Here’s some proof that science and morality can get along:
[O]xytocin orchestrates the kind of generous and caring behavior that every culture endorses as the right way to live—the cooperative, benign, pro-social way of living that every culture on the planet describes as “moral.” The Golden Rule is a lesson that the body already knows, and when we get it right, we feel the rewards immediately.
Take that, anti-Darwinists.
Sometimes doing the right thing is not easy, and doing the easy thing is not right.
For Jews, the High Holy Days — particularly the Day of Atonement — presents us with the opportunity to contemplate this same lesson.
But whether we choose to take advantage of that opportunity is entirely up to us.
This is a very helpful history of the New Atheist movement and a very interesting take on the lack of a female presence in the New Atheist movement “leadership.” Leadership is in quotes, because of course there’s no official group called the New Atheists — it’s a term made up by a journalist that happened to stick.
Here’s my only gripe with the article. The writer claims that:
Yet though [Jennifer Michael] Hecht’s and [Susan] Jacoby’s books both came out shortly before Wired bestowed its “New Atheist” designation on the likes of Dawkins and Harris (whose The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason was published the same year as Jacoby’s Freethinkers [which was published a year after Hecht’s Doubt]), neither woman is invoked in the mainstream media’s anointing of atheist thought leaders. Is it that “rationality”—the bedrock of New Atheist doctrine—is historically gendered male, while women are considered more emotional? Is it that their books are too conciliatory toward religion, too well balanced, too, you know, womanly? Nope. Both women are accomplished, strong-voiced scholars, and are no more afraid than their male colleagues to call out religion’s injustices in a public forum—that is to say, not afraid at all. And as for those whose knee-jerk response to the abundance of critical acclaim accorded male writers over female ones is the classic “Maybe their books just weren’t as good/original/ambitious,” nope again.
I do understand the outrage — I really do. As a Jew, I feel slighted when Jewish mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky are not given their due, because of the stereotype of the Jewish weakling. Like the writer of the article above, I’m not advocating or (hopefully not) glorifying organized crime, but I am reacting to what I perceive as a negative stereotype manifesting itself as a refusal to believe that Jews would go into an unlawful and dangerous business.
Likewise, the writer of the BitchMagazine article here bemoans the lack of recognition for females leadership in the New Atheist movement not because she is a dedicated “New Atheist” (although she is apparently an unbeliever of some form) but because the lack of recognition of female leaders in this field — like any similar lack of recognition in any other field — is a dig at the ability of woman to “tell it like it is” and “lead.”
Nonetheless, I can’t help but think that the fact that a woman hasn’t yet written a book with a title akin to God Doesn’t Exist - and If He Did He Would Suck is the real reason a “New Atheist Queen” has not been crowned. Whether that is something that will come in the future is something we don’t yet know… .
“The Jews who died in [the Triangle Waist Fire] were Jewish more in the way that Italians are Italian than in the way that Catholics are Catholics, for whereas one ceases to be a Catholic by abandoning one’s faith, a Jew does not thereby cease to be a Jew. As a combination, “Jewish and Italian” go well together.”
A couple weeks ago, I published a portion of a review of the book Exodus by Leon Uris. It made me think of the movie version, with Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan. The most famous clip from that movie is above.
I picked up Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History, yesterday and found it articulated an important point with a “quiz” at the beginning of the book. “Doubt” is often associated with disbelief in God, the afterlife, and the supernatural, somewhat narrowly defined as believing that the laws of nature are never broken. However, as this little quiz explains, there are what might be referred to as “half-way” materialists who proudly disavow belief in God but proudly dissociate themselves from pure “rationalist materialism” by answering “YES” to questions like the following:
Do you believe that love and inner feelings of morality suggest that there is a world beyond that of biology, social patterns, and accident — i.e., a realm of higher meaning?
Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?
Being sympathetic to “doubters” myself… .
