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Sam Harris Responds to Reviews of new Atheist Books
Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2007 6:17 am
by Dardedar
In Defense of Witchcraft
Huffington Post
Sam Harris
Imagine that the year is 1507, and life is difficult. Crops fail, good people suffer instantaneous and horrifying turns of bad luck, and even the children of royalty regularly die before they have taken their first steps. As it turns out, everyone understands the cause of these calamities: it is witchcraft. Not all witchcraft is at fault, of course -- there are "white" witches who use their powers to heal -- but there is no question that some witches have formed an alliance with the Devil. Happily, the Church has produced many learned and energetic men who are equal to this challenge, and each year hundreds of women are put to death for casting spells upon their innocent neighbors.
Imagine being among the tiny percentage of people -- the 5 percent, or 10 percent at most -- who think that a belief in witchcraft is nothing more than a malignant fantasy. Imagine writing a book arguing that magic spells do no real work in the world, that the confessions of bad witches are delusional or coerced, that the claims of good witches are self-serving and unempirical. You argue further that a belief in magic offers false hope of benefits that are best sought elsewhere, like from scientific medicine, and lays the ground for false accusations of imaginary crimes, leading to the misery and death of innocent people. If your name is Sam Harris, you may produce two fatuous volumes entitled The End of Magic and Letter to a Wiccan Nation. Daniel Dennett would then grapple helplessly with the origins of sorcery in his aptly named, Breaking the Spell. Richard Dawkins -- whose bias against witches, warlocks, and even alchemists has long been known -- will follow these books with an arrogant screed entitled, The Witch Delusion. And finally Christopher Hitchens will deliver a poisonous eructation at book-length in The Devil is Not Great.
What sort of criticism would these misguided authors likely encounter? In the following essay, I present excerpts from actual reviews of recent atheist bestsellers, replacing terms like "religion," "God," and "atheist" with terms like "witchcraft," "the Devil," and "skeptic." Observe how much intellectual progress we have made in the last five hundred years:
"[None of these authors] takes time to consider contemporary [witchcraft] in the light of some of its most sophisticated and heroic practitioners.... Moreover, none of them ever put their weak, confused, and unplumbed ideas about [the Devil] under scrutiny. Their natural habit of mind is anthropomorphic. They tend to think of [the Devil] as if He were a human being, bound to human limitations... [These] authors pride themselves on how science advances in understanding over time, and also on how moral thinking becomes in some ways deeper and more demanding. They do not give any attention to the ways in which [magical] understanding also grows, develops, and evolves... It hardly dawns upon them that [witches and warlocks] have been, from the very beginning, in constant--and mutually enriching--dialogue with [skeptics]... The path of modern science was made straight and smooth by deep convictions that every stray element in the world of human experience--from the number of hairs on one's head to the lonely lily in the meadow--is thoroughly known to [the Devil and his familiars] and, therefore, lies within a field of intelligibility, mutual connection, and multiple logics. All these odd and angular levels of reality, given arduous, disciplined, and cooperative effort, are in principle penetrable by the human mind... [Skepticism] cannot be true, because it is self-contradictory. Moreover, this self-contradiction is willful, and its latent purpose is pathetically transparent. [Skeptics] want all the comforts of the rationality that emanates from rational [sorcery], but without personal indebtedness to [the supernatural]. That is why they allow themselves to be rationalists only part of the way down. The alternative makes them very nervous." --Michael Novak, National Review
"What's really bothersome is the suggestion that [witches] rarely question themselves while [skeptics] ask all the hard questions.... The [great warlock] Michael Novak's book "Belief and Unbelief" is a classic in self-interrogation. "How does one know that one's belief is truly in [Beelzebub]," he asks at one point, "not merely in some habitual emotion or pattern of response?" The problem with the neo-[skeptics] is that they seem as dogmatic as the dogmatists they condemn... But as Novak argued--in one of the best critiques of neo-[skepticism]--in the March 19 issue of National Review, "Questions have been the heart and soul of [conjuring] and [divination] for millennia."
--E.J. Dionne, The Washington Post
"The danger is that the aggression and hostility to [magic] in all its forms... deters engagement with the really interesting questions that have emerged recently in the science/[necromancy] debate. The durability and near universality of [witchcraft] is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking... Does [spell-casting] still have an important role in human wellbeing? ... If [sorcery] declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?... I suspect the New [Skeptics] are in danger of a spectacular failure. With little understanding and even less sympathy of why people increasingly use [the evil eye] in political contexts, they've missed the proverbial elephant in the room. These increasingly hysterical books may boost the pension... but one suspects that they are going to do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand." --Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian
Two more examples
here
Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2007 9:51 am
by Barbara Fitzpatrick
I wish these guys would quit perpetuating the Christian myth that satanism is the same thing as the polytheistic, more-or-less egalitarian, relatively animistic religion now being called Wicca. Satanism is the "strawman" Christians made up so that it was OK to kill off the members of their closest rival religion in Europe and replace it with their own version of a monotheistic, militant, and patriarchal form .
