{"id":1368,"date":"2011-12-28T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-28T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=1368"},"modified":"2012-11-30T11:20:43","modified_gmt":"2012-11-30T16:20:43","slug":"picking-the-boring-fight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/picking-the-boring-fight.html","title":{"rendered":"Picking the Boring Fight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[UPDATE: I\u2019ve just started a hopefully non-boring fight with a couple Dominicans reading Edward Feser\u2019s defense of Aristotle and Aquinas. You can keep track of all posts in that series here: The Last Superstition <\/em>Index Post<\/a>]<\/p>\n

In the comment thread for my Hitchens post, Lukas complained that he found god is Not Great<\/a><\/em> unreadable and linked to a critique from First Things<\/a>. \u00a0David Bentley Hart has a number of complaints about Hitchens\u2019s book and a collection of essays titled 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists<\/a><\/em>, but the first seems to be that all the objections are pedestrian and unmoving<\/em>. \u00a0(I\u2019ll interject that it can\u2019t be very surprising to find that an essay collection is shallow).<\/p>\n

I have some sympathy for Hart\u2019s plaint. \u00a0I picked up Hitch-22<\/a><\/em> rather than\u00a0god is Not Great<\/a> <\/em>after Hitchens\u2019s death because I\u2019ve found most of the New Atheist canon boring. \u00a0It ends up tackling very boring, obviously-in-contradiction-to-the-visible-world religion. \u00a0Hart writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cA truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I won\u2019t deny that the New Atheists are going after the intellectually easy targets, but that\u2019s because the anti-intellectual evangelicals are much more politically threatening than the Aquinas-reading theologians. \u00a0We have to fight all of them on gay marriage, but it\u2019s the boring ones who tend to make trouble when it comes to evolution, global warming, and medicine (HPV vaccinations don\u2019t increase promiscuity<\/a>, btw).<\/p>\n

Since we atheists think we\u2019ve only got this world, we focus more of our efforts on the people who we think are actively harming themselves or others. \u00a0Plus, a lot of the most active people in the movement (the scientists under threat) have backgrounds that are much better suited to rebut the anti-empiricism crowd. \u00a0(The crash course in evolutionary biology in The God Delusion<\/a><\/em> is good, the rest is more meh). \u00a0The\u00a0criticism\u00a0of Hart and others is more a complaint about the New Atheists choice of targets than a claim that we\u2019re using the wrong tactics for the targets we\u2019ve chosen.<\/p>\n

Do the Catholics who complain expect that there is really an interesting critique of Young Earth creationism waiting to be written? \u00a0What would an ideal attack on the theology of Scientology look like? \u00a0These are mop-up jobs, and I\u2019m not surprised they don\u2019t exactly make the imagination catch fire. \u00a0It\u2019s possible to dress these books up a bit, but making them witty tends to blur easily into making them condescending. \u00a0You have to get someone on your side before they\u2019ll enjoy the joke.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m an atheist who prefers having the other kind of fight, but I\u2019ll admit it feels a lot more low-stakes than the kind the other folks are having, even if it\u2019s intellectually sharper.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[UPDATE: I\u2019ve just started a hopefully non-boring fight with a couple Dominicans reading Edward Feser\u2019s defense of Aristotle and Aquinas. You can keep track of all posts in that series here: The Last Superstition Index Post] In the comment thread for my Hitchens post, Lukas complained that he found god is Not Great unreadable and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[54,110],"class_list":["post-1368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-debatetactics","tag-atheism-is-boring","tag-boring-gods"],"yoast_head":"\nPicking the Boring Fight<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the comment thread for my Hitchens post, Lukas complained that he found god is Not Great unreadable and linked to a critique from First Things. \u00a0David\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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