• Religion, Theocracy and the Left at the Drink Soaked Trots

Thanks for the reference. I agree with both the general direction of shuggy's article and your comments and that this is a very key concept to develop.

Some of my comments about Dawkins in this topic were intended to be in the same general direction.

On the specifics, while I am even more critical of Hitchens style (too much journalistic/punditry shallow personalized attacks on side issues) and of related lack of accurate analysis in depth, I don't think his religious iconoclasm makes a good focus for the real point shuggy and you are making.

Hitchens has thoroughly bitten the bullet of uniting with other secularists (including the US Bush administration and its neocon supporters ludicrously described as Christian fundamentalists and religious zionists by their opponents) and also with religious forces such as the Shia islamist parties in Iraq, against the islamo-fascist enemy.

While the language of his expressions of generic hostility to religion might sound inappropriately shrill like Dawkins if they were in other contexts, I think they serve as a necessary or at least useful counterpoint given the domination of the pro-war camp by people who, to put it mildly, are not militantly atheistic.

With Bush throwing in "God bless America" in so many speeches and doing much more serious pandering to religious conservatives on issues like abortion, genetic research, gay marriage and "values" generally, I think its reasonable to be loudly and obnoxiously anti-religious when forced to stand on the same side as people wearing their religions on their sleeves as both fight reaction (including the pseudo-left and what Americans call "left liberals" wearing their secularism on their sleeves while actually promoting a superstitious world outlook and outright appeasement of religious fanatics).

But in actually analysing and understanding religion and how to combat it and how to unite with people influenced by it against our common enemies, a much more nuanced approach is necessary, as shuggy and you point out. I would recommend the crude stuff coming from Dawkins as a better target for making this point than Hitchens since Dawkins does claim to be providing an analysis while Hitchens is openly just "having a go".

Its interesting that this issue is being raised at the drink soaked popinjays. Although superficially "light-weight" they seem to have more depth than Harry's Place. See the discussion here earlier on religious thinking taking up tomb's remarks,including a reference to Harry's Place being a "religious site" in the topic on evolutionary theory where keza was also raising similar issues to shuggy and you.

Shuggy refers to the "traditional attitude" of the left being wrong. Actually the stuff he is objecting to became "traditional" in the sort of circles drink soaked trotskyist popinjays would have emerged from but were, like most of the rest of trot (and anarcho) politics, diametrically opposed to the real left tradition. (It is of course to their credit that they emerged from it instead of sinking into the depths of those who abandoned even that sectarian tradition in favor of open alliance with murderous religious obscurantism while still pretending to be "the left").

Essentially the traditional struggle against "sectarianism" in the workers movement was aimed rather precisely at the sort of stuff Shuggy complains about. (In particular against "atheist sects" which were excluded from the first international on the same basis that the Young Men's Christian Association was excluded - no theological sections allowed!) As always terms like "sectarianism" have been coopted by the sectarians themselves - especially to pretend that people who expose the essentially conservative or reactionary nature of their sectarian politics are being "sectarian" for refusing to submit to their sects!

On the other hand it has never really been necessary to explain that murderous obscurantists are not allies of the left before, so its hard to avoid a certain incoherent rage at having to discuss such issues and one can sympathize with Hari and Hitchens not being particularly nuanced about it.