Dawkins, Hitchens and Atheism

The following is part of a correspondence with CFRB radio host John Moore regarding his interview with author Richard Dawkins, Sept 30.

Hello John.
I have great admiration for the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. My only problem is this notion that they are doing something incredibly important and daring by using their lofty intellects to draw conclusions about religion that have been drawn many times before, and which most of us in fact figured out for ourselves sometime before the end of high school. Do we really need Richard Dawkins to tell us Moses probably didn't part the Red Sea and that talking snakes in magical gardens don't really exist? Has Christopher Hitchen's enlightened anyone by pointing out that virgins don't give birth and that people don't generally rise from the dead?

I was of the understanding that religious belief has been on a steady and precipitous decline in the West for decades.....yet the way these guys are strutting around, parading their earth-shattering "insights" to the masses, one would think that we live in a time of widespread, intransigent, Biblical literalism.
The Biblical literalists don't think so! So why do the atheists?

Regards,

Michael Harris


Part 2:

Thanks John. All very fair points. I have never heard that stat about the number of people who dispute proven science such as Darwinian evolution to be approaching half the population. Yikes.
If you would indulge me briefly, I would just add that Dawkins and Hitchens use their rational/modern vantage point to give pre-rational/pre-modern spirituality yet another justly deserved thrashing. But would you not agree that ultimately this is an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel? I mean, it's a pretty easy target. By contrast, I would find it fascinating if intellectual celebrities of their stature were to seriously take on the possibility of a post-rational spiritually....an evolutionary development that transcends yet includes the previous developments of pre-modern, modern and post modern.
Sam Harris, incidentally, did in fact touch on this at the end of his book The End Of Faith. I found that very refreshing and felt it distinguished him from the comparatively calcified atheism represented by Dawkins and Hitchens that tends to throw the spiritual baby out with the mythic bathwater.

As you say, we should welcome and commend such prominent and well equipped warriors as Dawkins and Hitchens in the battle against those who would champion the dominance of a first century, middle eastern mythology over the modern scientific method. But I cannot help but feel that the only people they are really reaching are those who already share their perspective. Even though I acknowledge their gallantry in taking up the fight nonetheless, they still are not adding anything particularly new to a debate that has persisted since the Enlightenment. And the dynamic continues to be framed in the exact same predictable way: the absoluteness of Christian/ Judaic/ Islamic orthodoxy versus the absoluteness of scientific-materialistic orthodoxy. To me, this simply reinforces our lazy cultural assumption that there are no other ways to conceive of these profound subjects.

But to be honest, I enjoy making lazy assumptions as much as the next guy - so what the hell am I whining about?

All the best,

Michael Harris

Response to Feminism Revisited; National Post, Sept.29

The following is part of a correspondence with Michael Coren in response to his column "Feminism Revisited" in the National Post, September 29.

I read your column in Tuesday's National Post concerning Erin Pizzey's apparent dramatic re-assessment of feminist orthodoxy with great interest. I immediately thought of the work of Warren Farrell and his book "Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?" Farrell was a prominent and celebrated figure in the feminist movement during the 70's in America who, like Pizzey, became a strong critic of the feminist agenda.
As the only man in the US to be elected three times to the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, and as the author of the decidedly pro-feminist book "The Liberated Man", Farrell found himself in high demand on the lecture circuit.
However, he describes that when he began including the male perspective into his addresses, the applause and invitations to speaking engagements quickly dried up. He says, "I did two articles that were accepted for Modern Maturity, one of the largest circulation magazines in the US. After the articles were accepted, edited and paid for, one feminist researcher objected to them and got Modern Maturity to drop both articles. And regarding the places like the New York Times in which I had published every single thing I had written when I was a feminist, since I have questioned feminism nothing I have written has been published. When I was doing the Donahue Show as a feminist, I was on seven times. I was on once where I deviated from the feminist position and I was never invited back."
Farrell asserts that "Men don't oppress women any more than women oppress men. The whole concept of men and women oppressing each other is ridiculous. That's a fabrication of the feminist movement. What is true is that both sexes have roles that can legitimately be considered oppressive, but those roles are not roles designed by men or women, they were designed by biological necessity and the necessity of survival. Survival was the oppressor. And in order to survive, you didn't teach people to focus on rights, you taught them to focus on responsibilities, you taught them to focus on obligations, which is why our grandparents listening to this discussion would be disgusted with us. And you have a nation of victims rather than a nation of entrepreneurs because you're focused on competing to be a better victim.
The biology of women in a survival-focused world was the child raising and that left the social role of men to raising the money to support the biological role of women. And it's not been until industrialized societies had enough income to help society progress from what I call a Stage 1, which is survival-focused to Stage 2, which is focused on the balance between survival and self-fulfilment, that we could produce people who were able to focus on what rights and opportunities they had.
But men did not have it all figured out and have a system of rules designed to oppress women. You could make a case that women taught men to play the role of chauffeur in life, that women sat in the back seat as mother and told us in the front seat in the uniforms to drive and we figured out the best way to get there without asking directions and the woman just fired us if we didn't do it right and continued to employ us if we did it right. You could make a case that women addicted men to their sexuality and then withdrew their sexuality until we provided them with a source of income. You could make a case that women figured out a way of brainwashing boys to earn money that the women spend to have better homes while we live out in the mines and construction sites and kill ourselves. You could do that but that would also be an incorrect masculinization and demonization of the female role. The truth is that neither sex had power. Both sexes had roles. Rather than raise children, men's role was to raise money. When you have a role, you have an obligation, you don't have power. Power is the ability to control your own life."

Though I personally find that he has a tendency to overplay his hand somewhat to make his point, he refutes commonly held "accepted truths" of feminism ( e.g. that men earn more money than women do for the same work; that women are more likely than men to be victims of violence; that men are more likely to commit spousal abuse than women; that women never have motivation to lie about rape etc.) with documented research and statistics.

The following is a link to a list of points from another book by Farrell called "The Myth Of Male Power."
http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/