence:
The number of conflicts that haven't involved religion at all.
If you ask the question, "Who has killed more people in the last hundred years, Muslims
or atheists?" The answer is atheists and it's not even close.
Let's explore one the most infamous ones of our time the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which
allegedly pits Muslims against Jews.
But how true is that statement?
Jewish atheists led the Zionist movement that created the State of Israel.
They argued for a Jewish nation state as a response to European anti-semitism.
Meanwhile, Muslim and Christian Palestinians live under Israeli occupation
in the West Bank and Gaza and protest Israeli efforts to claim Jerusalem together.
It's not hard to see how Israel's displacement of and occupation over
the indigenous Palestinian population rather than the differences of faith
are the sources of the strife.
And here's what Hitchens said shortly before his death in 2011
on the conflict.
Because of the divine promises made about this territory,
there will never be peace, they will not be compromise,
there will instead be misery.
I think that religious ideas are often used to legitimize violence.
I think often a more useful framework for thinking about, you know,
the sources of conflict is nationalism.
There's one more example than New Atheists often use
to make their anti religion points: ISIS.
Isis is the militant group that took over parts of Iraq and Syria,
spreading its violent messianic version of the Islamic faith.
The group killed all who stood in its path,
whether they were Sunni, Shia, Christian or otherwise.
Isis is behaving in a way that is sanctioned by a literal
reading of the Quran and the hadith.
But Isis and Islam may not be as closely
aligned as Harris presents.
I can't think of a better illustration of this than
the two young men, they were from Birmingham, and they went to join the
Islamic State. And they quite literally bought a copy of Islam For Dummies from
Amazon before they left.
ISIS' creation is a side effect of the
2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which created a political and security vacuum that
allowed such groups to flourish.
According to Savage, it's pretty common for people
to look at conflicts and tie them to some ancient disagreement,
instead of Western military involvement, which actually creates those modern conflicts.
New Atheists emerged after the September 11th, 2001 attacks in
the United States and have consistently attacked Islam.
I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world
The idea that Islam is inherently violent
is a really widespread idea that's not just limited to the New Atheists, but they've
given it a particularly sharp, polemical edge.
In 2017, a Pew Research Center study
found that 41% of US adults
believe that, "Islam encourages violence more than
other faiths."
Half also thought Islam was not a part of mainstream
American society, with 44% saying
that Islam and democracy are incompatible.
But many New Atheists consider themselves
true liberals or guardians of liberal values
In fact, 69% of the atheists in the U.S. lean Democrat and are more likely to
hold liberal values. Yet, the New Atheist views are illiberal.
And that's why Sam Harris and others believe
there's a crisis of liberalism because much of the
left in the U.S. would criticize them.
What we're seeing on the left is a kind
of censoriousness and
really
kind of an authoritarian moment.
The New Atheists' ridicule of Islam has made them allies of the
neoconservative right.
The New Atheist affinities for the right and for the neo-cons in particular
are really quite explicit.
There are a lot of people who are followers of New Atheism
that don't entirely realize that, you know, the politics of it are often rooted largely
on the right and might be appalled.
So, why is it so important to examine the New Atheists ideas?
Well, these guys are an influential bunch.
They've had books on the New York Times bestsellers list
and they've had large platforms to broadcast their ideas.
It's because the New Atheists' abrasive approach to
religion is seen as driving a wedge between religious folks and non
believing ones, instead of finding common ground.
So, when influential people like
Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins make statements like, "Islam is the mother lode
of bad ideas"
or "I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world,"
Does that make bigotry more acceptable in our society?
I don't think there's any way to
kind of answer this in theory
that belief in God either does or doesn't produce violence.
It all depends on the context.
Hey guys,
thanks for watching.
Hope you enjoyed the video.
Please let us know what you think in the comments
I'm sure the conversation is going to be really lit this time.
Come back next week for another great video and don't forget to like, share and subscribe.