A New History Undermines Atheists’ Pretense of Rationality

Today’s atheists and agnostics, like many of their precursors, usually claim that their unbelief flows from logic and science, whereas the religious worldview is based on blind or benighted faith. Arguments in favor of religion, they assert, are merely cases of subordinating reason to emotion. In Unbelievers, a history of atheism that focuses on Europe around the time of the Reformation, Alec Ryrie paints a very different picture. Nick Spencer writes in his review:

In reality, as Alec Ryrie shows in this short but beautifully crafted history of early doubt, unbelief was (and is) chosen for “instinctive, inarticulate, and intuitive” reasons just as much as is belief. [He argues] persuasively that unbelief was as much, if not more, about what people felt as about what they thought: in particular, a confluence of moral outrage and personal anxiety.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, termed an “age of suspicion” rather than of faith, Ryrie describes medieval skeptics as being like contemporary flat-earthers. They had no evidence to support their position, but practiced “a stubborn refusal to be hoodwinked by the intellectual consensus of their age.” . . . It wasn’t that philosophical ideas were altogether irrelevant. . . . It was that such thinking tacked with the wind, rather than made it. . . . As Ryrie writes: “Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it.”

Read more at Spectator

More about: Atheism, Reason, Religion

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF