Tag: Atheism

The Problem With Atheism

Ran across this article about a gathering of athesits in Ohio thanks to the No Countries, No Religion blog.

Lyndsey Teter of The Other Paper writes of the gathering,

“A lot of people have been waiting for some event like this to come along,” said Alexander Loeb, a 31-year-old Columbus resident and atheist.

“It’s like being in the Matrix—only there’s no Morpheus,” he said of converting to atheism. “You’re plugged in to the truth, but you’re sort of left standing there by yourself.”

Weird to see an atheist cite a scifi version of Xianity to make his point. But lets go with it.

The problem with atheism as a movement is that, unlike believers, atheism generally is not and probably should not define one’s self in the way that religions tend to do. When you look at various Christian sects, for example, there tends to be a significant amount of the individual’s self-concept that is defined by their religious beliefs. A Jehovah’s Witness is going to react to a birthday party invitation in a completely different and predictable way than an Orthodox Jew is going to react to the offer of a ham sandwich or a radical Muslim to an offer of a dog sitting job.

But believing there is no God(s) is the same thing in believing in the existence of the moon or gravity — it’s just another interesting fact about the universe, but it’s not like it entails any grandiose system of accompanying beliefs. There aren’t any dietary restrictions, no mandatory holidays, no prescribed reason to kill people or proscribed reasons not to.

So when I read about gatherings of atheists it’s like reading about people a hypothetical group that gets together to celebrate the fact that human beings have noses. Yay us!

One thing I did strongly disagree with was Ohio State University’s Daniel Merrit who is quoted as saying,

We shouldn’t be engaged in acts that could be perceived as intentionally antagonistic to other faiths.

First, atheism is not a faith. Go read Dawkins or Dennett and then come back when you’re ready.

Second, it is impossible not to be intentionally antagonistic to other faiths. Hell, simply declaring yourself an atheist is an intentional act that many religious people deem extremely antagonistic. Even beyond that, though, just go read their “sacred” texts. Are you willing to pronounce murder, genocide, sexual assault and a whole host of other crimes as completely acceptable? Well, be prepared to do so if you don’t want to be intentionally antagonistic.

Because lets be honest. First there is atheism — hmm..no god…interesting. And then quickly followed by that comes anti-religious sentiment. Hmm…there’s no god…interesting..and have you noticed just how f—ed up religion is? And wouldn’t it be much better if people didn’t cling to such irrational beliefs?

Of course, just as Dawkins points out that even believers are atheist toward all other gods but their particular bundle of divinity, so most believers are anti-religious toward all other practices outside their particular belief systems. I guess I could wear temple garments while undergoing my E-Meter-assisted audit if you really think it will make me a better person, but color me skeptical.

Charlie Brooker Reviews ‘The Genius of Darwin’

PZ Meyers linked to this review of Richard Dawkins’ new documentary ‘The Genius of Darwin’. The reviewer, Charlie Brooker, has a wit about as acerbic as Dawkins’, writing,

Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.

Since Darwin’s death, Dawkins points out, the evidence confirming his discovery has piled up and up and up, many thousand feet above the point of dispute. And yet heroically, many still dispute it. They’re like couch potatoes watching Finding Nemo on DVD who’ve suffered some kind of brain haemorrhage which has led them to believe the story they’re watching is real, that their screen is filled with water and talking fish, and that that’s all there is to reality – just them and that screen and Nemo – and when you run into the room and point out the DVD player and the cables connecting it to the screen, and you open the windows and point outside and describe how overwhelming the real world is – when you do all that, it only spooks them. So they go on believing in Nemo, with gritted teeth if necessary.

Ouch.

PZ Myers, A Frackin’ Cracker, and the Neoatheist Movement

I’ve been an atheist literally just about as long as I can remember — since sometime when I was 6 or 7. My family was neither particularly religious nor particularly irreligious, and I remember concluding at a very young age that God was just one of those stories like Santa Claus that people passed on because it made them feel better even if it wasn’t true.

At the same time I’ve never particularly felt the need to evangelize for atheism. When I see people pray or ascribe some natural phenomena or another to God or a miracle I think it’s kind of silly, but certainly the world is filled with all sorts of irrational beliefs and no one has time to stamp them all at. I, for example, have an extremely irrational fear of heights, and I wouldn’t be particularly welcoming if people got in my face challenging me to overcome that fear. Similarly, I assume haranguing people over their superstitions would be similarly ineffective. So, in general, I just don’t talk to people about their religious beliefs or mine, and everyone gets along.

Neoatheism is a term that has been used to describe the approach to atheism advanced by folks such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. Broadly speaking, the claim is that religious ways of thinking are a net negative to society and atheists need to more openly affirm their atheism and point out the problems that religion creates. Note that although the fundamentalists and evangelicals are frequently the targets of the neoatheists, their critique is much deeper — it is the form of any religious doctrine rather than the specific contents of said doctrine that Dawkins and others attack.

For the most part, I’ve thought the neoatheists have been on the right track. For example, I think Dawkins is absolutely right in attacking the commonly held middle ground position that science and religion are compatible. As Dawkins rightly notes, it is rather the case that science has completely undercut religion and why so few scientists are believers — the more you know about the naturalistic workings of the universe, the more absurd religious myths become.

But just how far should atheists go. I think PZ Myers offers us a good example of crossing the line in, of all things, a controversy about crackers.

A University of Central Florida student started a bizarre scandal when he attended a Catholic Mass held in June on the UCF campus. To make a long story short, the student received The Eucharist from a priest but rather than swallow it, took it with him when he left the church. Somebody spotted him and tried to stop him from leaving. At that point, the incident became a minor story in Florida, complete with an idiot priest comparing the kerfuffle to a kidnapping. A spokesperson for the Catholic diocese where this occurred said the student’s failure to consume the wafer should be treated as a hate crime. You just can’t make this shit up. Bill Donohue suggested the university might want to consider expelling the student.

