Why we write
Udo and Russell have their say on the putative schism between atheist camps.
In a different world, the merits, or otherwise, of religious teachings might be discussed more dispassionately. In that world, some of us who criticise religion itself might be content to argue that the church (and the mosque, and all the other religious architecture that sprouts across the landscape) should be kept separate from the state. Unfortunately, however, we don’t live in that world.
No, we don’t, and furthermore, all the fuming and name-calling from the people who despise the “new” atheists is, perversely or tragically or amusingly, just fanning the flames of “new” atheism. That’s partly because nearly all of the fuming and name-calling is noticeably unfair and inaccurate, and so it just irritates instead of persuading, but it’s also because the intensity and fury awakens our curiosity. It does. I often see people asking – people sometimes ask me – why “new” atheists care, why we’re so interested in theism, why bother, why not just ignore the whole thing. Well this is part of why – it’s because the more fury and unfair rhetoric there is, the more we wonder what’s going on, what theists and fans of theists are so worked up about, what they’re thinking, what all this is based on. So we look into it – and we are interested and perhaps surprised by what we find, so we talk about it, and that’s why we don’t ignore the whole thing.
When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising — and totally justifiable — that atheists and skeptics question the source of this authority. If religious organisations or their leaders claim to speak on behalf of a god, it is fair to ask whether the god concerned really makes the claims that are communicated on its behalf. Does this god even exist? Where is the evidence? And even if this being does exist, why, exactly, should its wishes be translated into law?
Yes, that’s what I mean. Even when religion claims authority in the political sphere in something that doesn’t directly affect us, we still question the source of the authority (some of us do). We’re interested. The louder the claims of authority are, the more interested we are. We start to wonder, or to pay more attention than we used to. What is that about? we wonder. Where does this idea come from, and why do poeple accept it so readily? How do people manage to ignore the many obvious problems with it? So we investigate, and write about our investigations, and then the despisers come along and call us a great many harsh names for doing so, and then we get our backs up. We are allowed to investigate this, and we are allowed to talk about it, and we are not any of those things we just got called. So next time we dig twenty feet down instead of ten.
Yes indeed. I not only find myself much more knowledgeable about evolution, epistemology, religious beliefs etc (on this blog, Eric and G are always stimulating to read, as well as yourself) but, after 3 years of not reading The God Delusion on the grounds it probably wouldn’t tell me much I hadn’t seen elsewhere, I’ve finally been provoked by yet another swarm of hyperbolic straw men, courtesy of Craven and Ruse, to request the book from the local library.
Your link at the top of the post took me to your CiF contribution, not Russell’s and Udo’s. Was that your intention?
FYI, Ophelia – the link in your N&C points to your article, rather than to the article written by Russell and Udo. They’re both fabulous, of course.
Or thirty feet – or more! The incredibly strident and frenetic response of religionists and religious atheists (faitheists) to more assertive atheism is a sign that religious believers have run out of arguments. Michael Brull’s piece highlights this. And when one reads Craven’s craven piece, or the All Saints’ sermon of the Archbishop of Cologne (linked on richarddawkins.net) – where Richard Dawkins is compared unfavourably with Nazis – or Alister McGrath’s shoddy ‘scholarship’, it’s not hard to come to the realisation that religion is in trouble, and knows it.
If there is a ‘movement atheism’ it’s largely because there’s such a lot of apologetic religious idiocy around, as well as a lot of unapologetic religious idiocy. AC Grayling suggests that religion is having its last, characteristically bloody, fling. Religion is becoming more, not less, poisonous, and more, not less strident and shrill.
Karen Armstrong may think that she has brought us a message from God to think again, but it’s the sheer lack of thought amongst the religious that is so worrying, the comfortable assumption that they need not answer the challenge of atheism, but merely need to pull out all the stops to regain the respect that they have lost. They’ll have to do better, and now that we’ve got them on the run, we should keep it that way.
Let Ruse and Dembski pal together. They’re obviously birds of a feather, despite the fact that Ruse takes cover under his claim of being a professional philosopher. When someone does that he’s immediately suspect anyway. But compare his CisF piece of yours, Ophelia, or to Russell’s and Udo’s – both of them clear, trenchant and relevant – and he comes off looking a lot like someone who has lost the plot, someone who hasn’t really learned his own lines, let alone the story line.
Cardinal Archbishop Meisner (of Köln) says that we don’t have the authority to “rewrite the ten commandments”. Well, I have news for him (in case he hadn’t noticed): they’ve been rewritten. It takes awhile for such blindingly obvious pieces of news to penetrate the palaces of bishops and popes (and even the offices of some self-styled professional philosophers), but – though I say this with reservations – even such as these can learn.
Oops! No, that was not the intention. I lifted the url from the belief main page, and must have hit the wrong one.
The ‘why don’t you just ignore theists?’ response is old but never fails to be annoying; it implies so much – that atheists are being unnecessarily shrill, that they just want the attention, that their case is weak so they mask it with anger – but thinks so little about the possible reasons why atheists don’t sit back and be quiet, which are pretty obvious with a moment’s reflection:
1. Theists don’t shut up. But more than this, they don’t stop trying to force their views on others, in numerous ways through government and the media which I don’t need go into detail about on this site obviously.
