|
I Don't Believe in Atheists | 
 enlarge | Author: Chris Hedges
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $12.49
You Save: $12.51 (50%)
New (42) Used (14) from $12.25
Avg. Customer Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 21590
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 141656795X
Dewey Decimal Number: 211
EAN: 9781416567950
ASIN: 141656795X
Publication Date: March 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: AUTHOR AUTOGRAPHED - perfect gift - brand new!
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of American Fascists and the NBCC finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning comes this timely and compelling work about new atheists: those who attack religion to advance the worst of global capitalism, intolerance and imperial projects.Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, has long been a courageous voice in a world where there are too few. He observes that there are two radical, polarized and dangerous sides to the debate on faith and religion in America: the fundamentalists who see religious faith as their prerogative, and the new atheists who brand all religious belief as irrational and dangerous. Both sides use faith to promote a radical agenda, while the religious majority, those with a commitment to tolerance and compassion as well as to their faith, are caught in the middle. The new atheists, led by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, do not make moral arguments about religion. Rather, they have created a new form of fundamentalism that attempts to permeate society with ideas about our own moral superiority and the omnipotence of human reason. I Don't Believe in Atheists critiques the radical mindset that rages against religion and faith. Hedges identifies the pillars of the new atheist belief system, revealing that the stringent rules and rigid traditions in place are as strict as those of any religious practice. Hedges claims that those who have placed blind faith in the morally neutral disciplines of reason and science create idols in their own image -- a sin for either side of the spectrum. He makes an impassioned, intelligent case against religious and secular fundamentalism, which seeks to divide the world into those worthy of moral and intellectual consideration and those who should be condemned, silenced and eradicated. Hedges shatters the new atheists' assault against religion in America, and in doing so, makes way for new, moderate voices to join the debate. This is a book that must be read to understand the state of the battle about faith.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Challenging book July 4, 2008
This book helped me sharpen my understanding of a challenging issue in our times: identifying what you believe -- and why. I do not share the author's faith base but I was energized by how he defended it. The book is an introduction to logic and apologetics.
 Rants, mostly June 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
He basically states that Dawkins, Harris and the like have created a new fundamentalism that's as scary and illogical as any religious fundamentalist, which I completely agree with. But his book is just a big pot of ill will he stirs, basically asserting that humans are intrinsically evil and left to their own devices, will destroy one another and eventually civilization.
There's a lot of name calling, a lot of straw man arguments and not much else. Some good thoughts here and there, but mostly a disjointed, disorganized batch of hostile essays.
He also seems to be of the opinion that Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens believes that the world will become a utopia if religion is banished. I'm not that well read in these men, but I don't recall any such assertion in what I have read. If anything, it's widely out of character for these guys. All of these guys can be accused of making unreasonable attacks on religion, but the picture painted by Hedges is inaccurate and dogmatic.
 the utopia of atheist fundamentalism June 7, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Chris Hedges grew up as a pastor's kid in rural upstate New York, where his father was a Presbyterian pastor. Six days after graduating from Colgate University he began a two year stint as a pastor in the violent ghetto of Roxbury in metro Boston, an experience so unsettling that he left the church and seminary. After a year in South America he completed his degree at Harvard Divinity School, though not without caustic opinions about his liberal professors who romanticized the poor whom they had never met, and the lectures which he experienced as "intellectual shell games." Then, for twenty years, he covered a dozen wars in Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans.
These life experiences deeply inform Hedges's writing. He's been around the block and he does not suffer armchair pundits easily, which is about the nicest description he might use about the so-called new atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. This book originated with his separate debates with Harris and Hitchens at UCLA in May of 2007. These atheists, says Hedges, are the reverse image of fundamentalist Christians. He derides them as "carnival barkers" whose stock in trade includes gross intolerance for any "other" who is different from them, facile analysis, the abuse of evolutionary biology as a "surrogate religion," the confusion of scientific progress with moral progress, racist and crude generalizations (especially about Muslims), and a "staggering historical and cultural illiteracy." But that's not the bad part.
What really angers Hedges about the new atheists is their uncritical belief in the utopia promised by the Enlightenment thanks to the inevitable progress of science and the innate goodness and rationality of humanity. He's outraged at their evangelistic effort to remake the world in the image of an ostensibly "enlightened" west. He quotes Harris and Hitchens who recommend slaughtering unwilling converts. Which proves his point, that "reigns of terror are the [...] children of the Enlightenment." Muslims have a long way to go before they catch up with the tens of millions of people, mainly civilians, slaughtered by the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Chinese (149).
Drawing upon heavy doses of Nietzsche, Freud, Dostoyevsky, Reinhold Niebuhr, Samuel Beckett, and Joseph Conrad, Hedges urges us to recover our sense of the fallenness of humanity. We must repudiate our smug and self-congratulatory self-image as morally pure purveyors of enlightenment, for "to turn away from God is harmless." But "to turn away from sin," which is what the new atheists do, "is catastrophic." Divine intervention in the world, he suggests, is "absurd" (13), history appears "purposeless" (42), and human nature remains "irredeemable" (67, 151). Rejecting absolutisms of all kinds, we must embrace our limitations and imperfections. The utopian dreamers, "lifting up impossible ideals, plunge us into depravity and violence." Only in such brokenness and humility can we see "the limits of reason and the possibilities of religion" (185).
I believe in Chris Hedges May 31, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
I haven't read the atheists' books referred to in this book, because I don't believe in atheists either, and don't much care for their ravings... so cannot comment on the analysis. But after wading through the book I found the last chapter, The Elusive Self, worth the price of admission. Hedges rightly condemns the utter vapidity of our television-defined, delusional consumer culture and loss of moral guides, and selects nuanced quotes from the intellectually wise that point to the simple hopes and possibilities of religion.
 The answer to the puzzle is in his earlier book! May 30, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I could not understand why Hedges would so totally misrepresent and misconstrue what people like Richard Dawkins are about until I read his earlier book, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING. I suspect that in this new book Hedges simply means to express the idea that even people who do not believe in God can be subject to the kinds of identity politics myths that he discussed in that earlier book. I think Hedges misses the mark in this book; maybe he just needed the money or something. Maybe after being traumatized by his years as a war correspondent he has become incapable of seeing benevolent motivations in anyone expressing strong opinions about the problems of the world. To want to make things better is not the same as advocating violent utopianism, after all. And even Hedges admits, in this earlier book, that in war (and, by extension, in other conflicts) there is a "less immoral" side. GET THE BOOK _WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING_ - but this one is a clunker in comparison. Sadly, it will have an effect among believers, though, that is the opposite of what Hedges says he is for. That is, atheists already being the most hated group in America, this is simply going to be another bundle of sticks that are being gathered by the Religious Right to burn their critics. ("See, they're no better than us!" they will say - EXACTLY the sort of garbage that Hedges decries in his earlier book!)
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
