The 'wankers' tag is going to make Google send some people to this tread who will end up very disappointed.

I'm on a boat!

Suddenly I wonder if you are motivated to not get thrown out of the lifeboat.

[appropriate tags added]

Nice way to settle it.

Also change the name of this thread to Atheism and Social Lettuce or I will have to make another thread.

I can't possibly match Elemenope philosophical argument's eloquence or elegance.
I declare myself bested.

<('.'<) (^'.'^) (>'.')

This the part where you dance.

LOL!

Ok.
We are agreeing on this.
How boring.

The problem is when they are used as rhetorical hammer against logic to discredit, show off or belittle, without any intent to generate more ideas.

Quite so. This was the philosophy-as-advocacy that I was complaining about. There are lots of ways to defend one's world-view from all comers, if you're willing to set the rules in such a way that you never lose. A person can certainly use the form of philosophical inquiry and ignore its purpose, but what they aren't doing then is inquiry, but as you say rather, wankery.

Indeed, I do recognize the usefulness of religious, superstitious and cooks for they continue to challenge our ideas.
It is not flattering to philosophers that they absolve the same function as the above groups.

The difference between them is the care put into the attempt. It's the difference between alchemy and chemistry, or astrology and astronomy. They have the same objects of concern, but their effectiveness is different because their ends are not the same and even more importantly their processes are not of the same quality.

I (think I) understand your point about provocation.
But when you mix together humans and theory, the result is different.
Random provokation just for the sake of showing off is not really productive, but rather an attempt to put oneself on an unassailable rethorical pedestal.
And I have no delusion that does not also apply to "scientists".

The problem is not the dwelling in thought experiment per se.
"What-if"s are awesome.
The problem is when they are used as rethorical hammer against logic to discredit, show off or belittle, without any intent to generate more ideas.

The forward-facing part of science can make a lot of statements about the data and the evidence available, and still be accurate.
I could make some significant point corrections to a friend of mine about quantum physics, a subject where my understanding is rather incomplete.

In the cases above "for the purposes of the exercise" was left out because the speaker was making definite statements about reality.

Indeed, I do recognize the usefulness of religious, superstitious and cooks for they continue to challenge our ideas.
It is not flattering to philosophers that they absolve the same function as the above groups.

In short, philosophy has meaning and method, but philosophers are largely wankers.

LOL! Well, I'd dispute it, except it's true.

I think, though, that this mistakes the intent of part of the philosophical method that is very different from the intent of the scientific method, and one of the consequent reasons why people trained heavily in one have such a difficult time addressing claims in the other. This problem becomes especially acute when a philosopher is trying to articulate to a scientist a criticism of science itself.

Both science and philosophy need, in order to work, to estrange humans from themselves in a particular way. Scientists need to let go of their intuitions, in large part, in order to regard evidence with an effective simulation of objectivity. In a sense, you could think about it as straining the human out of the science, the goal being depersonalization, of achieving a truthful narrative that depends only on physical facts and not at all upon the person compiling them. This is a necessary adjunct to the scientific method because scientists are inescapably human, and so its structures must seek to minimize the consequences of this unfortunate fact.

A philosopher runs into a conundrum not present in the activity of science when they seek to reach the same goal. That is, roughly, that because their object is the structure of concepts themselves, attempts to depersonalize their investigation render them inoperative and inert entirely. This is because language itself is a subjective tool that assumes persons. Heck, the very notion of concepts implies that they are the objects of consideration of some entity. So, the philosopher, in order to achieve the same goal as the scientist's depersonalization and pretension of objectivity, must go about it in a different way; the philosopher is more properly fucked than the scientist by the unfortunate condition of being human.

The best way I can describe it would be to borrow a bit from Brecht and his idea of Verfremdungseffekt, the "distancing effect". The basic idea is that the philosopher must alienate themselves from their own concepts, so that there is enough distance to regard them critically. What seems to be obvious and self-evident must still be questioned. More radically, though, it means that one must assume that each idea rests itself upon unspoken assumptions; the job becomes to make the unspoken spoken and then subjecting those assumptions in turn to the same process, until one is left staring at the irreducible axioms that undergird the whole idea. Only once you know and have identified all the assumptions one has made when forwarding a claim can a person be (provisionally) confident that they haven't smuggled their own prejudices unwittingly into the argument.

