Why Plato Sucks (especially for atheists).

“Christianity is Platonism for the people.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

In the course of fulfilling my duties as an underpaid slave to the university  a teaching assistant, I’ve had the mixed blessing of reading and reflecting on Plato for two consecutive quarters these past few months. I say mixed because while this has afforded me an opportunity to understand Plato’s thought in more richly textured detail, it has served mostly to reinforce the position I already held on that most beloved of philosophers – which is, simply, that Plato blows.

I am not intimidated by your stone locks nor your piercing blank eyes, sir.

Yes, I’m being hyperbolic. But allow me to make my case. I believe I can argue, with only moderate exaggeration, that any sincere atheist should have some serious misgivings about Mr. Plato – and this is simply because, as Nietzsche argued at length, Plato kind of invented Christianity. We must say “kind of,” of course, because Plato obviously never clearly articulated a concept even of a singular, all-powerful humanoid God, let alone anything as obtuse and ridiculous as a singular, all-powerful humanoid God which first creates imperfect beings in his image, then condemns them for acting on their nature and then creates a son to sacrifice for said imperfect beings who then somehow transforms himself into a sin sponge that sucks up all the ickiness in those poor beings simply by enduring some severe unpleasantness for a mere weekend.

But I digress – because here’s the thing. Plato may not have come up with the exact details of that ridiculousness, but he helped build the intellectual foundations absolutely essential to making the theological claims of Christianity thinkable at all. And in certain respects what he came up with, I dare say, rivals if not surpasses Christianity on the absurdity meter.

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Movie Review: Life of Pi

Spoiler alert: Pretty much everything important about the film is given away in this review. If you have any plans to watch the film without knowing the ending, I highly suggest you save this for later; the film largely depends on ignorance about the outcome for its effectiveness.

Perhaps you have heard about the new Ang Lee film Life of Pi. You may have seen advertisements for it, which communicated pretty successfully two things: one, this film is epic and two, it involves a guy being stuck in a boat with a tiger.

Turns out the preview did not mislead you – Life of Pi is a bona fide epic, and it does involve a boy stuck on a boat with a tiger. But from a strange ad on my facebook feed and an emotional post on an academic blog, I went into the film also knowing it had a much grander theme than merely spectacular visuals – I knew it had something to do with God, faith, and the meaning of it all.

Thus, I went into Life of Pi very curious but a little precautious. And at first, my precaution seemed at least slightly justified – early in the film, we are treated to several obnoxious and common mainstream (and typically liberal) truisms about faith – that God communicates himself through all the major religions, and that you cannot have faith without doubt, for lest how do you know you really believe? These are delivered by the adult Pi, living in contemporary Canada, who is visited by a struggling writer who tells him that a shared acquaintance told him that Pi had a story which would make him believe in God – and the film is structured by Pi’s recounting of this tale. This sets up the film to appear, at first, as another vehicle for delivering Hallmark-safe religion; all love, all acceptance, all inner-peace and in the end God or the force of love in the universe or whatever makes everything OK. But then things get a little more complicated.

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Islam and democracy

Following up on some of some of the issues I touched on in my last post, I thought to point our readers to a current roundtable over at the Times, which has several different people responding to the question, “Is Islam an Obstacle to Democracy?” Respondents include Reza Aslan, who we interviewed for the podcast a while back.

I’d also like to note that the responses to my previous post have been very thoughtful, and I hope to get around to continuing the discussion thread in the next week or so.

Sam Harris is wrong.

“This is already an old and boring story about old, boring, and deadly ideas.” — Sam Harris

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece critiquing the tendency of the atheist community to analyze the nature and impact of religion through the exceptionally narrow lense of truth claims and discreet ideas. I summarized my position at one point by arguing that ideas, in and of themselves, have far less agency than atheists usually assume they do. Just as important as the contents of a certain idea is the social, economic and political context which gives rise to it. Atheists tend to ignore these, instead preferring to compose arguments which presume the dominance of ideas, and consequently often end up producing analyses of situations that they have less than stellar understandings of.

And then last week, along came Sam Harris, with this gem of an example of just what I was trying to argue against. Energized by the recent attacks and murders at US Embassies, Harris composed a stirring call for moral clarity – of the sort that comes only in shades of black and white.

Before I get going with what is wrong with Harris’s rhetoric and assumptions, let me state unequivocally that I agree with him completely on the issue of free speech – all nations which claim to value freedom of speech should not engage in any kind of censorship to appease anyone, be they Islamic radicalists or outraged conservative evangelicals or overly sensitive identity-politics laden liberals. Insofar as the liberals Harris criticizes really were recommending restriction of freedom of speech (enforced either through the government or social pressure), to address the problem of radical Islamic terrorism and, more broadly, Muslim alienation, they are wrong. First, it is unethical. Second, it would not work anyway. So let’s make it clear that we agree on that and move on from there.

However, I take serious issue with almost everything else about Harris’s approach to this question.

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Is Religion Best Understood as a Theory About Reality?

Richard Dawkins, easily the most well-known leader of the atheist movement, loves to define religion as a scientific theory. Religion makes claims about how the world actually works, Dawkins argues, and is therefore making scientific claims that can be scrutinized in the light of reason and available evidence.

By and large, this is the definition of religion that the atheist community likes to work with.  And undoubtedly, Dawkins is correct that religion is a theory about reality.

But it is a mistake to assume that this is all religion is. Now, nearly no one in the atheist community makes this argument explicitly – the vast majority of us acknowledge that religion is a lot of other things as well, such as an identity, a political tool, an aesthetic choice and a cultural critique. Nonetheless, there is a disjuncture between what we claim to understand about religion and the way in which we tend to talk about religion. For if most of us understand that religion is not merely a theory about reality, in our own writings and preoccupations we usually ignore all the other things it is.

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Huff and puff — the surprisingly ineffective Religious Right.

I recently rewatched the last two installments of PBS’s excellent documentary, God in America, which I’ve seen before. These final episodes deal with the rise of the Religious Right, from its origins as a Cold War creature and reaction against the secular excesses of the 1960s all the way through the Bush administration.

The final portion of God in America seems to make the argument that the political clout of the Religious Right hit an apex with the election of Ronald Reagan, and while evangelicals have remained an important part of right wing politics ever since, they have never really regained the optimism they once had that if only they could get someone in the White House to represent the “Moral Majority,” the legislation that they all craved would finally become a reality.

Renewed hope blossomed shortly with the election of George W. Bush, a sincere evangelical who, unlike Reagan (a believer but hardly a devout evangelical himself), was one of them. However, as his term unfolded it became clear that whether or not he had a personal relationship with Christ, President Bush was not going to put his political neck on the line to seriously prioritize the evangelical agenda. Not that this kept him from starting two wars on the assumption that God put him in the White House to make sure a clear-headed decider was around when the devil struck the USA.

But the remarkable thing about most of the commentary in the last two episodes is how disappointed most of the commenting evangelicals sound. We’ve sold our soul to the Republican Party, they more or less assert, and look what we’ve got for it? Prayer in school is still illegal, abortion on the other hand is not, and in several states, homosexuals are allowed to get married and have children. Certainly on the gay rights front, the grip of evangelicals on the culture and on our politics has done nothing but degrade in the past two decades.

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