Rejoinders to a New Political Dialectic

I posted some rejoinders to my original piece "A New Political Dialectic" in the comments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  I have reproduced them below:

1.  A possible litmus test for what constitutes “positivist New Atheism” is that they tend to make the argument that religion is unfalsifiable as if that is an indictment of religion.  Really, religion does not hold itself to the same standards as science (why should it?).  The two work best when kept separate.  Just like I can be a scientist who enjoys art or a scientist who enjoys nature, I can also be a scientist who enjoys religion.

Again, this doesn’t speak to the question of whether or not God exists, (which I made explicit above) and I was hoping not to get into that since it’s been hashed out billions of times and no one has made any progress.  But, since people seem to want to talk about that, from my own personal journey, I know that “Does God exist?” is a difficult question to define precisely.  I’ve settled into a sort of noncognitivist/Spinozan outlook on the divine that places me closer to both a Sufi mystic and a Nietzschean atheist than one who believes I’ve been “saved” by a personal Jesus or the group of people that make vast amounts of money antagonizing believers in personal Jesuses (Jesi?) because their beliefs are not based on the scientific method.

2.  To be honest, I’m really disappointed that comments tended towards an old-fashioned Internet atheist debate, but I fault myself for putting so much about Harris and his positivist atheism at the beginning of the piece.  Burt Likko’s comment is one here that actually engages my argument, which is that political debate should be driven by a dialectical relationship between libertarianism and socialism; I was hoping that more comments would address this contention.

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A New Political Dialectic

<cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

Jackson Lears has a riveting piece up at the Nation which soundly routs the new parapositivism taking the popular and newspaper science cultures by storm.  The piece is called "Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris".  It's a takedown of Harris couched within a takedown of the New Atheist conceptual framework couched within a takedown of a positivism which oversteps its bounds.  Freddie deBoer recently praised the piece:

I think that absolutely everyone should read this profoundly necessary evisceration of Sam Harris, the Moe of the New Atheist Three Stooges, written by Jackson Lears and published by the Nation. It may be my favorite essay published this year; it goes well beyond the usual stalking horses of New Atheism and speaks to some of the fundamental analytical and ethical issues confronting our species, particularly when it comes to progress and the limits of knowledge. Read the whole thing, seriously.

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Transcendent Indwelling

To continue my rambling series on personificationism, the way we typically discuss "God" makes no sense at all.  (Out of simple curiosity, I have chosen to ignore the obtrusive irony of committing these thoughts to words.)  For a long time, I have been averse to both Evangelical Christians like all the usual culprits and New Atheists like all the usual culprits.  It seems there is a dearth of surly, self-appointed team captains willing to speak for the radical withholding of judgment.

Perhaps at least part of my aversion to both factions is rooted in their tendency to debate the nature of a representation, which just doesn't make any sense at all.  Mr. Hand says "Romanticism is green".  Mr. Book says it is not green.  I have more antipathy towards the New Atheists because as scientists they are presumably not proceeding from first principles; this - and a history of science full of arrogant fuck-ups - compels more cooperative metacognition.  But then again, conceptualization has never been the scientist's strong suit.

A typical argument used by the New Atheists comes from Betrand Russell's teapot.  The positivist Russell parodied the claims of the religious by postulating that a teapot exists in orbit around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.  One cannot disprove the existence of that teapot, therefore Russell's claim that the teapot exists is just as invalid a claim as "God exists".  At first glance, this seems like a fair attack on the existence of God; yet upon closer examination, we realize that Russell's claim involves the physical object of a "teapot", whereas "God" is a received linguistic artifact.  Russell and the New Atheists commit an egregious category error in compelling a falsifiable conception of the divine.

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