The shrill and strident new theists
Michael Brull replies to the elegant vice-chancellor.
The public and commercial prominence and success of atheist writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling has been heralded as the rise of a “new atheism”. Yet the response to this could equally be heralded as the rise of a “new theism”. Facing a new attack with an international audience playing close attention, religions have as little rational argument in their favour as ever. There was a time when they could deal with dissent through more draconian measures: the kind that can still be practiced in, say, Saudi Arabia. Having lost the power of the gun in the West, apologists of religion have a new weapon: being offended. Rather than confronting (say) Dawkins’ arguments with counter-arguments, people like Craven, and many others like him, instead cry out: why are you picking on us? All we want is for you to respect our beliefs. And so, the crybaby theists hide behind the demand for respect…The bottom line is that such special pleading is a way for theists to avoid answering their critics.
That and also a way for theists to bully their critics, and that is exactly how they new theists are using it. There is a very strong presumption that we are supposed to ‘respect’ certain kinds of beliefs (religious ones, basically), and the new theists deploy that presumption in their favor with energy and zeal. It’s a great wheeze – no need to make real arguments, and lots of emotive pressure to apply. It’s all good.
[I]n a liberal democracy, people should adjust to the prospect of other people finding their views stupid, immoral, pernicious, or any other terrible thing. …A liberal democracy cannot function without the possibility of discussing which beliefs are good and which ones are not. Crybaby theists wish to be shielded from the normal rough and tumble of arguments about beliefs. There are people who honestly think religious belief irrational, and find aspects of organised religion troubling. If anything is outrageous, it is the arrogance of religious extremists, here and elsewhere, holding that such views should not be allowed open discussion.
And that’s exactly why we keep saying so, as often as they attempt to shut us up via respect-demands or vulgar abuse or a bizarro mix of the two.
Nicely said. Not only do the crybaby theists want to be shielded from the rough and tumble, they want us to take long breaks to come over and kiss their rings and other accessories.
Crybabies is the perfect descriptor.
Yes, this was a great response.
The comments to your CiF article, OB, were very infuriating in regard to the ability to talk about religion and atheism. So many commenters went down the ‘there is no taboo, stop whining’ path, which as a gay man is familiar as a sort of tiresome equivalent to ‘you’ve got all your legal rights, now shut up and stop going on about your sexuality, what more do you want?’ as though lack of official sanction means everything is hunky-dory, here and in the rest of the world.
Many of the responses highlighted that there is still a taboo against atheists discussing religion in the most open terms, which of course there is; the detractors seem to confuse a taboo with a restriction in a more obvious, possibly legalistic, sense – there are no laws against discussing atheism, they say, so stop pretending there’s an issue.
But taboos aren’t about official censorship, that’s the point: it’s not that atheists can’t discuss and criticise religion, it’s that the responses so often aren’t simply counter-arguments, but – not always, but often enough – take the form of offence that such things are even being said, and implying that they ought not to be.
One comment put it quite succinctly: ‘Certainly responses are fair enough; but it’s my impression that the majority are attempts to close down the debate rather than take part in it.’
Maybe if the atheist writers keep it up, the theists will cry, take their ball and run home to sky daddy.
(If I wasn’t an atheist, I would pray that happens.)
These developments are interesting on several levels. The whole atheist rift/schism deal is an attempt to manufacture controversy, in exactly the same way as “teach the controversy” is. Sure, not all non-believers want to be open or vocal to the same degree, but it looks like it’s becoming an issue mainly because the theists who want to shut us up are actively searching for those among us who might provide a juicy quote to fan the flames. “Divide and rule” is a simple strategy which the theists, understandably, I suppose, want to use against us – if we let them get away with it.
It’s a PR war that’s being waged and one of the things I find most interesting is the evolutionary arms race that’s going on within that war, which we should be smart enough to harness to our purposes. Their weapons include the mislabellings, such as “shrill,” “strident,” “New Atheists,” “militant” and “fundamentalist.” We need to make clear why none of it washes and how much more applicable it is to their side than to ours.