Harris has a point about the reviewers - they wouldn't say half the crap they do about the atheist books if the atheism in question was focused on some mythology other than their own.
Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 3:43 am
by Lawood
Barbara swings and it's a home run.
For a real look at witches and official church superstition see Huxley's "The Devils of Loudon." Incredible. It later was turned into a film done in Theater of Cruelty style, entitled "The Devils" directed by Ken Russell. It touches strongly on the political uses of witch hunts and the craziness of the period.
.
Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 9:08 am
by Dardedar
Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:I wish these guys would quit perpetuating the Christian myth that satanism is the same thing as the polytheistic, more-or-less egalitarian, relatively animistic religion now being called Wicca.
DAR
Where did he do that? What words should he have used (or avoided) when making his point? Harris never refers to satanism per se and he gives the clue that he is using the words "witchcraft," "the Devil," and "skeptic" in the old/classic (and very harmful) sense of these words when he says "Observe how much intellectual progress we have made in the last five hundred years."
Setting asside the warm, fuzzy and relatively harmless way wiccans use these words today (kind of like episcopals or unitarians talking about God now), I don't see how he could have made the points he wanted to make without using these words.
D.
Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 10:21 am
by Barbara Fitzpatrick
Because those of the Old Religion did not believe in the Devil, Satan, Beelzebub, or that entity by whatever name Christians wish to call him. Those are names/concepts of the Satanic strawman religion invented by priests. Sort like W's weapons of mass destruction or the Saddam-9/11 link. Whether or not those currently referred to as Wiccans were warm and fuzzy or violent and bloodthirsty is more than less unknowable, since they had to go underground and much of what was reported about them was written by their enemies (want to trust BushCo on life in Iran?), but none of their gods went by those names and the ONLY similarity between the Satanic strawman religion and the actual religion was that one of the major gods of the latter was horned.
Harris should have spoken of witches OR referenced devils being worshipped, or at least made clear he wasn't talking about one religion when mentioning both (Dawkins, when shooting at Buddhists, doesn't suggest they ARE christians, just that they are religious).
Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 5:22 pm
by Dardedar
Harris should have spoken of witches OR referenced devils being worshipped,
DAR
None of the reviews Harris played with mention anything being worshipped. I don't understand. You said:
"I wish these guys would quit perpetuating the Christian myth that satanism is the same thing as the polytheistic, more-or-less egalitarian, relatively animistic religion now being called Wicca."
Where did Harris do this? And, are you saying there is not an overlap in belief and religious practice among the people that consider themselves wiccans and those who consider themselves satanists?
I like wiccans largely because they piss Christians off and are helpful on church state separation issues. Before we had a regular meeting location we had a meeting at a wiccans home and they gave the main presentation. It seems to me that wiccans use these old terms in question as props for some pretty squishy new age beliefs/claims. At their core they seem to be mostly humanist and I am glad they are there.
Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 9:40 am
by Barbara Fitzpatrick
Oh, the new "wiccans" are pretty much anything they want to be - and yes, predominently humanist with pretty stage makeup. My brother-in-law, who is one, generally uses the term neo-pagan rather than wiccan, but that's pretty much what he told me, and I've seen no reason to disbelieve him. However, I also know a "traditional" practitioner of the Old Religion (her family has handed it down on the distaff side for 10 generations that she know of - which takes us back to the "burning times") who has been kind enough to explain some of it to me.
No, there was no overlap between the followers of the Old Religion (because of the neo-wiccans, I have a problem using the term wiccan for the original practitioners) and satanism. Satanism was invented by the christian power elite (priests and bishops) mostly by taking christian rites and teachings and reversing them. Then, they took a characature of one of the Old Religion gods and labeled it "Satan" to convince the christian laity that these were folks who were out to kill christians and destroy christianity, and must be killed or converted (or both) in self defense. It really was very like what the neocons did to convince gullible Americans that we had to "pre-emptively" attack Iraq. And even more deadly. There are still Iraqis out there and they are fighting back as best they can. There are very few "hereditary witches" out there - at least ones who will admit it.
As to none of the reviews mentioning worship - well, specifically true (the word worship does not appear in any of the three "reviews"), but worship and belief in are more or less the same thing in religious context and the Dionne review specifically mentions belief in Beelzebub and the Novak review 1st sentence addresses witchcraft, while the 2nd addresses the "atheist" ideas about the Devil. And the Bunting review throws necromancy in there, which is part of satanism, but most assuredly not of the Old Religion.