The only way to consistently achieve this alienation is by radical provocation. One of the reasons philosophers seem like (and to some extent, are) wankers is that they are constantly exploring what seem to be ridiculous flights-of-fancy. What if the universe popped into being five seconds ago? What if there were a god (with X, Y, Z features)? What if existence is utterly dependent upon perception? What if, what if, and so forth. The point of exploring absurdities and provisionally endorsing them is to see whether what we assume retains its integrity given other factors we can't exclude, no matter how improbable, especially since philosophers do not have the luxury of considering assumptions of probability to be reliable!

In practice, as I just alluded, this makes philosophers doing philosophy sound rather insane. The problem is compounded by the fact that, though they are attempting to do similar things, the outward appearance of the scientific and philosophical practice makes them seem almost utterly opposite. A scientist is (rightly!) rather marked down by his or her peers for injecting wild speculation and personal provocation into their work, because the progress of science depends on pretending that that part of human nature should have no purchase. So a person trained in that method confronted with a person trained as a philosopher is, at their most charitable, going to assume the philosopher is rather drunk.

This comes full circle when the philosopher points out the most uncomfortable fact of all: science, as a practice, claims towards seeking truth (and not merely being useful), and so its method and its practice itself must be analyzed and dissected and challenged; it cannot be left as assumed, and it cannot be directly inferred from the fact that science is useful, as usefulness is not a reliable indicator of truth. You can't use science for this (using science to study the activity of science) because doing so assumes its own conclusion no matter how the investigation turns out. A philosopher and a scientist having this conversation are likely to not get very far unless they understand the methodology of the other, why it is undertaken, and what the shortcomings of each are.

You say: "Electron" is not only a word, is a concept described by physics. If someone attributes wrong properties to an electron, I can correct those, because it is a very accurate concept, there is no ambiguity.

This is actually the very essence of what philosophers (often in vain) try to point out about science: That it is not unitary in practice. That the social narrative that science tells about it's own method and practice match only part of the actual doings of science and critically do not match the practice of science as it goes through critical stages of change from one dominant paradigm to another. When philosophers (and intrepid sociologists) actually bothered to peer at science as it undergoes a major convalescence from one overarching notion to another, what they found instead was a chaotic mess.

Bruno Latour, in "Science in Action", used a rather evocative image of the Head of Janus to describe the character of science in its contradictory modes. One face was the face of "ready-made-science", that is, science whose objects, structures, and models were rather for the moment settled. That is the face of science that can utter statements much like "'Electron' is not only a word, is a concept described by physics. If someone attributes wrong properties to an electron, I can correct those, because it is a very accurate concept, there is no ambiguity." Pointedly, the only reason you can do this is that "electron" has been settled in essential respects in the domain of subatomic physics. The other face of science is the face of "science-in-action", that is, science that is trying to struggle free from a prior dominant conception whose defects have become obvious and articulate a new model. That face of science is incapable, at a fundamental level, of making any statement akin to your example, because it is mired in the deeply human, deeply social business of how scientists as humans come to sort out productive paradigms once a field has gone into crisis.

Scientists have trouble admitting this portion of the critique precisely because the whole of their practice is predicated on their ability to strain out the human side, but when people actually bothered to check what happens, it turns out that this human side of the business is the most decisive element in predicting the narrative of how science goes forward from that point. Scientists have to act as though their practice proceeds with some decent approximation of objectivity even especially when that isn't the case at all. Now, only a very sloppy philosopher (a student, natch) would go on to actually seriously conclude that all this makes philosophy in any way superior to science; but it can be understood as a provocation set up against the natural assumption that science is superior to other methods of analysis. If a person can't do that, they can't be said to have truly investigated the actual strengths and weaknesses of science at all. If anything, your poor (drunk?) interlocutor is making a similar mistake as what happens in sociology, where for the purposes of sociology one should assume moral parity for different cultures, to the reification of that thought to an actual demand that a person can't outside of sociology come to consider some culture's approaches to universal human dilemmas as better than others. "For the purposes of the exercise" is very easily a term that gets left out of the conversation somehow, especially when it is essential for it to be left in and stated boldly.

