There is an amazing piece at Alternet (amazing and amazingly silly) by one Robert Wright positing that although the overwhelming majority of atheists are left-leaning in their political stances, the leaders of the "New Atheism," Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, are "right wing hawks." I say amazingly silly because participtation in this online community convinces me that atheists come in all colors and have a wide disparity of political leanings and geopolitical beliefs. So I resent the writer's generalizations. I also resent Wright's taking issue with the New Atheists' (and particularly Hitchens') argument that there would be no Iraeli-Palestinian conflict but for religion. Wright says this is "just plain wrong."
Hitchens et al. would argue that the proposition is demonstrably true. To begin with, the Israeli government refuses to set the stage for a two-state solution to the conflict by tacitly authorizing the colonialism run rampant in establishment of satellite communities in formerly Palestinian lands: the settlement issue. A recent article in The New Yorker told how the right wing fundamentalist religious groups actually fund the settlements; they've infiltrated the army and fund the building of the infrastructure, all with the government looking the other way. And when asked how they can do these things when it so obviously exacerbates tensions among the two ethnic groups, their answer is -- guess what? God told them so. They believe that God gave them the "Holy [or is that Holey?] Land" and that it is thus manifest destiny.
No wonder the evangelical dominionists here send moral and monetary support to the Israelis and join forces with their influential lobby in D.C. to do all that can be done to aid Israel at the expense of the Muslim peoples. These mindless halfwits have a vested interest in speeding up the Apocalypse (no matter that John of Patmos was writing about Nero Caesar) so that they can bring about their longed-for "Rupture, uh, I mean Rapture, the end times, when Jebus will save all the "good" people and punish all the "bad" people in a fiery conflagration. (As the nutty parochial preacher in Cold Comfort Farm was wont to put it, "It'll be hot there, and there wont be a drop to drink.")
If Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris are hawkish on Afghanistan, it is only because they view the Shariah-obsessed Taliban as a threat to world democracy. (One supposes these leading "New Atheists" would like to do away with the dominionists, too, but that is another war, not yet fought.) Mr. Wright should meet a few of us rather than simply judging all atheists by the writings of the three men he criticizes. I can't speak for all of us, but I am a bit left of Karl Marx, and I support the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Am I "just plain wrong"?
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