Author: Ophelia Benson

Just to be thorough about it, I also disagree with Hemant Mehta. (I’m not crazy about his title, for one thing – it implies that atheists in general are not ‘friendly’ and perhaps that they are hostile and mean and crabby.) He starts out well, pointing out that ‘aggressive’ and ‘friendly’ atheists actually want the same things and aren’t as distinct as Stephen Prothero claims. But then…

The difference is that the “aggressive” types don’t care who they offend. They’ll go after religion in all its forms — it doesn’t matter if they criticize the Vatican or the local church down the street or your sweet neighbor who happens to be religious.

That just isn’t true. It just isn’t true that we ‘go after’ sweet people who happen to be religious. We do go after people who do horrible things for religious reasons – but that can’t be what Mehta meant by people who are sweet and happen to be religious. He has to have meant sweet people who are not made cruel by their religion. Well we don’t ‘go after’ people like that! We don’t refrain from disputing religious truth claims on the grounds that people like that exist – but that is not the same thing as ‘going after’ them. It does get pretty tiresome to have people constantly accusing us of being more sadistic than we in fact are.

The “friendly” types are willing to do some triage here. They’re not going to spend the same amount of energy going after a local pastor or national politician who happens to espouse a personal belief in a god. There are more important battles to fight.

But what has the local pastor done? It depends, doesn’t it. If the local pastor is just the local pastor, most ‘new’ atheists also don’t spend much energy going after her. The national politician is another matter – national politicians in a secular democracy really shouldn’t be ‘espousing’ a personal belief in a god, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of energy to say so. Of course there are more important battles to fight, but so what? We can multi-task.

I would much rather keep as allies those religious people who do things like support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state.

But why is it one or the other? Why would religious people who support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state stop doing those things merely because some atheists (or all atheists for that matter) are explicit about their atheism? I don’t believe for a second that they would. Who is that stupid and petty? People who support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state are probably already not the kind of people to change all their views and actions because they’re in a snit. They might even be so reasonable and fair-minded and sensible that they really think atheists have every right to be public about their atheism. They might even be interested in the arguments!

I know others prefer a no-holds-barred approach, but I think that’s counterproductive when dealing with the people we want to reach out to the most — those who are on the fence.

What fence? Which fence are we talking about? And who’s ‘we’? What is this imaginary ‘we’ that accommodationists always have in mind? The always-right secular but friendly but atheist but civil but liberal but soft-spoken…Everyliberal? Or what? Why is there a ‘we’ who wants to reach out to people on the fence – why aren’t the people on the fence a ‘we’ who want to reach out to us, but find us too boring and anxious and timid to bother with? There’s something weirdly patronizing and de haut en bas about all this grand strategizing and we-invoking, as if all accommodationists were best buddies with David Axelrod or something. Why do the ‘friendly’ atheists think they have some heavy responsibility for what they perhaps think of as ‘the atheist community’ and how it appears to everyone else? I don’t know – but it makes me so huffy that I think I will become a conservative evangelical Republican, just to punish them.

I’m late in doing a meany-atheist dance on Stephen Prothero’s sweet little valentine to the laydeez but here it is anyway.

Today, most Americans associate unbelief with the old-boys network of New Atheists, but there is a new generation of unbelievers emerging, some of them women and most of them far friendlier than Hitchens and his ilk. Although the arguments of angry men gave this movement birth, it could be the stories of women that allow it to grow up.

So men are angry and women are friendly. So angry is the opposite of friendly and vice versa. Well that’s wrong for a start – it’s perfectly possible for people to be both. Being angry about particular things does not rule out being friendly; it especially doesn’t rule out being friendly some of the time. Granted some people are friendly all of the time, but they tend to be bores or intrusive or both. Who doesn’t know this? People who are never angry about anything aren’t paying attention! You can’t have real compassion without anger. If you see the world as it is, you’re going to be angry some of the time.

That fact by itself makes Prothero’s ludicrously sexist opposition incredibly insulting. Men have the energy and passion and commitment to get angry, and women are lukewarm and permanently unthinkingly friendly. Well the hell with that – and fortunately it isn’t true.

I heard two very different arguments at this event. The first was the old line of the New Atheists: Religious people are stupid and religion is poison, so the only way forward is to educate the idiots and flush away the poison. The second was less controversial and less utopian: From this perspective, atheism is just another point of view, deserving of constitutional protection and a fair hearing. Its goal is not a world without religion but a world in which believers and nonbelievers coexist peaceably, and atheists are respected, or at least tolerated.