One way in which a philosopher can fail to be a good philosopher is to fail to examine some deeply cherished notion sufficiently; it sounds like your teacher bellowing about the Pope and the Reich simply failed to get her Catholicism out of her way in considering the moral complexion of the facts as they presented themselves. There's no cure for that but to point it out. Philosophy is a powerful tool, such that the temptation is to use it for advocacy rather than exploration. Philosophers face here a rather similar temptation as scientists.

Also, and this point cannot be minimized, philosophy's social role, much like science's social role, is partially separate from its practice. Plantinga once snarked rather harshly about philosophy departments functioning as a graveyard for silly has-been scientific ideas and dumb defeated arguments ("Hey, look, they even have a Whiteheadian!"), because it is the only place where, due to its method, it can be properly tolerated and contained. This social role goes in hand with the goal of exposing ideas to rash, radical criticism.

I mean, how confident can you be in a notion unless there's someone around with a different perspective to take a whack at its more fundamental premises? Scientists claim they do this for themselves, but in most circumstances they are nibbling at the edges-- the "helper hypotheses"--while leaving the main assumptions mostly unexamined. Perhaps the existence of one idiot creationist or other is beneficial for the health of evolution as a paradigm. It is only unhealthy when the idiots win the social argument and convince the society proper that they have a point. That is, in turn, an unhappy consequence of the scientific method making scientists rather hobbled advocates of their own ideas; to pretend towards objectivity makes it rather hard to argue, because the assumption has to be that the conclusion points to itself and needs no help of argument! Popularizers of science dance on the edge of a razor when squaring that circle (as they must when defending science to a hostile society), though the real work of that should be done not by scientists nor philosophers but by teachers.

LOL, probably what I wrote ended up being harder than I wanted, now the very minimum I can do is to read the whole papyrus 'Nope wrote... I went for it.

I find your explanation very clear and I find no trouble agreeing with most of it.
Still, the translation from 'philosopher' to 'wanker' is not something I decided to do, but something that arose sua sponte from experience; unfortunately this makes it harder for me to pinpoint exactly why.

The first debate I had on Evolution was with my philosophy teacher.
His argument was "We can say that all species suddenly appeared all together".
(He wasn't even religious).
The OTHER philosophy professor WAS religious.
In history class she showed us a shitty, old, blurred cyclostyle of the Pope leaving the Reichstag or something and yelled at us "Does the Pope look like he negotiated with Hitler?"
Then I met this student of philosophy... I don't remember the details, but we started a conversation and she was showing off by dismembering the meaning of the words I was using, words that had a very real and down-to-Earth practical meaning.
Then a friend of mine discussing the superiority of philosophy over science but getting angry whenever I would use technical words... I like to think he was just drunk.

And yes, what about many of those "philosophers" that attack the unreligion movement?
Have you read their articles?

I understand your rant.
But, I think you overlooked a major point.

"Electron" is not only a word, is a concept described by physics.
If someone attributes wrong properties to an electron, I can correct those, because it is a very accurate concept, there is no ambiguity.
Words, on the other hand, change and their meaning is given by those that use them.
If I use a word, you are not going to tell me that that word doesn't mean that because you and your friends decided so or that in another context it means something different.
If you can't see that the meaning I am giving to a word is accurate within the context, you are just too self-absorbed to actually have meaningful communication with the rest of us mammals.
Bitching about concepts and bitching about words is different.

In short, philosophy has meaning and method, but philosophers are largely wankers.

@FO

I've thought about your comment for a while, despairing of any approach to even responding. As the kiddies say these days, often painfully ironically, "What is this I don't even...".

Let me give it a shot anyway.

We tend to value the scientific approach over many other approaches in interrogating physical reality, but one great strength towers above many others: its superiority over the naive intuitive approach. Our intuitions bend us towards expecting that what we see is what we get, that our senses are reliable, that our anecdotal experiences can be extrapolated to universal truths. Science is, crucially, a method that rejects intuition as a proper approach in favor of poking the damn thing being studied with a stick, dissecting it till its insides are laid open for examination, of checking under many different conditions to see if something truly holds true over many cases, rather than extrapolating from the singular or the handful. Those of us who believe that the method of science is superior do so because it shows where the error in those intuitions lie, such that we can look past them to discover and apply more effective methods. We get to the truth of physical matters by rejecting our initial assumptions and digging at that truth with sharper tools and more careful methods.

