{"id":30136,"date":"2012-04-13T01:57:14","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T15:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=30136"},"modified":"2012-04-13T01:57:14","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T15:57:14","slug":"2012-global-atheist-convention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=30136","title":{"rendered":"2012 Global Atheist Convention"},"content":{"rendered":"

Assuming God or a bus doesn’t strike me down between now and then, I’m gonna go to the 2012 Global Atheist Convention<\/a> this weekend. In preparation I’ve been reading and watching some stuff about atheism, or to be precise The New Atheism<\/em>\u2122. Most recently, Jeff Sparrow’s article The Weaponization of Atheism<\/a> (Counterpunch<\/em>, April 9, 2012). It’s a neat article and includes one or two things that kinda struck me — not like a lightning bolt cast by an angry God but more like… I dunno, a gentle tap on the shoulder from a friendly cat or something.<\/p>\n

First, money. To be precise: a) “These days, it is religion, not atheism, that correlates with poverty” and; b) “There\u2019s an obvious rightward dynamic in tremendously wealthy authors ([Sam Harris<\/a>‘s] fee is $25,000<\/a> which includes airfare.\u2019) regaling audiences of the well-educated and the well-to-do about the ignorance and stupidity of immigrants and the poor”.<\/p>\n

Secondly, history. Or rather, Jeff’s thesis regarding the political divorce of The New Atheism of the early twenty-first century from the atheism of late nineteenth century Melbourne. (See also Gary Bouma<\/a>.) In essence, the movement from left to right.<\/p>\n

I don’t have the time or the inclination to explore these and the other questions Jeff raises now, but I’ll probably return to them later: that is, after the show. Briefly: I’m not sure the relationship between wealth and belief is at all straightforward, tho’ certainly anybody seeking to hold the Catholic Church to account<\/a> for the rape and sexual assault of children by some of its clergy will be forced to agree that the Church’s apparent prosperity is seemingly impossible to ascertain legally<\/a>. Secondly, if the atheist agitators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advanced a broader and more radical critique of Australian society, they were also able to draw upon a combative labour movement, a movement which is as absent in reality now as God was in their imaginations then.<\/p>\n

Oh, and the episode of Q&A<\/em> in which Pell battled Dawkins for ideological supremacy<\/a>? Apart from displaying Dawkins’ ability to put the fear of God into those of us who find laughter refreshing, it naturally brought to mind the name of another holy man: Father Gerard Ridsdale<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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In the meantime…<\/p>\n

Why have a Global Atheist Convention?<\/a> asks one of its chief organisers, David Nicholls; Jason Ball on 3CR<\/a> is what happened when Dr Cam, John Safran and myself invited the Convention’s media guy on to ‘The SUWA Show’ to talk about celebrating reason; Sam Harris on Economics<\/a> reveals more about Sam’s view that, inter alia<\/em>, taxes should be raised on billionaires; Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching<\/a> (London Review of Books<\/em>, Vol.28, No.20, October 19, 2006) is where (former?) Marxist and cultural theorist Terry Eagleton takes Richard Dawkins to task for the er, philistinism on display in The God Delusion<\/em> (Bantam, 2006) while finally a radical critique of religion is available in Ken Knabb’s 1977 essay The Realization and Suppression of Religion<\/a> and more specifically of Islam in Al-Djouhall’s The Misery of Islam<\/a> (1989).<\/p>\n