The Atheism Delusion - Konstantin Kisin
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
170.56856
Summary
Born in the mecca of non-belief that was Soviet Russia, my view of religious people as ignorant, obscurantist and doctrinaire was only reinforced by watching my comedy heroes like George Carlin and Bill Hicks take big and legitimate swings at the disconnect between the teachings of religion and the behavior of the religious.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
When asked about my religious views, I usually call myself an agnostic.
00:00:04.360
But if I had to describe my views more accurately, it would be fair to say that I'm a lapsed atheist.
00:00:09.700
Born in the mecca of non-belief that was Soviet Russia,
00:00:12.520
my view of religious people as ignorant, obscurantist and doctrinaire
00:00:16.260
was only reinforced by watching my comedy heroes, like George Carlin and Bill Hicks,
00:00:21.100
take big and legitimate swings at the disconnect between the teachings of religion
00:00:27.740
Hicks summed this incongruity up perfectly by recalling a story of three men approaching him
00:00:38.560
Hey, buddy, we're Christians. We don't like what you said.
00:00:48.100
Today, in a world in which the religious right has less obvious impact on our world,
00:00:52.680
jokes of this kind would have little resonance.
00:00:54.600
But my youth was infused with example after example of stuffy religious conservatives
00:01:00.200
attempting to enforce their values on the rest of society
00:01:06.260
trying to prevent Monty Python's Life of Brian from being shown in cinemas,
00:01:10.260
and trying to push through the idea that creationism should be taught in schools.
00:01:15.120
This backdrop provided the perfect opportunity for the emergence of daring countercultural figures
00:01:20.280
who could use their erudition, wit, and refreshing honesty
00:01:23.680
to effortlessly take apart the tired old arguments for a religious worldview.
00:01:28.720
In the wake of 9-11, the four horsemen of new atheism,
00:01:32.100
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett,
00:01:35.580
came forward to re-articulate the importance of enlightenment values of truth,
00:01:42.160
They were smart, charismatic, and above all, they were cool.
00:01:45.300
Dawkins wrote terrific books like The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker,
00:01:50.120
which made evolutionary theory simple to understand
00:01:52.880
and debunked unscientific claims about the nature of our world.
00:01:56.800
Hitchens applied the power of reason and rationality to debates,
00:02:00.480
obliterating his opponents with a uniquely British civilized ruthlessness,
00:02:04.760
illustrating the cowardice of those who engaged in embarrassing apologetics
00:02:10.840
as they sought to enforce blasphemy laws in our society through violence and terror.
00:02:17.780
when he found himself attempting to articulate the problem with Islam on Bill Maher's show,
00:02:24.840
and what quickly became the talk of the internet.
00:02:27.300
The new atheists were exciting because they were saying something new,
00:02:31.040
challenging the dogma of their day and speaking truth to power.
00:02:34.560
Not content with proving that religion wasn't true,
00:02:36.880
they ventured further in attempting to prove religion was at best unnecessary
00:02:43.620
To this end, Dawkins wrote The God Delusion in 2006
00:02:46.560
and Hitchens delivered God is Not Great the following year.
00:02:49.680
The argument was no longer about encouraging religious people to calm down
00:02:54.900
It was increasingly that religion was inherently wrong and bad.
00:02:58.340
It was around this point that I began to lose my faith and atheism.
00:03:01.740
The God Delusion was the last Dawkins book I read
00:03:04.060
and the appeal of that discussion went quickly for several reasons.
00:03:07.380
First, it was clear to me that to attempt to challenge Islamic extremists
00:03:11.280
with facts and logic as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris had done
00:03:16.340
Despite their efforts, most of the Western world today
00:03:20.980
which are enforced not by religious activists lobbying for censorship
00:03:24.500
but by knife-wielding fanatics and suicide bombers.
00:03:28.260
The liberalism that the new atheists so enthusiastically espouse,
00:03:31.700
the idea that we should be free to criticize, mock and satirize anything
00:03:35.340
including religion, only works when the government is willing
00:03:41.200
In seeking to liberate us from the tyrannical instincts of dogmatic Christians,
00:03:45.520
the new atheists actually delivered us into the hands of a different
00:03:50.560
from which the ordinary citizen has no security at all.
00:03:53.980
Second, the fact that many religious ideas are scientifically inaccurate
00:03:57.300
and that religion has been and continues to be used for evil
00:04:01.920
Indeed, one of the core claims of the new atheists
00:04:06.440
that were far worse than the body count of non-believers.
00:04:09.880
Sure, Stalin, Hitler and Mao were bad, they argued,
00:04:12.680
but they weren't motivated by their atheism or its holy book.
00:04:16.600
This view of the Holocaust, Stalinism and the Great Leap Forward
00:04:19.760
as accidental byproducts of a non-complicit atheism
00:04:23.080
is, to me, a complete misunderstanding of the impact
00:04:26.620
a lack of religious faith has on the way we think about other human beings.
00:04:30.480
The central positive feature of the religious worldview
00:04:32.920
is to ensure that human beings do not see themselves
00:04:43.840
Yes, of course, atheist mass murderers like Stalin and Hitler
00:04:47.120
weren't motivated to kill millions because of religious differences,
00:04:55.240
was a product of the sense in which, in the absence of God,
00:05:01.100
This is precisely why we had to invent the concept of human rights
00:05:06.780
Without a worldview in which we are all worthy of dignity
00:05:09.140
and respect by virtue of being children of God,
00:05:11.480
you have to reinvent that particular wheel through the United Nations.
00:05:15.360
My point is, it is extremely easy to prove that religion is evil,
00:05:18.800
but I am not convinced that proving that it causes more evil
00:05:24.460
Third, the central question new atheists fail to answer,
00:05:27.540
and one that we put to Richard Dawkins in this interview here,
00:05:30.740
is whether, irrespective of how scientifically true religion may or may not be,
00:05:38.620
The Dawkins answer is as close to quoting Karl Marx's idea
00:05:41.840
that religion is the opium of the masses as you can get
00:05:46.280
The comfort that you get from believing a falsehood is like a drug,
00:05:55.980
that there's everything to be said for the drug.
00:05:58.640
This is a persuasive argument, in the sense that truth matters,
00:06:02.620
irrespective of how uncomfortable or impractical it may be.
00:06:06.000
But the problem here is that the absence of old religion
00:06:08.480
seems to produce only a vacuum into which a new religion rushes in.
00:06:12.420
And this new religion has just as little regard for the truth as the old ones.
00:06:16.940
That's why Richard Dawkins, who spent his best years arguing with creationists,
00:06:20.860
is now increasingly forced to explain basic biological concepts,
00:06:24.580
like the inability to change your sex by incantation, on national television.
00:06:31.640
is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose
00:06:34.540
that our post-Christian societies are suffering from.
00:06:44.180
please note that they're available on my sub stack,
00:06:48.340
So make sure to click the link in the description.