And that's hard enough.

It is difficult in the extreme to tell people to ignore what their senses and experiences tell them is true in favor of more careful examination. It is counter-intuitive, it runs against all initial instinct. We all, here, have personally experienced or at least observed being experienced the utter frustration of showing someone who is bent upon taking their prior lessons and personal experiences for granted as superior to scientific investigation of how the world actually works. This is because we must in the vast majority of our lives rely utterly on our confidence in our senses, the lessons of our experience, merely to navigate through the world without getting dead. Our instincts are exceptionally good at mitigating the dangers of the world by heavily incentivizing us to take our intuitions seriously and act upon them immediately. This is what the science-explainer is fighting against when they are desperately (and usually vainly) trying to convince a person that what works so well in navigating life is not nearly as good at exposing truth.

Now, imagine that task made infinitely more difficult, because your object of study is not the sense-data that inform people's thoughts, notions, and ideas, but rather the actual content and structure of those ideas themselves.

This is the basic task of the philosopher.

Science has a method which helps to bolster our confidence in its ability to see past our deeply-held intuitions and penetrate to the actual facts of the matter. Two critical elements of that method are rigor and peer-review. Philosophy likewise employs a method that emphasizes these two elements as components. Nothing and nobody is exempted from dissection. Unlike scientists, however, philosophers are left with a rather smaller number of tools, since probing a concept involves poking at a rather more elusive target. Since concepts, as humans experience them, are composed of words, the one thing more than anything else that a philosopher has to be careful of is the use of words. They are, along with logic, the only tools that a philosopher has to poke at a concept, to see what its insides look like, to expose it to scrutiny.

Somewhat as a result, you'll find no group of people more concerned with "words meaning things" than philosophers. Even lawyers and writers, groups ostensibly quite concerned with words, are concerned with them only as means to other ends (conveying experiences real or imagined, or gaining tactical advantage), rather than as an end-in-themselves. Of course, there are philosophers who are, comparatively, better or worse at this than others, just as there are good or rather bad scientists. And nobody's perfect by any means. Nonetheless, you'll find no greater allies anywhere if you're concerned that words be maintained as a sharp tool to convey concepts than you will in a philosopher.

I noticed early on in my education that philosophy is distrusted and spat upon by a lot of people. None more so, though, in my experience, than among "active" (that is, not apatheistic) atheists. Your "...whenever my brain hears the word 'philosopher' it automatically translates it as 'wanker'..." is a sentiment quite at home in the circles we both travel in. It would be hard to express just how much that depresses me, because all too often it means that people are voluntarily cutting themselves off from actually discussing the very concepts they rely upon and traffic in on a regular basis. It also means that they persist in simple errors of reasoning and are utterly not amenable to correction. The philosopher asks people to distrust what they think a concept actually implies the same way a scientist asks people to distrust what they think a sense-experience implies, but if anything people are less up to distrusting their intuitions about concepts--or really even trying it tentatively--than they are to distrusting their very eyes. It is a uncomfortable, often deeply unpleasant and disturbing, task that most people would simply rather not undertake, even if cursorily.

Worse, though, is that people easily take the unexamined concept as the "true" one, when in fact it is sloppy and poorly formed, and when you poke it even a bit with logic or with more careful language its apparent structure collapses into conceptual glop. How "people actually on Earth" use words is about as useful, in rigorous examination, as the lay opinion of what an electron or a star is to a scientist. People jealously guard these sloppy chimeras of thought and are insulted and incredulous when a pesky philosopher points out a smuggled assumption or a hidden implication. This should be taken as no sign that the so-called "real world" use of the word is superior in elucidating truth than a more careful usage. Quite the contrary. I have never understood why, if effective interrogation of physical reality resists so utterly being intuited and democratized, why people believe so strenuously that investigation in other areas ought to be. What you're essentially arguing for is that we take more seriously the "No socialized medicine - don't touch my Medicare!" sign-wielding idiot's definition of socialism than that of a political scientist, an economist, a historian, or a philosopher. That is, after all, how people are trafficking in the term in the trenches of "the real world". Does that seem like a good idea to you? In every discipline one finds many words which have been re-purposed from the general language to mean something rather more nuanced and specific, and it is quite acceptable for experts when discussing that discipline to insist on that meaning rather than the general one.

