Tag Archives: atheism

Kittens and atheists – cute, but what’s the point?

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Is this a joke, or is this serious? There have been major rows over atheist billboards all over the world, but now American atheists apparently try something new. According to the Friendly Atheist blog, a new billboard will be made public on Monday. It’s an announcement for a large atheist convention. And the billboard looks like this:

Atheist kittens

Now, I love kittens, but can someone tell me what kittens have to do with atheists? Why not, say, pigs or baboons? (Dodo anyone? – Just kidding…) But seriously, am I missing something here?

By the way, it seems, I’m not the only one who wonders about the point of the billboard. Jerry Coyne apparently also doesn’t know what to think of it.

Dawkins, jewelry, atheism, symbolism

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Have you ever looked at the website of the Richard Dawkins http://richarddawkins.net, and then I mean especially the store section: http://store.richarddawkins.net/? I recently noticed that “they” (I don’t presume Dawkins is selling stuff in person) sell jewelry. In itself there’s of course nothing wrong with that. But notice that The Richard Dawkins store sells jewelry in the form of DNA-strands, and Darwin’s sketch of the tree of life. These apparently are adopted as the symbols of the atheism that Dawkins is preaching. It’s interesting to see how science and symbolism here go hand in hand. But what is also interesting, is particular dynamics that is at work here. Creationism and Intelligent Design are taking evolutionary theory as a symbol for evil. Evolutionary theory symbolizes everything that in the eyes of creationists and ID-adherents is morally wrong in our contemporary society. Creationists and ID-people consider especially Darwin’s tree of life, representing common ancestry, a deeply problematic symbol. And now here you have Richard Dawkins who does exactly that: Dawkins takes DNA and Darwin’s idea of the tree of life, and turns them into – yes jewelry, I know, but also – symbols for atheism. Science, symbolism, and ideology are getting lumped together in the discourse of the new atheism. In my view a highly problematic combination and potentially dangerous because of its ideological undertones. Wacky stuff.

The Belief Instinct–an interview with Jesse Bering

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Later today I will post the second part of my evaluation of Jesse Bering’s The God / Belief Instinct. However, I recently found an interesting interview with Bering that also can function as an interesting summary of the book, here:

http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/religion-as-instinct/

Note the following passage:

When we understand how the mind works in relation to supernatural beliefs, we can stop ourselves from becoming suckers at the hands of illusion. “Once we’re aware of how the illusion operates, and how mechanistic it is and how predictable it is, we can catch ourselves as falling prey to it really easily,” says Bering.

Can you spot the fallacy?

Terry Eagleton vs. Alain de Botton

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A while ago I read Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists (which for some reason was published in Dutch several months before the English edition). I was not too enthusiastic about the book (to put it mildly – and I did put it mildly in the review that I wrote). But then again, I’m no Terry Eagleton.

In the British journalThe Guardian, Eagleton published a short but brilliant review of De Botton’s book. Eagleton writes in his characteristic style, very readable, humorous, ironic, and with a conclusion that I found right on the mark:

What the book does, in short, is hijack other people’s beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal.