Atheism’s Wrong Turn

[Yrth]

I don't know exactly what I think about this, but I do understand what he's talking about. It's an interesting read.

 

_____________________

 

Atheism’s Wrong Turn

 

 

By

Damon Linker

 

December 10, 2007

 

In the penultimate chapter of his best-selling book The God Delusion, biologist and world-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins presents his view of religious education, which he explains by way of an anecdote. Following a lecture in Dublin, he recalls, “I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Lest his readers misunderstand him, or dismiss this rather shocking statement as mere off-the-cuff hyperbole, Dawkins goes on to clarify his position. “I am persuaded,” he explains, “that the phrase ‘child abuse’ is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.”

 

Why Dawkins refuses to take this idea to its logical conclusion--to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state--is a mystery, for it follows directly from the character of his atheism. And not just his. Over the past four years, several prominent atheists have made similarly inflammatory claims in a series of best-selling books. Philosopher Daniel Dennett shares Dawkins’s hostility to religious education, warning ominously in Breaking the Spell that “under the protective umbrellas of personal privacy and religious freedom there are widespread practices in which parents” harm their children by teaching them ignoble lies. In The End of Faith, writer Sam Harris argues that “the very ideal of religious tolerance--born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God--is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.” And then there is polemicist Christopher Hitchens, whose manifesto God is Not Great culminates in a call for humanity to “escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection ... to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.”

 

Journalists have dubbed this combative style of challenging religious belief “the new atheism.” To the extent that the appellation is meant to highlight the novelty of virulently anti-religious ideas finding a mass audience in the United States, it is certainly fitting. But, as a description of the style of unbelief itself, it demonstrates a striking lack of historical awareness. That’s because “the new atheism” is not particularly new. It belongs to an intellectual genealogy stretching back hundreds of years, to a moment when atheist thought split into two traditions: one primarily concerned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth, the other driven by a visceral contempt for the personal faith of others.

 

Today’s bellicose atheists are part of the second tradition. And it is not surprising that they have found a sizeable audience for their contemporary repackaging of centuries-old ideas. To liberals frightened by the faith-based conservatism of George Bush or the theistic fanaticism of Osama bin Laden--or both--the feisty language of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens sounds refreshing, apt, and bold. But the intellectual lineage to which these authors belong should in fact give liberals pause. Among other problems, it isn’t a liberal tradition at all.

 

Atheism has been around for a very long time-- presumably as long as belief that gods exist. Beginning with the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, thinkers in this tradition looked to natural causes to explain phenomena that their fellow citizens interpreted as the work of divine agents. Socrates himself was portrayed as an atheist in Aristophanes’s The Clouds--an accusation that likely contributed to his conviction for the capital crimes of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens.

 

Socrates may have been the most celebrated martyr to atheism, but many other philosophers and scientists, before and since, have faced political persecution for their insistence on subjecting religious beliefs to skeptical scrutiny. Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant are just a few of the writers who faced hostility, some of it violent. Fear of such persecution led many atheists to express their views with a tentativeness quite unlike the bold declarations of today’s unbelievers, who write and think in conditions of political freedom.

 

But the cautious intellectual style of these atheists did not derive entirely from a concern with self-preservation. It also flowed from the self- limiting character of their skepticism. It has always been possible to demolish this or that claim on behalf of piety--to undermine the veracity of evidence presented in favor of the gods. But, as we know from elementary logic, it is impossible to prove a negative: However thoroughly evidence in favor of divine beings is scrutinized and dismissed, an unbeliever can never be certain that divine beings do not exist.

 

The most thoughtful atheists--let’s call them liberal atheists-- have always understood that the impossibility of negative proof is a crack through which the gods, no matter how ruthlessly banished from the human world, forever threaten to return. These atheists--whose ranks include Socrates, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Albert Camus, and Primo Levi--responded to their lack of certitude, to the invariably provisional character of the beliefs by which they oriented their lives, in a supremely philosophical way: with equanimity. Accordingly, they did not go out of their way to act as missionaries for unbelief.

 

An alternative atheist tradition--one that was more practical and political-- began to emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Shocked by the senseless bloodshed of Europe’s religious civil wars, skeptics started to criticize select beliefs and customs in order to liberalize Western civilization--to make it more moderate and civil, less intolerant and cruel. To be sure, these thinkers--whose ideas formed the backbone of the Enlightenment-- did not seek a godless society. Whatever the personal views of such writers as Locke, Hume, Kant, and the American Constitutional framers, they publicly promoted not atheism but liberal Christianity. This was the case even for most of the French philosophes. Though they were more radical in their religious criticism than their British, German, and American counterparts, Voltaire and his fellow Parisian intellectuals viewed the Catholic Church as their enemy, not God or religion as such.

 

It was only in the final years of the eighteenth century, in the late, fanatical phases of the French Revolution, that a wholly politicized form of atheism--let’s call it ideological atheism--fully emerged. Convinced that the religious toleration guaranteed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen permitted ignorance to thrive in the revolutionary republic, anti- religious crusaders such as Jacques Hebert and Jacques-Claude Bernard sought nothing less than to dechristianize France. To accomplish this goal, these radicals (called Hebertists) encouraged their supporters to ransack and desecrate churches and cathedrals, transforming them through iconoclastic violence into “Temples of Reason.”