If I had to hazard a guess on why this general attitude of disdain is so prevalent, it might be that philosophy--if it is taught at all--is taught more as "the history of philosophy (and we'll throw logic in there to bore you!)". Students are presented with the trajectory of tried-and-discarded ideas and methods, much like if they taught science by starting with Aristotle's physics and then only after students had internalized it pointed out that it was mostly wrong, and then moving progressively down the ages with other discarded and since-improved attempts to explain similar phenomena. There is much in the history of science that, from the benefit of our hindsight, is beyond silly. Such as it is with philosophy, and yet somehow we've figured out that presenting a subject at its worst is not exactly the best way to inculcate a sense of value when it comes to science, but not so much with philosophy.

It is no wonder when we spend inordinate amounts of time making fun of Descartes' musings on the function of the pineal gland as the seat of the soul, people can easily laugh off his rather profound and historically significant insights about epistemology and the quest for certainty. It would be like spending all of class time making fun of Newton's absolute space and absolute time as wrong in lieu of studying what his investigations got right. Rather, it bears pointing out that Descartes' musings on the pineal gland made it nowhere in philosophy except as an amusing historical footnote, whereas his investigation of certainly led to fallibilism as an acceptable goal in epistemology, which is the foundational epistemological stance undergirding all of science. Newton's ideas on absolute space and time were discarded and replaced by inertial frames of local reference and spacetime, but his other discoveries in physical mechanics and descriptions of regularities and physical laws are still crucial to classical mechanics as a sub-discipline of physics, much less mentioning optics.

I realize this is turning into what I imagine was a rather unexpected rant, but this stuff has been bothering me rather a lot lately, with many more people than you all too happy to tell me that they feel free to ignore philosophy or perversely express pride that they don't understand it, and then use that as sufficient justification to dismiss a criticism of how a concept is used or how an argument is presented. To me, this behavior is about as laudable as that of the person who stands up loudly and says they trust their own eyes and ears over what the scientist tells them reality is like. That is to say, not at all. Perhaps worse, since at least the creationist and the flat-earther try to explain away the results of investigation. The person who hates philosophy feels satisfied in the task of refutation simply by wholesale rejection, the colloquial equivalent of meeting an argument with "nuh-uh! [raspberry]" and calling it done.

/rant

I did a little research onto how much I'd need to adjust if I were to move to Norway, and I didn't like it. There's kind of this idea where if you are comfortable vs. where you are free. I don't buy that I've had all this time to concoct a terror plot just because I am currently on the state's dime. An opposing argument may suggest that labor drives some people to the brink and take violence to their workplace. However, the state doesn't give me a whole lot to work with. The thinking here is that if it worked much better, nobody would leave, and how it is now sorts people into sincerely needy and merely unmotivated. I have thought many times that this is really too difficult - it might just be easier to get a job. That's how hard being on welfare is. There aren't a lot of systems in place to move me from a person who is needy to a taxpayer. It's not efficient or well-organized. I would rather use a good system for a short time than be on a bad system forever.

Anyway, the systems of a more socialized nation tend to be regarded as making people less free. It is like, if you could get any job there is and pay more of it than you're used to so you can stay at a hotel, and drive whatever car they say, but also have your medical care completely off your mind, you would be less free. When I had a job I felt less free, though. Capitalism isn't "choices" - your choices are eat or don't eat. When I had money coming in and an obligation to be somewhere every day, I wasn't particularly motivated to keep my feelers out for a more rewarding job where I felt like I was giving my best to a cause or organization who deserved that much of my time, and it's hard to find many people who leverage their time and talents successfully - if you have a job, you're probably in a rut and it's a comfortable rut. The motivation is simply not to lose the good enough gig you have in hand than to do anything else. What is the difference between working somewhere and being on welfare as far as what capitalism offers that socialism does not?

