Posted: May 05, 2019 4:20 pm
The best read of the Four Horsemen atheism books, if you ask me, was the Hitchens one: God is Not Great. It's true Hitch chose his title as a direct negation of "Allahu akbar". He only has one chapter about the Quran, however, and he's scathing about every religion he mentions, including some obscure ones. Events such as the Salman Rushdie fatwa, 9/11, and the murderous international fiasco over some Danish cartoons were among his inspirations to write the book. It would be rather weird to write a polemic against religion and not mention the elephant in the room (not talking about Ganesha).
To call "new" atheism (or outright Hitchensian anti-theism) an "ideological branch" of white supremacy is ludicrous on the face of it, and needs no further comment.
Harris has emphasised that different religions have differing theological and ideological tenets, meaning that Christian or Islamic fundamentalists are more worrisome than Jain fundamentalists (the more extreme a Jain gets about Jainism, the more he obsesses about not harming or infringing on the life of a single ant). This has been used to say Harris is "Islamophobic" and bigoted against Muslims, of course. This is a bit like arguing that if someone worries more about Scientology than about Wicca, this just shows they have a deep and hateful prejudice against Tom Cruise & John Travolta in particular.
To call "new" atheism (or outright Hitchensian anti-theism) an "ideological branch" of white supremacy is ludicrous on the face of it, and needs no further comment.
Harris has emphasised that different religions have differing theological and ideological tenets, meaning that Christian or Islamic fundamentalists are more worrisome than Jain fundamentalists (the more extreme a Jain gets about Jainism, the more he obsesses about not harming or infringing on the life of a single ant). This has been used to say Harris is "Islamophobic" and bigoted against Muslims, of course. This is a bit like arguing that if someone worries more about Scientology than about Wicca, this just shows they have a deep and hateful prejudice against Tom Cruise & John Travolta in particular.