An oxymoron is repudiated
The Economist has more sense than some people I could mention
It’s hardly a new charge against atheists, but it has come up again several times recently in the blogosphere: that today’s secularists, atheists, anti-theists and whatnot, including the publicly active ones, are “just as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists”…This trope needs to be laughed out of existence, immediately.
I’ve been working on it. Backup is welcome.
On one hand you have faith that makes people fly planes into buildings, genitally mutilate young girls, murder abortion doctors (in church), stone adultresses, outlaw certain forms of consensual sex or even just make it impossible to buy beer on Sunday in some states. On the other hand there is the atheist “faith” that makes people write smug op-eds, put ads on buses, file frivolous lawsuits against nativity scenes on public property, and the like. Show me what harm in the world a prominent atheist intellectual has done.
They make all the normal non-intellectual non-atheist people hate science! That’s what. Atheists make people hate science. It’s the new discovery of the year, which was revealed by…by…well I don’t know what it was revealed by, but revealed it was, so that answers that question. That’s what harm in the world a prominent atheist intellectual has done. Ask anyone.
Until god does prove the atheists wrong with an indisputable miracle and Messrs Harris, Dawkins and Dennett still cling to their atheism, fundamentalist religion and “fundamentalist” atheism cannot be put on the same footing. And until those al-Darwinia brigades arrive and start beheading people, “fundamentalist” is a slander against atheist journalists and academics whose sharpest weapon is a pen.
Thank you.
And now I’m inclined to despise the Economist just a little bit less. But then I’m sure they’ll make up for a perfectly sensible editorial by doing something gnarly and pseudo-intellectual soon and it’ll be status quo again.
Nice to have something direct and reasonable, but reading the comments following the article was generally a dull exercise in disappointment.
I had hoped the Economist might attract a *slightly* higher standard of argumentation?
I mean, f’rinstance, why-oh-why-oh-why can’t people get off the ridiculous “Hitler was an atheist/Catholic/Zoroastrian/pagan baby-eater/very naughty boy” non-debate? Argggghhhh…
The correct response to that line of argument is to point out that Hitler was a vegetarian.
The silliest thing about the “fundamentalist atheist” argument is the implication that we dislike Al Qaeda because they are just so damn smug. As if the whole war on terror was triggered by a strident newspaper article.
And it never occurs to these people that ‘fundamentalist’ has to have an opposite to make sense; a fundamentalist vs a progressive/moderate Christian etc. How are fundamentalist atheists different to other atheists? Do they really really not believe in God as opposed to a more laissez-faire lack of belief? You can have philosophical systems around atheism, and there’s the whole positive/negative atheism issue, but they’re different things.
What they mean of course is that they are shocked that people with reasoned atheist opinions actually want to express them unequivocally, and don’t see why they should ‘respect’ religious beliefs they believe are patently false and potentially dangerous – how very uncivil, how rude, how fundamentalist.
AC Grayling has suggested that a non-fundamentalist atheist might believe in a god for maybe a few hours each week. Or maybe she believes in a bit of a god, such as a divine foot or something.
Or she believes that non-belief in god is purely metaphorical. Or she believes in apophatic atheism. Or she’s not really an atheist but she is unspiritual. Or she believes no-god is the ground of all non-being.
But isn’t being unspiritual a more fundamentalist position than not believing in god?
I’m now tempted to use “I’m not an atheist. I’m unspiritual” as a t-shirt slogan.
That was a refreshing bit of common sense from the Economist.
Yeah, the word “fundamentalist” gets misused a lot. “Fundamentalist” derives from “fundamental,” obviously. It means someone who sticks rigidly to the fundamentals of a belief system, and does not allow anything from outside that system to affect her worldview or to cause her to question those fundamentals.
There really are no “fundamentals” to atheism because atheism isn’t a belief system. It’s a specific stance on a specific subject, not an organized collection of various postulates. Even if you call atheism a “belief,” which you shouldn’t, you can’t call it a belief system because it’s just one opinion about one subject.
There might be fanatic atheists, though I’ve never met any, but not fundamentalist ones.