The Dish

Simon Smart lauds Nick Spencer’s Atheists: The Origins of the Species, remarking that “the most challenging aspect of this work is the way it illuminates the inherently naïve optimism contained in New Atheism’s rendition of the ‘God is dead’ trope”:

While there has been no shortage of non-believers who viewed the demise of the divine as ushering in an era of untrammelled human progress, no less a figure than Friedrich Nietzsche understood the great shadow that would be cast across Europe if, as he hoped, the rejection of Christianity came to fruition. Such a move would signal the ruin of a civilisation, and he wrote about “the long dense succession of demolition, destruction, downfall, upheaval that now stands ahead.”

Something of a dark prophet, Nietzsche envisioned troubled times ahead – a prediction that the 20th century’s atheist regimes fulfilled with alarming efficiency. Nietzsche’s importance, writes Spencer, lies in his understanding that metaphysics and morals are inseparable. Nietzsche was under no illusion that you could hold on to Christian ethics – which he saw as degenerate slave mentality – while jettisoning the Christian faith.

In reply, PZ Myers expresses his exasperation with all the Nietzsche-love from believers:

And then Spencer and Smart drag out one of my pet peeves: Nietzsche. Not Nietzsche the philosopher, of course, but Nietzsche the dolorous atheist. Nietzsche the regretful non-Christian. Nietzsche the sorrowful, reluctant thinker who praises Jesus while weeping sincerely, and simultaneously predicting cultural cataclysm because we’re losing our faith. It’s the only atheist message the devout want to hear — if you’re going to abandon religion, at least be sure to stroke the pastor’s ego on your way out the door.

These guys always make Nietzsche sound like a 19th century S.E. Cupp, which is an awfully nasty insult to deliver to a guy you’re praising. …

You know what? Fuck the Christian cartoon Nietzsche. He’s wrong, he’s annoying, and I feel no obligation to respect his views of a lovely essential Christian dogma. Also, as noted above, if atheism is a reaction to false authority…why the hell do you think citing a philosopher who has been dead for over a hundred years will make us roll over and surrender? Nietzsche ain’t the atheist pope, either. Christians can keep trying to shoehorn atheism into obligatory tropes that they’re subject to, but all it does is convince us that Christians don’t know what they’re talking about.

Previous Dish on Nietzsche and atheism here, here, here, and here.

https://twitter.com/umamame/status/507385985076703232

Alice Robb flags some new research about the hijab and body image:

A study published in the August edition of the British Journal of Psychology suggests that the hijab actually offers some protection against the body dissatisfaction that plagues many Western women.

A team of psychologists, led by Malaysian-born British psychologist Viren Swami at the UK’s University of Westminster, interviewed 587 Muslim women in London, 369 of whom regularly wore some sort of hijab. Their ages ranged from 18 to 70; the mean age was 27. The majority – about 79 percent – were unmarried, and they represented several ethnic groups – Bengali, Pakistani, Indian, and Arab. More than three-quarters held an undergraduate degree.

Swami and his team gave the women several tests to measure their attitudes toward their bodies – and the women who wore Western dress scored higher on every scale of body dissatisfaction. When subjects were asked to look at several sketches of women’s bodies and pick the one they would most like to have, the choices of the women who wore the hijab more closely resembled the bodies they actually possessed. On a measure of “drive for thinness” – determined by answers to questions about preoccupation with body weight, fear of becoming fat, and excessive concern with dieting – women who didn’t wear the hijab scored, on average, 3.58 out of 6 points, compared to 2.87 for women who cover up. Women who wore Western dress also registered a higher degree of “social physique anxiety,” or concern with how others perceived their physical appearance: 3.26, versus 2.92, on the 6-point scale.

Previous Dish on veiling and beauty standards here.

