This is an essay i wrote for my masters in religions and i'm considering sending it to some journals in order to get published, would like some feedback from here. Its a critique of the 'scientism' and bourgeois rationalism of the new Atheist 'movement'.
cheers.
I'll have a wee read later. Eagleton's Reason, Faith & Revolution goes over a lot of the same ground. Though I find his theism frustrating, his critiques of liberalism, Hitchens and Dawkins, are fairly spot on.
A minor point of contentionfrom a first-time poster: schizophrenic hallucinations are conditioned and shaped by the social and historical in which the so-afflicted individual is living; that is, those hearing voices from this so-called god-thing could well have a similar etiological disturbance as those thinking the members of Pantera are laughing and talking about 'em behind his back (in reference to the murder of Pantera and later Damage Plan's guitarist Dimebag Darrell.) 'Feeling saved' (pace James) seems insufficient for distinguishing psychotic szhizophrenics from normalized god-voice hearers as some so-called schizophrenic have reported quite similar sensations. until there is a clear and unequivocal etiological basis for "schizophrenia" I don't know how one can differentiate between people who "hear god" and those diagnosed by some psychiatrist as schizophrenic (and one cannot count brain damage from antipsychotics as an etiological difference: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mad-in-america/201102/andreasen-drops-bombshell-antipsychotics-shrink-the-brain.) In short, I tend to agree with the new-atheists on this issue, although I don't think we share much in common beyond this point. I'm not sure that those who hear the voice of god (who or whatever this god thing is) are schizophrenic but i'm likewise not sure that there is a certain way to know they aren't; are i think there are more similarities than differences.
Quibbling aside, word. Good read!
captaincorndog, thanks for reading and taking the time to respond to my essay, a couple of points.
first of all i tend to agree with people like Norman O Brown and R.D Laing who argue that schizophrenia often can reveal or at least express important truths about consciousness, like the fact that 'normal' everyday consciousness is often more 'split' in some ways than the schizophrenic. Schizophrenia can therefore be thought of as a bit like the collapse of the wall of psychic repression but a collapse in which the person experiencing it has to some extent lost control of the situation to an extent which a shaman or mystic would 'hopefully' be able to resist/avoid.
a line used by Norman O Brown which i quite like is "you can get the madness without the blessing but you can't get the blessing without the madness."
therefore while there may be some similarities between say a saint/shaman and a schizophrenic there are usually important differences. Firstly most people who are seen as being particularly 'spiritually advanced' (for want of a better term) are not usually prone to the same disorientation and 'befuddlement' of a schizophrenic sufferer.
not sure if i've made the exact point i wanted to but ....
Yeah thought this was a worthwhile piece. Did you end up getting it published?
I have came across the work of DB Hart who doesn't share our politics but thoughtfully skewers these guys from his own theologically one
thanks Hopkins, it's good to get some feedback. I kind of got diverted from trying to get it published but it's good to hear that you think it would be good enough.