You are kept busy by busy work in order to get your cookie vs. just getting a cookie.

The value of this over all other values in an idealistic version of capitalism, where you can at least pretend we're motivated to build sky scrapers, be an office pirate, and start cookie-baking businesses in our kitchens, is kind of ridiculous. Wake up. Capitalism is a system where the option is still there, someday, but depends on the good, hard worker who doesn't try to get free.

Now, with all the respect I have for you, 'Nope, whenever my brain hears the word "philosopher" it automatically translates it as "wanker", as in someone that juggles with the meaning of words pretending to ignore that down on Earth those words describe specific concepts, and I feel that you have not been immune to this.

More to the matter, I think that what the uhm... "anti-religious movement" is fighting for is to change how we understand things and how we think, how we decide what is true and what false.
This will help us collect and evaluate facts, but doesn't tell us much about how to proceed from there.
I don't see much overlap with social justice and economics.

I agree with you so far as it goes, that words are only containers that we fill with meaning. But some of those meanings are hard-won. I think we lose an inestimable amount--basically, our ability to situate any of what transpires now in any sort of coherent historical context--by relinquishing our demand that words mean things.

Besides, I think looking to the current state of political discourse in any age is precisely the last place to look for a word's meaning. In politics, often the only object is rhetorical supremacy, and the best easiest means to this is the twisting of words into their antonyms and beyond. That is word as weapon, rather than word as description. It bears no reltion to the continuity of a word as describing a set of ideas and their travel throughout that history. That "No socialized medicine - don't touch my Medicare!" is fatuous almost beyond sane comprehension is neither here nor there in acknowledging that the word socialism has a meaning and that applying the ideas it contains to real world contexts can yield more than ephemeral results. I think you correctly suggest that every real world application is a smattering of theory, mainly because in order to work in real conditions any theory must be welded with a great amount of pragmatic compromise and soldered to more than a wee bit of political exigency. Nonetheless, it is useful to be able to say "the economy of the United States is [in X, Y, Z ways] less socialist than Sweden's" or perhaps even more importantly "the economy of China today seems more capitalist than it did thirty years ago". These are not fatuous statements precisely because we have ideas with labels to which these real-world examples can be compared.

Well, Nope, my gut reaction is to say that labels are inherently empty and exchangeable. Labels, and words in general for that matter, are simply containers - they only have what meaning we decide to give them. While I'm sure that for scholars of the subject terms like capitalist and socialist are meaningful, the fact is that in the general political discourse they've become so debased as to be completely meaningless. I mean, how many people will seriously say, "No socialized medicine - don't touch my Medicare!" without any notion of just how ironic - or funny - that statement is?

Besides, as a practical matter, has *any* modern society ever made their economy work well without both socialistic and capitalistic elements? As far as I can see, trying to make a "pure" economy of either variety is about on a level with trying to build a perpetual motion machine. Like I said, when ideology comes up against reality, ideology goes "Boom!"

This comes up particularly often with Harris and philosophy. He's a good scientist, but rather a dilettante philosopher, but seems often to expect the acclaim that his science background grants him on opining about science to be transitive to his rather less well-formed philosophical (esp. ethical) notions.

But this itself is not sufficient, for there are several subjects (politics, economics, and philosophy) which intersect rather quite a lot with many others, and just as often operate upon matters of universal concern. It's difficult even for an amateur to avoid having a rather decided personal opinion about any of them. I only object to when that opinion is presented as if it were from an expert in those fields, as opposed to an expert in another field venturing a tentative opinion outside their domain of expertise. It is right and proper for anyone who sees, ahem, the violence inherent in a system to call out the oppression that they observe, but it is important for them to be amenable to correction on where a subject veers into counter-intuitive territory (as all explorations of the expert end of a subject do).

I'm not sure that it's compulsory for somebody who has strong feelings about the unfairness of a given system (religion) to also have similar feelings about another system (economics). Dawkins, for example, maybe be well qualified to destroy a Young Earth Creationist, but that doesn't automatically make him an economist, or a financial liberal.