I thought Myers did a good job of highlighting the idiocy entailed in those sorts of statements. He was on a roll making fun of silly superstitions and then he had to write this,

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

I think publicly asking for a religious symbol so that you can desecrate it for everyone to see on the Internet is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve heard an atheist who wasn’t Madalyn Murray O’Hare say. Myers post reminded me most of the sort of far left activist who thinks the best thing to do for this or that U.S. failing is to burn an American flag which, after all, is just a frackin’ piece of cloth.

In both cases, the only thing being communicated is an incredible lack of disrespect that generally tends to harden opinions on the other side rather than persuade anyone that this is just a cracker/piece of cloth. For me at least, Myers’ asking others to sneak out wafers so he can desecrate them is just as extreme as saying that the student who walked out with one committed a hate crime.

American Atheists on Barack Obama

The last few weeks have been a bit amusing as Barak Obama seems to have gone from “Change You Can Believe In” to “Policies the Establishment Will Be Comfortable With.”

After all, it wasn’t too long ago when Samantha Power drew criticism for saying that Obama’s 18-month withdrawal plan was a “best case scenario.” Now, Obama himself is clearly distancing himself from his own promise of a quick withdrawal from Iraq (and Obama, after all, is the Senator who said the withdrawal should have begun in 2007).

Similarly, Obama says he’s going to vote for the bipartisan FISA bill which will provide immunity for the telcommunication companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping of Americans.

But, Obama really jumped the shark with his promise to not only continue but expand George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives. For once, I agreed with the American Atheists’ analysis,

“This makes it official – the Democrats are trying to outdo their Republican colleagues in using religion and the lure of more taxpayer money to turn houses of worship into voting blocks,” said Zindler. “Obama wants to continue the discriminatory policy of taxing millions of Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists and other Americans who profess no religious beliefs, and give that money to organized religion. That’s unfair, that’s discriminatory, and it endangers our First Amendment freedom.”

Dave Silverman, Communications Director for American Atheists, said that the Obama pledge to continue Bush’s programs is a risky economic and social experiment. “The faith-based initiative allows religious groups to use our money in programs that are poorly monitored, have little or no accountability, and drain resources for their more effective secular counterparts,” said Silverman. “This is pandering to religious groups, and offers the lure of free government cash in exchange for political support.

Apparently either a McCain or Obama presidency will resemble a 3rd Bush term a lot more than people are willing to admit at this point.

Secular Coalition for America on That Pew Religion Poll

The other day I noted a Pew poll where 1 in 5 self-identified atheists said they also believed in God, and likened it to similar number of vegetarians who say they occasionally eat red meat — these folks aren’t atheists or vegetarians, but rather clueless. Anyway, the Secular Coalition for America has a slightly different interpretation. This isn’t cluelessness, they claim, it is an example of the fear people have in contemporary America to admit they don’t believe in God,

“When atheists are telling you they believe in God and Catholics are admitting they don’t, that’s evidence of the stigma our society puts on nontheists,” said Lori Lipman Brown, Director of the Secular Coalition for America. “Americans repeatedly tell pollsters that an atheist is the last person they’d want their children to marry, the last person they’d vote for as President. This prejudice also appears in the widespread impression that atheists lack ethics and values.”

Atheists afraid to admit they believe in God? Give me a break. In fact, I think one of the reasons many Americans have such negative views of atheists is that a good proportion tend to want to talk about their irreligious views exclusively and incessantly (see, for example, Michael Newdow).

Just look at popular culture for goodness sake — the objects of ridicule and prejudice in movies, television shows and news broadcasts are the evangelical Christians (and often, frankly, for very good reason). For example, I just watched HBO’s Friends of God documentary for the third time. There is a Christian comedian featured in the documentary who complains, rightly I think, that evangelical Christians are one of the last groups that you can openly make fun of. And, of course, the entire point of the documentary itself seems less to understand Evangelicals than to simply make fun of them (which is hard not to do when you see adults singing ridiculous “Behemoth Was a Dinosaur” songs to convince children of the inerrancy of the Bible visa vis evolution).

If anyone had reason to conceal their true views for fear of ridicule it would be evangelical Christians, and yet they are hardly shrinking violets. If there are a bunch of secret, scared atheists, I suspect that says more about those individuals than it says for any lack of tolerance of atheism in America.

Of Atheists, Vegetarians, and the Pesky Meaning of Words

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently published the results of its survey of 36,000 people regarding their religious views. Unfortunately, the report doesn’t break out what percentage of respondents were atheists but rather lumps them into the 16.1 percent of Americans who didn’t express any religious affiliation.

Of those who do call themselves atheists, however, 21 percent said they believed in God. Three precent of the atheists told Pew that religion plays a very important part of their lives. Pew chalks this up to Americans being “non-dogmatic.” I guess…if “non-dogmatic” is the new synonym for “clueless.”

This reminds me of similar surveys which ask people about their dietary habits. In a 2003 survey of UK consumers, for example, fully 25 percent of people who identified themselves as vegetarian also reported that they ate red meat on occasion. Perhaps they were simply “non-dogmatic” about their vegetarianism, but more likely — much like the “atheists” in the Pew survey — they simply weren’t paying attention or have a different meaning for the words in question other than the common usage (one hypothesis about vegetarians who eat report eating meat is that there are people who think the word “vegetarian” means little more than “I like to eat vegetables.”)

I guess if Pew ever calls me, I’ll describe myself as an Evangelical Christian who just happens to not believe in God. After all, I end up in a church once a year or so for a wedding, funeral or some other ceremony. That qualifies me, right?