Brull’s piece is inspirational because it goes a little way to turning their own weapons against them. They need to be branded with something like “crybaby;” something obvious and memorable, something that, if it gains currency (and that’s entirely a PR exercise in getting the meme out there), might begin making some of them think twice before whining like that in print.
We have no choice but to fight on several fronts. We have to (those of us who believe in being vocal) speak out against religion and then follow up by speaking out against attempts to stop us speaking out against religion. We should expect wave after wave to come against us and never be apologetic about what we’re doing.
I think it’s also worth making another point in the specific context of the campaign to make us look disunited. Bluntly put, it’s the most ridiculously overblown case I can possibly imagine of the pot calling the kettle black. Theists are trying to make atheists look bad, on the grounds that there is some disagreement among non-believers regarding how vocal they should be. Pause and let that sink in. Theists are claiming we suffer from a lack of unity. Whereas those, unlike us, who believe in a god or gods are split into hundreds and thousands of camps who cannot agree on the identity of their god, what it preaches, which people it favours and have a history (so far) of thousands of years of killing each other, as well as non-believers, over precisely those issues. What I’m saying is: we need to be out there laughing these claims of our disunity out of existence and reminding people that when the believers of this world have achieved one percent of the unity we already possess, that world will be an immeasurably better place.
I gave up searching before for some kind of metaphor that might show how ludicrous it is for believers to trumpet their claim that the atheist cause is beset by disunity. What just came to me is the over-the-top thought (and I apologise for the debt this owes to the worst and most insensitive jokes we told each other in primary school) that it’s like someone who needs to squint to read the newspaper being mocked for that slight disability – by Helen Keller.
Michael Brull said: “Unlike crybaby theists, I’m happy for missionaries to try to persuade adults of the merits of their irrational case. Indeed, no atheists that I know of actually suggest that theists should ‘respect’ their beliefs and stop arguing for theism.”
My mother was an Anglican who only sporadically went to Church, while my father was a Voltaire-quoting liberal and miltant atheist, for whom religion was an object of scorn and ridicule. The house in Strathfield, Sydney, where I spent my early childhood was around the corner from the national HQ of the Seventh Day Adventists. So every weekend we had one or two of them on the doorstep.
The probability of having a weekend free of an attempt at conversion was proportional to the square root of the distance of the house from the HQ. Similarly, the probability of civility on my father’s part to vendors of ‘The Watchtower’ was proportional to the natural log of the number of days since the previous conversion attempt and inversely proportional to the square of the mean number of requests on his part that it took to get them to leave. Which was a low number to high number ratio.
My father, were he still alive, would probably agree with with Brull if he was prepared to modify his position to: “I’m happy for missionaries to try to persuade adults (other than me) of the merits of their irrational case.”
Since making statements that some group of ‘victims’ consider to be racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or Islamophobic, is now verboten (and not just taboo; actively illegal in many cases), we can hardly be surprised that another group has donned the mantle of victimhood and is now seeking on similar grounds to suppress any views they don’t approve of.
I agree that the ‘liberal democracy’, ‘freedom of speech’ angle should be pushed as the context, or dare I say, ‘frame’, for dealing with ‘the new theists’. It’s much tougher for them to defend themselves if they’re also forced into opposition with basically ‘Western’ society, not just vocal, concerned, conscientious atheists.
I’d love to see someone go after the ‘buttery-atheists’, or ‘faitheists’. They not only allow their internalised faux reverence for religion to gag them in the face of obvious idiocy, but they also often deride their less hypocritical, less condescending, fellow non-believers when speaking plainly.
It looks as the shism among the atheists falls on the time honored lines of modernism/post-modernism and groupism/individualism. I don’t agree that this shism is not structural and only reflects an attempt by theists to divide and rule. I see darker motives behind it.
You can see the same sort of accomodationists praising Islam as the religion of the oppressed and the exploited, and that religion should be honored for post-colonial reasons.
I just want to express my disappointment that OB is not on the list of speakers for this global atheist convention: http://www.atheistconvention.org.au/
Catherine Deveny could easily be recycled for some other role, and OB made a keynote speaker.