Atheism Done Right Tuesday, Nov 10 2009
religion 5:19 pm
Russell Blackford, an atheist activist and transhumanist, and Udo Schuklenk, who is Joint editor-in-chief of Bioethics, the journal of the International Association of Bioethics, and released the October 2009 anthology ’50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We are Atheists’ with Russell, have published an article in The Guardian, “Stand up, stand up, against Jesus”. It describes the unfortunate schism in atheism between the “accommodationists” and the people who say it like it is. Here is an excerpt:
Religious teachings promise us much — eternal life, spiritual salvation, moral direction, and a deeper understanding of reality. It all sounds good, but these teachings are also onerous in their demands. If they can’t deliver on what they promise, it would be well to clear that up. Put bluntly, are the teachings of any religion actually true or not? Do they have any rational support? It’s hard to see what questions could be more important. Surely the claims of religion — of all religions — merit scrutiny from every angle, whether historical, philosophical, scientific, or any other.
Contrary to many expectations in the 1970s, or even the 1990s, religion has not faded away, even in the Western democracies, and we still see intense activism from religious lobbies. Even now, one religion or another opposes abortion rights, most contraceptive technologies, and therapeutic cloning research. Various churches and sects condemn many harmless, pleasurable sexual activities that adults can reasonably enjoy. As a result, these are frowned upon, if not prohibited outright, in many parts of the world, indeed people lose their lives because of them. Most religious organisations reject dying patients’ requests to end their lives as they see fit. Even in relatively secular countries, such as the UK, Canada, and Australia, governments pander blatantly to Christian moral concerns as the protection of religiously motivated refusals to provide medical professional services demonstrates.
Homosexuals are demonized thanks to religion. The God of the Gaps serves as the most notorious curiosity-stopper there is. Homosexuals are routinely murdered in places like Iraq. According to the predominant interpretation of the Bible, it says that homosexuality is evil, but how do we even know that “lying with” a man means sexing them up? Christianity is the fuel in the engine of the fantastically evil and wasteful Drug War. More Christians back torture.
More subtly, religion, especially Christianity where I come from, discourages counterculture and brash intellectualism in general. If the Bible is immune from higher criticism, then the notion of erecting other curiosity-stoppers elsewhere comes naturally.
I am quite interested in Christianity for the large, convoluted memetic complex that it is. I have over 173 bookmarks for Christianity on my del.ic.ious account. If there are any atheist transhumanists out there with as much interest in Christianity as I have, people step forward, and we can discuss the authorship of the Pauline epistles together over wine and bread.
As Russell points out, it is our right to make mockery of religion. If you are religious, it is my right to disrespect you all day long if I feel like it. In America, a free country, I can do any damn thing I want as long as I don’t break the law (and sometimes even then). You can feel free to disrespect me back. But I see Christianity unraveling, and it’s our obligation to pull on the threads.
Most transhumanists are afraid of Christianity and want to be buddy-buddy. Not me. I respect some theists, like Lincoln Cannon and the Mormon Transhumanists, but I think that Mormon theology is extremely unusual in its flexibility and apparent relatedness to transhumanism. Mormonism is one of the most exotically unusual Christian sects anyhow, so when I am speaking against Christianity in general you can assume I am not talking about Mormonism. Most mainstream Christians consider Mormonism to be heresy anyway. My priest in the Russian Orthodox Church made fun of Mormonism to me when I was an altar boy. It seems like Mormonism can almost be twisted and pulled and warped into something that makes sense, but not quite.
I am part of what you’d call the Penn & Teller school of atheism. Except that I don’t think that people should use quotes from Michael Shermer. Michael Shermer is played out.
However, I think Jesus was pretty fricking interesting. He was damn smart and confident. He reminds me of others sometimes.
A Jewish friend told me that his interpretation of the thing about “lying with another man” was that gay sex should not be performed in the marital bed. Apparently in the Torah there is a grammatical error in that passage, as the word of G*d can’t have an error this must have some meaning and therefore modify the meaning of the entire section.
My observation of the Jerry Springer show suggests that modern women are more likely to forgive their husband for getting some gay action on the side if he does it away from home. So it seems that the ancient Jews may have had some insight into psychology there.
“More Christians back torture.”
You are making a series of simplified blame-assignments, which reminds me of the scales of justice fallacy. I’m not clear on what’s your message in this post overall (what was that on Mormonism?), and I’m not disagreeing that dogmatic insanity is evil, but that paragraph freaks me out.
Excuse me but has anyone actually found any evidence either physical or written that the man Jesus actually existed in the flesh? That would be news to me.
