Author: Ophelia Benson

About this meta-discussion. H E Baber sees things differently.

But then there’s the meta-disussion–when self-appointed referees (particularly when they’re also players) complain that all that bashing is too, too nasty or that this rough play is hurtful to “despised minorities.” Of course I think it’s perfectly ok for atheists to proselytize, irritating as it is, just as I think it’s perfectly ok for Mormans to come knocking on my door, which I find equally irritating.

I don’t normally say things like “all that bashing is too, too nasty” or “this rough play is hurtful to ‘despised minorities’.” I didn’t say it this time, either. I said something a little different. I agreed with Russell Blackford that Dennett and Dawkins “have been demonised with some success” and added that “the myth-perpetuating and demonization are if anything getting louder and more pervasive.” I then named a whole slew of names by way of example. I then said there was a good deal of the witch hunt about this, because of the exaggeration and the scapegoating.

Now – notice that Baber says she thinks it’s perfectly ok for atheists to proselytize, and also that their doing so is just as irritating as Mormons’ knocking on her door. But of course atheists don’t knock on people’s door – and we don’t do what is normally considered proselytizing, either. So already we’re in double standard country – already we’re being told we’re allowed to do what we’re doing, but it’s just as irritating as knocking on people’s doors in order to tell them what to believe.

Well this is exactly the hyperbole I was talking about – it’s also exactly the charge that Chris Mooney and the other Atheist-haters like to fling around: that we want to pry into what people believe, we want to force people to think correctly. This is the double standard. We do much less in the way of intrusion and attempted forcing and proselytizing than throngs and hordes of theists do – yet we get told we are equally irritating.

The rest of the comment is equally careful and well-informed.

As far as accuracy goes, it’s at best an exaggeration to suggest that people who criticize the New Atheists and their followers hold that religion deserves some special respect–I don’t think it does–or that religious claims shouldn’t be criticized in public or that atheists should be deferential or remain closeted.

But Chris Mooney has been saying all of that for weeks, on his blog, in Newsweek, in other news outlets, in the wake of having said it in his book. Many other people say it too – I listed several in my post. How does Baber know it’s an exaggeration to say that they say that? Beats me! Frankly, I think she just made it up. It apparently doesn’t sound plausible to her, so she just announces it isn’t true. Well – that’s not good enough.

It’s also inaccurate to suggest that the New Atheists’ critics want to impose a double standard s.t. religious folk are allowed to trumpet their views publicly and evangelize but atheists aren’t. Some I suppose would hold that both atheists and religious people should be more polite and should avoid proselytizing and inflammatory rhetoric.

But again – it’s not a matter of supposing – it’s a matter of the public record. The “New Atheists’” critics shout the place down about the irritating noisiness of the “New Atheists” while not saying a word about thousands of years of noisiness from Old Theists. That is a double standard. It’s not that they spell it out, obviously, but then double standards never are – that’s why they’re called that! The word indicates an unacknowledged inequality. That’s the point.

I wouldn’t say all this – but there is a rude dismissiveness in the Comment is Free piece, in the comments here, and in ‘The New Atheists’ at The Enlightenment Project that, frankly, I have had enough of. I think H E is dead wrong on a whole bunch of facts, and that she’s either unaware of or ignoring a whole bunch of realities; given that, I think she should be less quick to scold other people.

Here’s one such blind spot:

I suppose I can understand some of the hostility to religion. There are still a few people around who were raised as fundamentalists and got beat up by it or who live in backwaters where conservative evangelical Christianity is the religion du jour, religious participation is de facto mandatory and non-participants get flak.

A few people who live in backwaters where conservative evangelical Christianity is the religion du jour etcetera. Er – no. It’s more than a few.

Have a pleasant evening.

Russell Blackford said in More on H.E. Baber’s piece in The Guardian that yes there are such people as knee-jerk atheists, who are far less nuanced and thoughtful than Dennett and Dawkins and so on, but –

But that is inevitable. What movement doesn’t attract a lot of people who adopt a relatively crude version of its ideas? It’s very unfair to write in a way that perpetuates the myth that Dennett, Dawkins, etc., themselves are unnuanced and dogmatic. Any fair reading of their work shows the opposite. If anything, there is now some urgency in dispelling that myth, which is not only unfair but also making it more difficult for the individuals concerned to get a decent hearing, i.e. they have been demonised with some success.