Critics don’t seem to understand this, and think atheists are being melodramatic. If they would just keep more abreast of what goes in the world around them they would see how many religious groups quite plainly try to change the world according to their particular set of absolutist and unprovable beliefs.
This is why in the immediate practical sense atheists and secularists need to constantly speak out.
2. Even if theists had no more power than anyone else peddling a set of beliefs – political, environmental etc – atheists would still regard their beliefs as demonstrably false, incoherent, and potentially dangerous if not subject to scrutiny, in a way non-supernatural beliefs aren’t.
Atheists care in the grandest abstract sense about what is true and knowable about the world, which to be honest I think fewer theists than people think do: they seem to talk as if they care, but often their arguments are for the claimed necessity or usefulness in society of religion, not its truth.
Without sounding a bit crawly OB and JS hit the nail on the head when they said truth ‘matters because we are the only species we know that has the ability to find out’, and in addition to that when large sections of society – a global majority – want to effect change based on very dubious religious ‘truths’ it becomes even more important to use this ability to seek out actual, objective truths with which to countermand subjectivism and superstition.
This is why in the wider philosophical sense atheists and secularists need to speak out.
When they want to effect change, Dave JL, or, when they try to keep things the way they are. As Onfray says, religious epistemology is still the norm, and “even after their physical departure the conquerors are still there, because they have subdued the bodies, minds, and flesh of the majority.” Not that they have actually left the scene yet, physically. This is something that people like Ruse don’t seem to recognise: that much of what he thinks already has a religious basis; he must actually make an effort if he wants to be an unbeliever.
George, your comments are consistently top-notch and a joy to read! I don’t think I’ve ever found anything to disagree with you on, but I do have one nit to pick.
I do think comparing the societal perception of atheists to where gays have been is a valid comparison. No, atheists haven’t been subject to the kind of violence gays have (which I’ve personally experienced), but the utter loathing from the mainstream, the tut-tutting about rocking the boat, the utter lack of embarrassment about making the most vile, dehumanizing statements. . .it’s all so very familiar.
Thanks, Josh. I think you’re right that the rhetorical parallels between the attitude towards gays and atheists are all-too similar, even if the extremes of bigotry manifest in outright oppression and violence fortunately do not repeat themselves. I can’t help but wonder whether there would be more violence against atheists if we were more readily identifiable as such. I have a sneaking suspicion that a certain class of people – okay, young men – would hang out near “atheist bars” looking for targets for violence, if there were such a thing as identifiable atheist bars. As a tiny example, I find it endlessly fascinating that the (fortunately quite sturdy) “Darwin fish” license plate on the front of my car has been the target of repeated attempts to bend and pull it off. It’s a comic little icon that makes what I presume most people in my college town would see as a rather uncontroversial point – that creationism is rather silly – yet some people are so offended that they attempt vandalism. (Oddly, no one has yet defaced the “Atheism is Myth-Understood” bumper sticker on the trunk of the same car, even though a casual inspection would reveal that it’s attached with naught but a magnetic backing. Says something about the observational skills of your typical religious bigot, I suspect.)
And on a related note, I am truly sorry that you have been on the receiving end of violence from bigots, Josh. That shouldn’t happen to anyone, ever – and yet it does, with shocking regularity.
Which sparks the further thought… It’s a peculiar thing to apologize for wrong-doing that one is not (and would never be, and could never be) responsible for – and yet, we have no other words handy to acknowledge and express sympathy for the wrongs done to our fellow humans. I think that, in some way, an “I’m sorry” is as much an acknowledgment of privilege as an expression of sympathy. Privilege blindness is, I think, a very bad thing: So when I tell a dark-skinned person that I am sorry in response to hearing about an experience of racism, or express a similar apologetic sentiment to a woman targeted by sexism, or a gay/bisexual/transgender person targeted with abuse or violence because of his or her sexual identity, and so on (and on and on, unfortunately) with regard to any other minority to which I don’t belong, what I am saying is that I acknowledge and accept my position of privilege, and I feel bad about the fact that other people similarly privileged are such asshats.
But what do I know? I’m just another white middle-aged over-educated heterosexual male. And worse yet, an American, which magically transforms any support I express for the plight of women or homosexuals in countries dominated by Islam into a manifestation of Islamophobia and Imperialist Hegemony ™…
G-
Ha! You needn’t grovel in abasement over your “privilege” before me:) You’re very kind to say what you said, though you didn’t have a responsibility to.
I’m happy to say those terrible events are in the distant past. Watching young LGBT people grow up in a world safer -although not nearly safe enough- than I did is real pleasure.
I balked at even bringing up my experience, because I hate it when people trot out their war stories of being oppressed as some sort of rhetorical or philosophical get-out-of-jail-free card.
I now realize why I did it, and it’s silly. There’s a certain commenter on a certain blog (roundly loathed by B&W readers) who trots out his status as a gay man to bludgeon anyone who makes the comparison between atheist equality and the gay civil rights struggle. He gets himself into such a self-righteous lather about it, and clearly expects everyone to be embarrassed and apologetic about making the comparison. It really chafes, since I’ve had many of the same experiences he has (and have long fought vocally for LGBT rights), and have come to a very different conclusion. I wanted you and other readers to know that not all gay people (certainly not me) think such comparisons are inappropriate. So, maybe not so silly. .
/blather