Vladimir, you’re right that that paragraph is sort of scales-of-justice-y, but unfortunately Christianity is so big that there is always some part of it immune to specific criticisms, so Christians always make it out like criticism X does not apply to them. I am just issuing some of the most pressing criticisms that apply to many Christians, for instance their empirically demonstrated increased probability of supporting torture. There is a strong connection between moral realism and atrocities. I have to pick some criticisms, and whatever criticisms I pick, they will be subject to the scales of justice fallacy, so how can I even argue for atheism while avoiding that fallacy? When arguing against a mass movement you have to pick characteristics that correspond to 60% or 70% of the movement but not 100%, because the latter is impossible.
I think a lot of the scales of justice fallacy bias can be eliminated in the interpretation. Instead of counting each argument against Christianity as a “point”, think of them as varied quantities with fuzzy applicability.
My message in the post overall, seemingly clearly, is that I am against accommodationist atheism and am in favor of activist atheism. You may disagree with the method, but how is the message not clear overall?
The Mormon part is included because Lincoln Cannon tends to respond to all my anti-religious posts by pointing that Mormonism is immune to some if not many of the criticisms I often direct against Christianity in general. He is correct, it is, so I wanted to take care of that issue before it even arises.
Tell me how you would have written this post.
Improbus, it’s complicated, but there is scattered evidence here.
The new atheism seems more like anti-theism to me.
Yes, similarly to how astronomy is explicitly anti-astrology rather than agnostic or non-confrontational with astrology.
Michael wrote:
“As Russell points out, it is our right to make mockery of religion. If you are religious, it is my right to disrespect you all day long if I feel like it. In America, a free country, I can do any damn thing I want as long as I don’t break the law (and sometimes even then). You can feel free to disrespect me back. But I see Christianity unraveling, and it’s our obligation to pull on the threads.”
Other than extreme fringe types, I don’t think there are many who would dispute your First Amendment right to slam Christianity. I’m not sure that disrespecting people is quite as effective as you imagine, however. No doubt there’s a good deal of emotional satisfaction involved in smacking those poor deluded believing fools up side the head (rhetorically, of course), but I — speaking as one of the aforementioned — find that approach highly offputting, and not the least bit persuasive.
I also don’t like it when obnoxious, in-your-face fundamentalists try to set me straight on how things are — and for the same reason.
They’re obnoxious.
A while back I mentioned on my Facebook profile page that I consider myself a free-thinker. I didn’t realize that the term “free-thinker” somewhere along the line came to mean “agenda-driven atheist who posts four or five items per day to Facebook about how stupid religious people are.” But I learned, as I continued accepting friendship requests, that this is apparently what the term now means. For me, being all worked up and pissed off all the time have very little to do with thinking freely, but what do I know?
What those wussy “accomodationists” have going for them is a willingness to engage in real dialog. I consider myself something of an accomodationist on the other side, as offensive as that idea might be to some of my Christian friends. But I think the arguments for atheism have a lot going for them, and I am of the opinion that a committed atheist who has thought the matter through and come to his or her conclusions honestly is in a superior intellectual, moral, and spiritual position to a believer who has just kind of followed along with what everyone else around him or her has always done.
Likewise, I think an individual who has really worked on his or her faith is much better off than an intellectually lazy atheist who doesn’t actually care one way or another, but who loves ripping on all those stuffy religious hypocrites. I don’t think there were too many of of the latter in the past, but my guess is that the growing popularity and acceptance of atheism, coupled with this strident rhetorical approach that gives people a real Us vs. Them bandwagon to jump on, will produce a lot more of them.
The amount of noise those people make might help move the numbers in your direction, but then you serious atheists will have to deal with the old “embarrassing friend” problem, which will actually be kind of nice — seeing as serious believers have been dealing with it for a long time.
Anyhow — speaking as just one believer — if ever I do become an atheist, that worldview is much more likely to grow out of an understanding reached through dialog and respect than it is through one of my Facebook friends telling me that I’m an idiot. And I may yet become an atheist; I think I have good reasons to view the world as I do, but I could be wrong. And for some reason, I tend listen more closely to others (on either side of this particular issue) who say the same.
Phil, you have some excellent points, but to be frightfully honest, it’s the younger set — the teens and 20s — that I’m after. For these fence-sitters, an abrupt nudge and outright mockery is often a more effective strategy than pleading and dialogue. True Christians must believe, and the older a Christian is, the more likely they are to have pleasant memories associated with the faith and friends that help create a feeling of solidarity around them. It is more likely that these people will become atheists when disconnected from their Christian community, which is most likely to happen through coincidental circumstance (such as a move to another city), if ever.
What I’m looking for are younger types who have not yet solidified their religious identity and are not embedded within a religious social clique. The type of group, for instance, that would find this page on 25 Retarded Bible Verses” persuasive. I believe that it is more likely that older generations will abandon Christianity only when all their children have.
