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But all of that is irrelevant to my original point: it is ridiculous and irresponsible to create a perjorative name (New Atheists) to describe a few outspoken atheists, and call them extremists and dangerous.

Sam Harris is no extremist. Dan Dennett is no extremist. Richard Dawkins is no extremist. Even Christopher Hirchens, who’s views I generally dislike, is no extremist. Nor are any of them dangerous. To use those terms to describe them does great damage to the meaning of those terms.

Each of them accept as real, the religious experience. None of them suggest violence against believers. Their motivation for speaking out as atheists is a deep concern about real religious extremists in a world in which nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are becoming ever easier to make or obtain.

They call for open, frank dialog regarding religious belief and it’s penchant for producing extremists. But no open, frank discussion can be had if the tenets of religious belief are out of bounds. Therefore, the New Atheists argue that it must be ideas, not authorities, that should be the focus of discussion.

As Sam Harris argues, it is moderate believers who provide cover for more extremist elements by not speaking out or taking action to reduce extremist views in thief respective sects. And now we have scientists who, steeped in the tradition of assuring believers that science and religion are just two separate but equal methods of finding truth, are offended when a few scientists speak out about the threat which religious extremists pose to society. And in their offense, create a perjorative term (New Atheist) and accuse them of dangerous extremism.

I’m hearing a lot of criticism of the New Atheists, including snide comments about them with no justification, by the author of this blog when he spoke in Seattle – NONE of it substantial. How about some specifics? Give me a quote from the New Atheists which is dangerously extreme. Then let’s see how that quote stacks up along side quotes from real extremists. But that’s too easy. Let’s see how the most offensive quote from the New Atheists stands up against say Tom Paine, Bertrand Russell, or some of our Founding Fathers.

This is because their war-like behaviour has nothing to do with the label they are wearing. Our best understanding of this behaviour is that it is rooted in the territoriality that we inherited from our primate ancestors.
It is present in all of us and changing or removing labels will have not the slightest effect.

If you could wave a magic Atheist Fundamentalist wand and strip away all religious belief systems what would happen? Humankind’s innate war-like aggressive instincts are still there. Do you think they would obediently shrivel and waste away at the behest of some vague, amorphous atheistic culture of moral autonomy?

Furthermore people are endlessly inventive in the ways they exploit ethnicity, culture and belief systems for their own ends. To blame the exploitation on a belief system is entirely wrongheaded. It is people who do the exploitation and they will continue to do so no matter what the guise.

You see your argument is only a slightly more sophisticated form of scapegoating. And if there is anything that has done great harm to our society it is the practice of scapegoating.
We find a convenient scapegoat, label it, parody it, parade it and attack it. It is emotionally satisfying.

Hitler is the obvious case. Hitler wanted power and his use of religious bigotry as a means to achieve it is undeniable. And let’s just be clear here: Hitler was Catholic. He supported the Catholic church, and vice versa.

Dawkins may have recently have popularized the notion that religion is dangerous, but that notion goes much farther back in history. The religion clause of the First Amendment might not exist if our Founding Fathers had not witnessed the sectarian colonial wars first hand.

The danger of religion is not limited to inciting or being used as a tool for violence. During the Plague, the Pope ruled that lancing the boils, which greatly improved one’s chances of survival , was a mortal sin, punishable by excommunication. St. Augustine forced indigionous populations to fast until they had open, infected sores and then marched them one after another through baptismal pools – later commenting on the high rate of death in the aftermath, and praising God for having sorted out those who were truly converted from the unconverted. Or St. Cyril and his part in the murder of Hypatia and the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Or Mother Teresa’s war on contraception and family planning in the poorest places on earth. These are just a few of the reasons the “good works” of believers will never fully atone for the consequences of religious belief.

If it wasn’t for those damn New Atheists antagonizing believers, everything would be much better. No more video taped beheadings. No more resistance to advances in science. If we could just keep the New Atheists from spouting their vitriol, everyone could live in harmony and prosperity.

Give me a break!

To begin with, Bohm makes a case for order being implicate to the whole of reality. I might state it this way: If reality as a whole is seen as one large broadcast of sorts, then enfolded within its signal are all the orders that can exist. What determines whether an order exists or not, is whether some receiving capacity exists or not. An example of this would be television in the sixties: while color was enfolded into the networks’ signal, our t.v. couldn’t unfold that part of the signal. I had to watch Batman in Black and white.

I’ll jump ahead to the relevance to your posts: A lion exists, because it can unfold the enfolded order of lion. And if you were to somehow embody lion-ness in human form, you would get a Roman Caesar; that is, one who only cares about being the king of beasts and that his own appetites are sated. In contrast to the Caesar stands the Christ who unfolds an implicate order of “god”, and does so in comparison to Caesar who first claimed himself to be the son of god, and even had it decreed into Roman law. In this historical event, we are asked to distinguish between the two different embodiments of an implicate order called god- Caesar’s and Christ’s.

I would offer that human being is unique in that we have some freedom as to what out of the implicate order we will make explicit: will we incarnate the enfolded order of the lion or the enfolded order of god?, might be the quintessential religious question. In the way that I think about things, transcendence for human being, isn’t about leaving the human dimension for a dimension that exists outside of the human world, rather, I see transcendence as delving deeper into our humanness, and embodying an order described better by the Christ than the Caesar, by a sense of god instead of the lion. In other words Peter, the history you cite, also describes our failure to embody higher orders of existence implicate within the order of the whole: that is, we fail to be fully human.

I apologize for the intellectual leaps- I’m trying to be brief; but I hope this is enough to get a gist of this theory. Also, this theory isn’t meant to establish anything about the Christ etc; I only mean to gain insight into humanness.