Quite, and the myth-perpetuating and demonization are if anything getting louder and more pervasive. The Great Anti-atheist Noise Machine is leaving The Atheist Noise Machine in the dust, at least in terms of sheer volume. (In terms of quality, I would say no, but then I would, wouldn’t I.) Andrew Brown has made a specialty of it at Comment is Free belief, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish and John Gray have joined the chorus, Madeleine Bunting and Mark Vernon and Theo Hobson and Giles Fraser and Chris Hedges and many many more grind away at the subject week in and week out, and of course Chris Mooney is at it almost full-time.

It’s noticeable that a lot of those people would probably call themselves liberals or leftists of one kind or another – yet they seem to be curiously blind to the commonalities between their pet hobby and a good old-fashioned witch hunt. They seem to be surprisingly obtuse about the risks of the hyperbolic scapegoating they are indulging themselves in. They seem, in fact, like people who have never even heard of pogroms or Joe McCarthy or God Hates Fags. They seem weirdly easy in their minds about heaping frenzied opprobrium on people whose ideas they dislike. They seem to think they are like Stephen Jay Gould when in fact they more closely resemble Anita Bryant. Strange, isn’t it.

I haven’t said enough yet about Sholto Byrnes. I’ve said a little, but that little was a mere note – a mere listing of the things he said about Does God Hate Women? that were not true. I’m not sure that was quite adequate. I’m not going to say all that I could say about Sholto Byrnes, but I am going to add a little something.

For instance I’m going to point out that his vituperative and inaccurate review was apparently not enough for him; he had to take another swipe, just in passing, while talking about a different book.

Armstrong’s god is beyond our little explanations etc etc; ‘any suggestion of literalism is to fall into a gross and idolatrous anthropomorphism.’

Although this may come as a surprise to the millions of Christians who entertain thoughts of God as a jovial beardie – a celestial Frank Dobson, if you will – it is familiar territory for any student of theology or philosophy of religion. Which is why Armstrong is right to describe the analysis of the Dawkinsites, who have made the god they wish to dismiss into just such a being, as “disappointingly shallow” and “based on such poor theology”. It is also why the poisoned darts of Armstrong’s critics (see Johann Hari’s review of Does God Hate Women? in the NS of 6 July) fail to pierce her arguments. They are aimed at territory she does not wish to defend.

No they’re not. Our putative ‘poisoned darts’ are not aimed at her woolly idea of god, they are aimed at her bad and unfootnoted pseudo-scholarship on Mohammed and his marriage to a child. They are aimed at territory she has defended in more than one book. But Byrnes is not a precise or careful writer. Byrnes just throws things – not poisoned darts so much as whatever is nearest – an old boot, a sandwich, the dog, a stale muffin that looks exactly like the Blessed Virgin if you look at it the right way. Byrnes reads a book and has reactions to it and then takes his reactions to be things resembling facts. He felt hatred for our book, therefore it became true that our book was largely “torrents of invective” – when in fact that description fits at most one page of the book.

Sadly, and rather contemptibly, the Independent and its lawyer pretended to believe this explanation. Here’s what the lawyer had to say in response to our dispute of that assertion:

This is a comment and is in keeping with the rest of what is a strongly expressed review based on the writer’s honest belief. For the proper meaning of the expression it has to be read in the context of the preceding passage, including the word “excoriating”. No reader would expect this tag to be literally true or anything more than a figure of speech, to be understood in the light of the reviewer’s transparent and openly articulated dislike of the book. Reviewers, as you know, are entitled to be opinionated and to express their opinions forcefully and colourfully. Of course, Madeleine Bunting expresses similar views in her recent article on your book.

Yes, of course, we know, and we stipulated, that reviewers are entitled to be opinionated and to express their opinions forcefully and colourfully. We do not accept that that means they are entitled to make express their ‘opinions’ so forcefully and colourfully that they grossly misrepresent the book. We think it’s absurd to complain about bad reviews, and we fully expected bad reviews for this book. Reviews that say things that are untrue are another matter. We think there is a difference.

I’m an editor. I’m an editor in more than one place. If I got a review like that – I would reject it. It’s too stupid, too crass, too vulgar, too…bad to publish. The literary editor of the Indy accepted it, and then defended it. There’s something peculiar about that.

There’s also something very odd about the goddy turn at lefty newspapers and magazines in the UK – but more on that later.