Nigel Biggar praises Karen Armstrong’s forthcoming book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, as “a magisterial debunking of the secularist tale” that claims “religion is essentially and uniquely generative of division and violence.” A run down of why she finds that tale too simple:

Armstrong’s corrective, complicating history includes a number of nicely water-muddying, stereotype-confounding details. For example, in the so-called Wars of Religion, Protestants and Catholics not infrequently fought on the same side against imperial forces: in its final phase, during the Thirty Years War, Catholic France came to the rescue of Protestant Sweden. Second, whereas that famous son of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves, the inspiration for the abolitionist movement was originally and predominantly Christian. Third, the first genocide of the 20th century was committed by zealous secularists, the Young Turks, against (Christian) Armenians. Fourth, it was the Tamil Tigers, a non-religious, nationalist movement, which pioneered suicide bombing, and most suicide bombing in Lebanon during the 1980s was performed by secularists. Fifth, so deep-rooted were the habits of coexistence between Christians and Muslims in Bosnia that, during the 1990s, it took the Communist Slobodan Milošević three years of relentless nationalist propaganda to turn the former against the latter. Sixth, James Warren Jones, the instigator of the infamous Jonestown massacre in 1978, was not a religious zealot but a self-confessed atheist, who ridiculed conventional Christianity. Next, Ayatollah Khomeini’s critique of the regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s has much in common with Pope John XXIII’s contemporaneous critique of unfettered capitalism. And finally, what is striking about the 9/11 bombers is not how much they knew about Islam, but how little.

Ian Bell, however, points to questions that he believes Armstrong leaves unanswered:

What is it about humanity that allows it to receive and accept messages of love and compassion yet use faith in such precepts to justify mass murder? Freudian hokum invoking the trinity of id, ego and superego might once have been called upon. Armstrong prefers neuro-anatomy and a near-Marxist account of elites, class, oppression and exploitation.

“Each of us,” she writes, “has not one but three brains which co-exist uneasily.” We acquired this collection at various stages of evolution. The oldest is a reptilian remnant, utterly self-interested; the second, the limbic system, allows empathy; the youngest, acquired perhaps 20,000 years ago as the neocortex or “new brain”, grants us self-awareness. We can stand back, as Armstrong puts it, from our primitive instincts. We can also be imbued with faith and utterly murderous.

This is neat. It is also, for the sake of an argument, convenient. Armstrong understands religion in terms of the human search for – indeed, need for – meaning. Most of the major faiths make larger claims to do with a deity and absolute, eternal truth. If that is what is going on, surely the ugly, insistent claims of our buried “old brain” would be overwhelmed. It might be a mistake to claim, crudely, that religion causes war. But to put the question in the context of a fine and eloquent book: why has the impulse to faith failed to suppress our brutish taste for warfare?

A new Pew study finds that the Internet hasn’t totally eroded the reading habits of Generation Y:

Millennials, like each generation that was young before them, tend to attract all kinds of ire from their elders for being superficial, self-obsessed, anti-intellectuals. But a study … from the Pew Research Center offers some vindication for the younger set. Millennials are reading more books than the over-30 crowd, Pew found in a survey of more than 6,000 Americans.

Some 88 percent of Americans younger than 30 said they read a book in the past year compared with 79 percent of those older than 30. At the same time, American readers’ relationship with public libraries is changing—with younger readers less likely to see public libraries as essential in their communities.

Meanwhile, Susan J. Matt, author of Homesickness: An American History, defends the 22 percent of adults in their 20s and 30s who live with their parents. The idea that young adults should leave home, she argues, only took off in the 20th century:

By mid-century, experts were arguing that tightly bonded families were out of place in America. Sociologist W. Lloyd Warner explained that because the economy required individuals to move frequently, “families cannot be too closely attached to their kindred. . . or they will be held to one location, socially and economically maladapted.” Those who tried to maintain strong kin ties were criticized. In 1951, psychiatrist Edward Strecker, preoccupied with the Cold War and the need for a mobile fighting force, accused American mothers of keeping their “children enwombed psychologically,” failing to “untie the emotional apron string … which binds her children to her.” He dubbed these women the nation’s “gravest menace.”

Today, we continue to believe young adults should leave home. When they don’t, their living choices are chalked up to poor employment prospects. While economic realities surely play a part in their residential choices, the media give short shrift to other motives. The idea that families might be drawn together by feelings of affection is left out of the equation, as is the possibility that this generation wants to become something other than mobile individualists. Yet there’s considerable evidence that millennials hold values that center more on family and less on high powered careers. A recent poll found them far less concerned with financial success than the population at large. They also are closer to their parents, whom they fight with less, and talk with more than earlier generations.