That’s a lot of bad stupidness in one paragraph. One, that is not ‘the old line of the New Atheists.’ Very few ‘new’ atheists say simply ‘Religious people are stupid’ – that’s a typical anti-atheist canard, meant to inflame hatred against any atheists who actually argue the case for atheism. Two – that second thing is crap. If atheism is ‘just another point of view,’ then it really is on all fours with religion (and other ‘perspectives’), where we just choose whatever we want to believe and there is no need for a reality check or an argument or evidence. But atheism of the kind that goes to meetings, as opposed to just non-theism, is based on reasons. People are active or argumentative or meeting-attending atheists for reasons, real reasons, and we don’t agree that atheism is ‘just another point of view,’ because we think it gets things right. We think theism gets things wrong, and atheism gets things (the relevant things) right. We don’t think all points of view are pretty much the same kind of thing, all mixing it up together in the great salad bowl of life.

These competing approaches could not be further apart. One is an invitation to a duel. The other is a fair-minded appeal for recognition and respect. Or, to put it in terms of the gay rights movement, one is like trying to turn everyone gay and the other is like trying to secure equal rights for gay men and lesbians.

No. Dead wrong. Wrong all the way down. Wanting to confront religion and dispute its truth claims frankly (which does not equate to having the goal of ‘a world without religion,’ which I think most of us know is a highly unrealistic goal and potentially coercive) is not an invitation to a duel, it is simply an expectation of an equal right to talk freely. It is also not the case that the ‘fair’ alternative is simply ‘a fair-minded appeal for recognition and respect,’ because that’s not the real or the only issue. We don’t want to beg for recognition and respect just because we exist, because we are another point of view; we want to be able to say why religious truth claims are mistaken. That’s part of what ‘new’ atheism is about. We are of course legally able to do that, but we’re not always socially or institutionally able to, and that’s why there is a need for campaigning and agitation and, yes, anger.

There was one female speaker, however, and she spoke in a different voice. Amanda Gulledge is a self-described “Alabama mom” who got on her first plane and took her first subway ride in order to attend this event. Although Gulledge stood up on behalf of logic and reason, she spoke from the heart. Instead of arguing, she told stories of the “natural goodness” of her two sons…

Got that? Is it clear enough? She’s ‘a mom,’ so she’s acceptable – she’s not one of those angry loudmouth aggressive women who would dream of self-describing as say a lawyer or a geneticist or an engineer – no, she’s a ‘mom,’ and bless her heart, she speaks from that cuddly organ instead of from her pesky and doubtless feeble little head, and she talks about her children. Isn’t that sweet? Don’t you feel less threatened already? Now she’s the kind of woman we can approve of, we professors in religion departments.

It really doesn’t matter what you believe for no good reason, as long as you believe something for no good reason.

The Parliament of the World’s Religions has brought together representatives from 80 nationalities and more than 220 faith traditions for seven days of debate and dialogue…The parliament could hardly be accused of failing to account for the broadest possible range of spirituality and religious experience. Pagans, Zoroastrians, and even atheists make up the rich mix of perspectives. Organisers have faced some criticism for giving a platform to the Church of Scientology – which some accuse of being more of a business than a conventional religion. But this is an event which is prepared to given even the most unusual new religious movements a fair hearing.

Because – because – because if somebody somewhere believes it, it deserves a fair hearing. And notice how atheism becomes not a denial or rejection of theistic religion but simply one more ‘perspective.’ Even atheism gets a fair hearing. No real attention, presumably, but a fair hearing.

Concerns have been also raised about whether religious perspectives are taken seriously, particularly by secular governments in the West.

Which is a fundamentally absurd concern, since a secular government that took ‘religious perspectives’ (see? there it is again) seriously would not be a secular government any more.

Prominent American rabbi David Saperstein told delegates that religious leaders must work hard to make their voice heard, particularly concerning the moral questions facing the world…”In a world in which you can do everything, what you should do – the moral question – is the fundamental challenge facing humanity. And on that question, the religious communities have urgent, profound, indispensible wisdom to offer” he said.

No they don’t – not as religious communities they don’t. As people they do, but no more so than other people, and in some ways less so. Religion doesn’t bring anything useful to moral reasoning, and it often does impede it or misdirect it.

Quote for the day, from Oliver Kamm.

I reject – in the sense that I’m antagonistic towards them, not just that I don’t accept them – all religious claims to truth.

Precisely. That is no doubt what put the ‘new’ in ‘new atheism’ – the addition of antagonism to non-acceptance. The move from plain unbelief to unbelief plus dislike. The adoption of Kingsley Amis’s ‘Yes [I’m an atheist] but it’s more that I hate him.’ The brazen unapologetic frank hostility to all religious claims to truth, because they are religious claims to truth, and therefore not only worthless but also harmful, because religion is not the way to get at truth, and pretending it is just trains people to learn bad non-functional ways to think.

We are allowed to do that. Call it new or call it old, it makes no difference; we are still allowed to do that. Othering, shunning, name-calling, finger-pointing, ‘framing’ – none of them are going to convince us otherwise. Genuinely good arguments might, but all that other crap isn’t going to do the job.

Have a nice day.