The Four Horsemen (Hour 1)

Comment

Comment by Steven Nickeson on January 2, 2008 at 3:44pm

I thought it was a great conversation, but that it missed a couple of points.

1. I don't know is I would call these four men Horsemen because I doubt if any of them have much to do with horses—except for the fact they are beating one that is almost dead already. Compared with where it was a 100 years ago, not to mention 200 years ago, this culture is almost totally materialistic and secular, so much so that almost all it’s people take as given what would have been totally heretical at the turn of the previous century. This makes me think there other things at work below the surface that has set up some paranoia in these men at a time when believers are so easy to dismiss out of hand. One factor is that there is a sector of the culture that is just scared of living; intimidated by the uncertainty they find all around them and run off searching for the psychic protection of religion or spirituality or other superstitions like illusions of truth or theories of evolution being intelligent and purposeful. There is also another sector that finds the rationality of the leading cultural and educational forces too anal and restrictive and run off to superstition just to get away from the science geeks. Fighting the illogic of either of these approaches is shooting at the wrong target.

2. The Four Men obviously fear religious war and so want to disarm the motivating power of the jihadists on the other side. They seem to miss the point that history is fairly clear on the fact that a religious war is not fought because Group A prays to a different god than Group B, but that Group A’s old men in suits have something—usually access to resources and the power to regulate the distribution of those resources—that Group B’s old men in suits don’t have, but want badly enough to send someone else’s kids off to take big risks for on their behalf. Not wanting to appear greedy because greed is supposedly taboo in all religions, Group B righteously goes after the the false doctrines of A. Spiritual matters are a very thin veneer over much of what life is about and this is doubly so when it comes to the causes of war. So again the Four Men are shooting at the wrong target; a symptom rather than a cause.

As for the details: I like to listen to Hitchen’s sales pitch but I wouldn’t trust buying anything from him. I found it interesting that Dawkins couldn’t understand anything about the conversation that wasn’t 2 + 2 = 4 and therefore he couldn’t understand anything that Hitchens said that was inspired by emotional impulse, which was a lot of what Hitchens said in the 2nd hour of the discussion. But it was fairly clear that if and when Science becomes the accepted religion/superstition of the world, Dawkins wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to be Pope.

Comment by MetroPunk on December 31, 2007 at 2:48am

They are waging an uphill culture war...