Kenneth's review
I Don't Believe in Atheists
by Chris Hedges
I will be reading this soon.
I am just now finished E. O. Wilson's The Creation, and I find it quite good.
I am interested to see what Hedges has to say about Wilson.
Wilson seems like the kind of atheist I could drink a beer with.
Kenneth's review
I Don't Believe in Atheists by Chris Hedges
Kenneth's review
rating:
bookshelves:
cultural-studies-and-social-critics,
religion
Hedges has a sober, wise voice. In I Don't Believe in Atheists he rails against fundamentalists (of various stripes) and urges us against ideology. The downside of this little book is that he tends to oversimplify the arguments of the so-called "new atheists" (Sam Harris, Hitchens, E. O. Wilson, Dawkins, et al.). And although I think he gets Hitchens right, and Harris at least partly right (in particular Harris' ideas about Islam), they are merely straw men as he frames them. (It'll be interesting to see critical responses from either Hitchens or Harris, or perhaps a thoughtful essay by someone more objective, in the NYROB or The Nation.) Still, Hedges here is well worth reading--and a welcome champion of what James Baldwin called "confronting with passion the conundrum of life." We need Hedges' voice now and in the even more difficult years to come.
Here's an excerpt:
What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists for the Iraq War have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished. The United States is becoming a militaristic state, dismantling its democratic freedoms and gutting its social services in the name of national security. The rise of militarism is a familiar path taken by collapsing states. Militarism arrests social decay. It shoves it underground, where it cannot be challenged by critics and
social movements. The failure to confront the oil peak, for example, means that the catastrophe will descend swiftly and with an unexpected fury on the United States as supplies decline. This is a failure of leadership, caused by blindness of a corporate state that seeks not the common good but maximum profit. ...more
Here's an excerpt:
What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists for the Iraq War have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished. The United States is becoming a militaristic state, dismantling its democratic freedoms and gutting its social services in the name of national security. The rise of militarism is a familiar path taken by collapsing states. Militarism arrests social decay. It shoves it underground, where it cannot be challenged by critics and
social movements. The failure to confront the oil peak, for example, means that the catastrophe will descend swiftly and with an unexpected fury on the United States as supplies decline. This is a failure of leadership, caused by blindness of a corporate state that seeks not the common good but maximum profit. ...more
I will be reading this soon.I am just now finished E. O. Wilson's The Creation, and I find it quite good.
I am interested to see what Hedges has to say about Wilson.
Wilson seems like the kind of atheist I could drink a beer with.