My objection to this line of reasoning is that it is actually important to track the history and amendments over time to an idea in order to fully understand that idea. Capitalism as it is practiced today differs in important respects from the systems and ideas that Smith and Ricardo described, but it bears so many similarities that to name it such is not fatuous. Socialism is much harder to track in this respect, not least because there are many, many diverse (and contradictory) sources of thought that feed into the family of ideas appropriately characterized as socialism. Nonetheless, when a person cognizant of that history describes a system as "socialist" they are intending to say something a great deal more than merely the assignment of an empty or exchangeable label. That these things buckle and change, I think, is no good excuse to discard the terms, as the terms still have utility (despite the best efforts of people who use them as empty epithets).

I think the fact that we're still talking about "capitalism," "socialism," and "communism" at all is pretty telling. To be blunt, they're just labels from a nineteenth century political fight. Try to picture people a century and a half from now throwing insults at each other along the lines of, "Tea Partier!" "Progressive!" "Beckite!" "Pelosist!" Why does anyone even remember what these terms mean? Err, actually, on second thought, for the most part people don't, do they?

Personally, I think that noblesse oblige is a good thing, and something we could do with a darn sight more of in the US. The last thing we need is to have more people start thinking of how we run the economy as a cosmic battleground between the forces of Good and Evil. Things built according to the dictates of ideology do not work. Ever. They either do nothing at all or blow up in your face. At its most basic level, the economy is simply a very large and complex distribution system. We know how to make those work. It's time to get the emotional and ideological BS out of economics and hire some engineers to make it actually work right.

Modern Communists will tell you that what happened in Russia/China/NK has nothing to do with communism but the label.
I tend to agree with them, but I'm still of the idea that communism would not be very practical.

A German friend of mine, born and raised in East Germany and despite all the persecution he suffered for being son of an evangelical pastor, was surprisingly neutral about the conditions before and after the fall of the Wall.
"Many things got better, many things got worse" he said.

My uninformed support (but I lived in Sweden for a year or so) goes to the Scandinavian model; is a nice blend of good capitalism and socialism.
I am puzzled by the fact that in the US "socialist" is used as an insult... O_O

This said, I don't think that weakening religion and economic/social justice have much in common.
I see the first just as means to education and unbiased thinking, which will improve our choices in everything, including the latter.
They are just different hierarchies or ideas.

I don't really see an avoidance of taking on economic justice issues in the atheist community. The gnu atheists, or whatever you want to call the 4 horsemen era of the movement, focused on religion since this was something that needed to be said publicly for a change, religion is not a benign influence, and on fighting for evidence based science education. These were a good choice for forming an atheist movement since unlike economic and social issues, the vast majority of atheists can line themselves behind the idea of keeping Ken Ham from writing the public schools biology textbooks.
As our movement matures it can now start taking on different issues in additional to the core atheist ones and the A+ thing is one avenue in which it can be done. the reason sexism is taking the front page is not so much because it's more or less important but probably due to the kind of misogynistic bile that floated to the surface in the last couple of years and was partially responsible to people like Jen McCreight feeling they need to build an alternative community.
Blot's comment illustrate another issue, it's hard to have a nuanced discussion of economic issue in internet forums so you often end up with a black and white view as if the only options are completely unregulated capitalism or Marxism instead of a full gradient between the two extreme positions where you can have a regulated free market as well as a social safety net with the amount of regulation varying for different segment of the economy rather then a one size fit none approach.

Atheism went the Marxist route once. I don't seem to recall it ending all that well... As LMNOP says, capitalism is "the worst form of economic arrangement, except for all the others".

The solution to the negative outcomes of global capitalism don't lie in rejecting capitalism, but in restructuring capitalist markets to minimise the likelihood of those outcomes; a shift from profit-maximisation to meaning-maximisation; Eudaimonia. It's a bit idealistic, but not unrealistic.

Check out http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2012/11/how_to_fix_your_soul.html and the companion howtofixtheworld.org.

You know, it's funny; as a rather committed capitalist (of the "it's the worst form of economic arrangement in the world except all the others" sort), it strikes me as odd that criticism is or should be absent from the square of rational argument. And yet, as you point out, it is, rather to the point of such criticism being anathemized. That sort of intolerance only usually crops up in two instances; when something is incontrovertibly true, or when something is likely not to be true but the people believing it are incapable of acknowledging the vast amounts of bad faith they have to apply to make their thoughts fall in order.

It's something to think about, on both ends.

Then again, I had recently some rather disturbing run-ins with the moral relativist end of the atheist set, and am not terribly keen on relying upon the community's ability to call what is evil, evil. So on that level, at least, you have a sharp point.

Interesting polemic at the Daily Beast on the lack of social justice as a core focus of the New Atheist movement. A little meandering in structure, and by no means is he saying that New Atheists are wrong to focus on religon and not the real religion running the United States and the world (Mammon)

"As the Marxist Terry Eagleton observes, there is something egregiously amiss when “[atheist] avatars of liberal Enlightenment like Hitchens, Dawkins, Martin Amis, Salmon Rushdie, and Ian McEwan have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam” and “most of them hardly mention the word ‘capitalism’ at all.” This “imperial atheism,” as author Jeff Sparrow calls it, is a quite pernicious phenomenon. As he has persuasively argued, the right-wing foreign policy and civil liberties positions of many within New Atheism’s core coterie are antithetical to the building of a leftist movement culture aimed at advancing social and economic justice."

"One more point about Harris needs to be made here. It is a fair guess, I think, that most people reading his inequality essays will get the impression that in arguing for a degree of wealth redistribution Harris is taking a noble moral stand. However, that is not at all clear. Read him carefully. Notice his use of language. The normative term “wrong” is never applied to inequality and the words “injustice,” “oppression,” and “unfair” never appear at all. His concerns are mostly pragmatic ones aimed at reversing or preventing certain destructive social and economic trends. While such concerns are certainly laudable, for the most part they seem to emerge from a sense of noblesse oblige rather than from any process of applied ethical deliberation. In general, when Sam Harris scans the American sociopolitical economic landscape he does not see injustice; he sees danger. A rather strange case of moral insensitivity, is it not, given that the man is a talented intellectual who published a whole book about morality just two years ago? What we seem to have here is an instructive lesson in just how insidiously privilege can wreak havoc on human moral sensibilities."

And this is even worse. She may be "brave" and speak truth to pwoer about religion, but her economic views are to the right of Newt Gingrich:

"A more troubling example of a classist New Atheist is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, best-selling author and the world’s most famous woman atheist. Hirsi Ali belongs to an economically conservative Dutch political party and is a visiting fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In 2008, an interviewer asked her the question “Is the free market responsible for class warfare?” Her answer was grotesque:

I will give you the example of the man who murdered Theo van Gogh, who [i.e. the murderer] was on welfare. Based on that principle, a 26-year-old, healthy young man, and what I took from that and I think what many Dutch people learned from that is he had the time to plot a murder, which in the United States he would not be. He would be busy trying to feed himself and find a roof over his head.

From her perch at the AEI, Hirsi Ali spouts nonsense such as that the free market both “establishes a meritocracy” and “strengthens moral character.” She confidently asserts that the U.S., where market fundamentalism reigns, is superior to the welfare states of Europe. Apparently, she is unaware of the results of periodic studies, conducted by various organizations, that rank the world’s countries according to quality of life measures (distinct from, and superior to, “standard of living” indicators). They typically show that around 15 European countries rank higher than the U.S."

http://buffalobeast.com/atheisms-class-problem/#more-16709

A lot to think about here. :)

On a related subject, my better half is writing an essay on the ethics of creating a market (could be price regulated by the government or a more free market) for anything from blood donation to organ donation. My starter for ten was that I don't think I have a problem for blood donation (maybe problems with that it's no longer seen as a civic duty) but organ donation would almost inevitably full on the poor and more likely the third world ... but, but, but if you enable a parent to give their children a chance in life that they would not otherwise have isn't that their choice not ours?

Check out the HeLa cell controversy. Rebecca Skloot wrote an excellent book on it called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A poor black woman in 1951 goes to the doc for a pelvic exam. He gives her cervical cancer tumor to a researcher who begs cells off everyone in his work on cloning techniques. Her cells take off and become an essential tool in medical research. She never gave her consent and her family never received compensation or recognition. Now days you sign something saying who has rights to your body parts even when they're cut off.