Chris Hedges is a writer, a foreign correspondent and formerly the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times.He has now written a piece called "I Don't Believe in Atheists," which Salon says is "charmingly titled."
Please.
Hedges has decided, being the son of a Presbyterian minister and a hard-headed foreign correspondent and all, that the people he calls the "new atheists," such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are "preaching a fundamentalism as dangerous as the religious fundamentalist belief systems they attack."
I think Hedges is full of you-know-what.
The "secular left" says Hedges, has embraced "the same kind of bigotry and chauvinism and intolerance that marks the Christian right." These leftist seculars, claims Hedges, are "little more than secular fundamentalists."
What exactly does that mean? Well, Hedges would have us believe that the secular leftists - these "new atheists" - have adopted "many of the foundational belief systems of fundamentalists." They believe that human beings are moving forward to some kind of a better society, which is what fundamentalists believe.
Baloney. Hedges gives no examples. I've read all of these men and none believe that humans are gradually getting better and better. I don't think religious fundamentalists believe that, either. Most of them preach just the opposite - gloom and doom: We're going downhill fast, and they point specifically to gay marriage, and abortion, and the lack of Christianity in the government. In fact, they suggest that because we are moving away from God, becoming more evil, God's gonna get us! Some think things are so bad that Armageddon is just around the corner.
Hedges says the Holocaust was the result of a fascist Utopian agenda; it adopted the "cult of science," whatever that means. Then he says that "the New Atheists also make that leap from science into the cult of science, and that's a problem." Is he trying somehow to equate the thinking of the New Atheists with the thinking of the Nazis?
But , exactly how the New Atheists have done that, Hedges doesn't say.
Hedges thinks that it can be dangerous not to believe in sin, and accuses the New Atheists of doing just that. He says they think evil can be eradicated. He says they defend torture. He says that Hitchens is amoral, and Harris is "just intellectually shallow."
It seems to me, however, that Hedges claims a number of things for which he offers no substantiation, and makes all sorts of claims which are either not true or are simply exaggerated.
But the big problem is that nobody cares what Hedges thinks and that makes him angry.
He complained that when he debated Sam Harris at UCLA, the 1500 people present came to the debate liking Sam Harris and left liking Sam Harris. He was pissed.
"I don't think that they heard a word I said, and it's just insulting."
Or maybe they heard quite clearly what he said and came to the same conclusion I did: Hedges is full of horse shit!
3 comments:
Why did you decide which kind of shit he was full of? One cannot prove which was most valid. the opnly thinkg we can agree on is that he is full of shit. If we debate the meaning or definiton of shit, aren't we as bad as those that debate god's words and meaning?
That thought is so profound that I do not know what it means.
Bob Poris
Far be it from me to defend Chris Hedges, but I think this is unfair.
I saw a lot of people criticise TGD who had never read it; they just went by Dawkins' demeanor and interviews. That's pretty much what you're doing here, isn't it?
Hedges doesn't give any examples? It's a Salon interview! You must know by now what Salon interviewers are like, right?
Look, he may be full of horse shit (or some other kind of shit; thank you, anonymous commenter!), but I really don't see how you'd be able to tell either way based on the information that you have.
"American Fascists" was a very well-argued book. I hope that "I Don't Believe in Atheists" is also a good book. But until I read an actual review, or read it myself, I have no way to tell.
Dear pseudonym,
If you don't want to defend Chris Hedges, why did you?
I have read Dawkins, but I haven't read Hedges' latest book. I wasn't critiquing the book, I was critiquing what he said in the interview.
On the basis of his comments re: atheists and religious fundamentalists sharing the same attributes I concluded he was full of horseshit. Certainly it could be some other kind of shit. I don't know why I chose the horse.
I have read a number of articles by Chris Hedges and have come to not like his ideas or his writing very much.
He might be a very fine person. I just think he's full of some kind of excrement.
Didn't you find his comment about his experience with Harris at UCLA a bit self-serving and whiney? He was "insulted" when he thought the students didn't hear what he had to say?
C'mon.
And read some of his anti-Israel stuff.
I was right. I think.
Peace,
Jacob
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