The reason why I am even more disappointed in Christianity is that I myself was a devoted, thoughtful Christian at a much earlier stage of life, yet I was converted to atheism by abrupt, unforgivingly straightforward arguments. Perhaps this is just an artifact of my personality, but it is natural for me to “preach” atheism using the same direct tone that “converted” me.
Arguing the merits of atheism is something I’ve done for a while, and I’m proud to say that I’ve turned dozens of fence-sitters into atheists. All of them have been under the age of 30. I’m pursuing a particular strategy, and while I know it may offend many, it has a proven history of effectiveness.
Hey Michael –
Aha, now I understand why you’ve always been so nice to me. I’m too old to matter. ;-)
Interestingly, I’ve seen evangelical Christians pursue equally focused strategies with great success, so your results are not surprising. The emphasis on getting your target audience away from social pressure to be Christian and into a situation wherein they’ll feel social pressure to remain atheist — which is one result of the whole mocking approach — suggests that rational argument alone is less than completely sufficient, and that the matter may not remain as fully settled for them as it does for you.
And, in fact, it may not.
Young people who get shocked into a new world view sometimes become lifetime zealots, sometimes experience a pretty severe backlash, and sometimes stray off into interesting new areas. I’m sure it’s hard for you to imagine that anything like those latter two scenarios could happen with the dozens you’ve brought over, but, hey — heads up.
It might.
Hi Phil,
No, I’m nice to people of all religions because they deserve it. (I can’t tell if you are joking here or not.) Part of why I have a problem with religion is that people take it as such a sacrosanct part of their identity that their equate hostility towards religion — an idea — with hostility towards the human being. Reading much of the above, many religious people would jump to the conclusion that I think terribly negatively of them as people, but this is not so. It’s merely the idea that I dislike. I do believe that extremely intelligent people can be Christians, and some of my best friends growing up were Christians.
Note that I said that I have the right to disrespect religious people all day long if I feel like it, not that I actually do. I have to say this because many Christians seem to be operating under the assumption that they have the legal right not to be disrespected by other free citizens. I realize I risk alienation from Christians by saying this, but someone has to say it, and if I were a Christian myself I would support their right to do that, but no Christians ever step forward and say so.
As an intellectual I think everything should be subject to questioning from every angle. Religious people disagree — questioning their religion is considered equivalent to questioning their value as a person. But I am not questioning anyone’s value, just their ideas. In a secular context, such questioning is often considered an acceptable part of dialogue, but in religion, questioning of a certain depth is forbidden.
Until human beings are robots, rational argumentation ought to be occasionally coupled with explicit social approval or disapproval. Anyone who forgoes these tools is operating with a hand tied behind their back. If the people I were trying to persuade operated based on rational argumentation alone, then that would be all I need. Even the most rational arguers couple emotion with their arguments, but they try to make it so that the emotions flow from rational arguments rather than the other way around.
Do you know any lifelong atheist zealots who have killed for their beliefs, prevented the terminally ill from the right to end their own lives, or prevented women from removing fetuses that consist of tiny balls of undifferentiated cells? If so, they are extremely difficult to find. Perhaps the greatest “zealotry” that I’ve seen zealot atheists commit is making religious people feel socially uncomfortable, an unfamiliar experience given centuries of Christian cultural homogeneity in the United States.
I do wish to exert social pressure towards atheism, analogous to how I wish to exert social pressure in favor of paying attention to priors, in favor of the scientific method, in favor of vegetarianism, etc. The only problem is that I am in favor of so many unpopular ideas that if I exerted social pressure in their favor simultaneously, I would probably offend everyone under the Sun. So, I have to pick and choose, and atheism is one issue where I’ve decided to exert social pressure.
Still, thanks for the heads up — if I encouraged someone to become an atheist due to social pressure alone, that conviction probably wouldn’t be very stable, or very well-reasoned.
“I can’t tell if you are joking here or not.”
Yes, joking. Just having fun juxtaposing your defense of the right to “disrespect people all day long” with the fact that I’ve never known you to be anything but a perfectly genial and gracious guy. I see where you’re coming from in explaining the distinction between having the right and exercising it. And, for sure, anyone who thinks they have a legal right not to be disrespected just doesn’t get the whole First Amendment thing.
“Do you know any lifelong atheist zealots who have killed for their beliefs, prevented the terminally ill from the right to end their own lives, or prevented women from removing fetuses that consist of tiny balls of undifferentiated cells?”
Nope, not one. Atheism qua atheism is generally harmless when it comes to that kind of stuff.
Genuinely , I’d utter that skepticism is pretty much the only course of action towards ‘zest’ .
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