 

Though the leaders of the Cult of Reason were eventually guillotined, their brand of atheism lived on in European politics, receiving its greatest theoretical justification in the writings of Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx. Not only were they among the first philosophers in Western history proudly and publicly to denounce belief in God, they also went further, arguing that it was humanity’s destiny to shed religious conviction altogether. To resist this revolutionary metamorphosis, they claimed, was an act contrary to reason as well as historical progress.

 

That the first ideological atheists were found on the far left is historically interesting but theoretically irrelevant; Friedrich Nietzsche, a figure who would become associated with the far right, soon joined them in pronouncing the death of God. What both factions shared, besides a hatred of religion, was an irrepressible loathing for liberalism, which permitted citizens to continue worshipping their gods in peace, protected by state power from persecution. For Europe’s ideological atheists, this was an indefensible concession to superstition and prejudice. By the early decades of the twentieth century, their anti-liberal outlook had become a crucial component of communist ideology.

 

Until recently, neither strand of European atheism played much of a cultural or political role in the United States. Many of the Founding Fathers subscribed to deism--the belief that the universe and its natural laws were created by a God who plays no providential role in human life or history. And they marked a path that American critics of religion would take again and again: denouncing the foolishness of this or that religious institution while simultaneously affirming one of several heterodox forms of religious belief. In nearly all cases, the form of belief--whether deism, Unitarianism, pantheism, or John Dewey’s religion of democratic “common faith"--has been perfectly compatible with liberal government.

 

There have of course been exceptions to this American consensus. On the one hand, a handful of authors have embraced versions of liberal atheism. Pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, for example, placed himself firmly in the Socratic tradition in a 1950 essay for Partisan Review. While acknowledging that, “as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability,” Hook nonetheless conceded that, for many, faith in God served as “a source of innocent joy, a way of overcoming cosmic loneliness.” As long as these comforting religious views were “conceived in personal terms” and did not take “authoritarian institutional form,” Hook maintained, they should “fall in an area of choice in which rational criticism may be suspended.”

 

Those Americans who have adhered to ideological atheism have naturally taken a much less accommodating view. Some, like Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman, have imported their strident “negation of gods” directly from European sources. Others, like nineteenth-century intellectual Robert Ingersoll and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, did not so much emulate Europeans as end up in a similar position by following through independently on the logic of anti-religious ideas and combining them with a typically American optimism about the morally salutary consequences of scientific progress. And then there was activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who leapt to prominence in the 1960s by advocating a uniquely vulgar and hate-filled version of ideological atheism. But in none of these cases has extreme hostility to faith held mainstream appeal. Only now, during the past few years, have books espousing the illiberal form of atheism attracted such widespread interest.

 

In describing their atheism as illiberal, I do not mean to imply that the new atheists are closet totalitarians. On the contrary, all of them understand themselves to be contributing to the defense of freedom against its most potent enemies, at home and abroad. Yet the fact remains that the atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens is a brutally intolerant, proselytizing faith, out to rack up conversions. Consider, for example, the sloppiness displayed by all of the authors in discussing their political aims. Do they seek to defend the secular politics favored by the American Constitutional framers? Or do they have the much more radical goal of producing a secular society--a society in which the American people, as a whole and individually, have abandoned religion? The former is a liberal goal, the latter an illiberal one; and it is inexcusable that each book leaves readers guessing which objective its author favors.

 

Not that there aren’t clues. Harris, for instance, seeks nothing less than to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity.” To this end, he would have public schools “announce the death of God” to their students- -a development that would mark the end of the government’s theological neutrality and inaugurate a time of outright antagonism toward the religious beliefs of citizens. Anticipating, moreover, that religious liberals might balk at such tactics, Harris asserts that “the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist” whose attachment to tolerance convinces too many in our society to restrain themselves from loudly proclaiming that “the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish.” A similar ire fuels Dennett’s and Dawkins’s hatred of religious education, as well as Hitchens’s wildly excessive denunciations of Mother Teresa. (Hitchens’s charges, first lodged in his book The Missionary Position, are repeated in God is Not Great.) Convinced that, as Hitchens puts it in his subtitle, religion poisons everything, today’s atheists feel perfectly justified in dispensing with such moral luxuries as tolerance and civility.

 

Indeed, the tone of today’s atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that “religious readers who open [The God Delusion] will be atheists when they put it down.” Exactly how will such conversions be accomplished? Rather than seeking common ground with believers as a prelude to posing skeptical questions, today’s atheists prefer to skip right to the refutation. They view the patient back and forth of dialogue--the way of Socrates--as a waste of time.

 

It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism. Politically speaking, liberalism takes no position on theological questions. One can be a liberal and a believer (as were Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others in the American past and present) or a liberal and an unbeliever (as were Hook, Richard Rorty, and a significantly smaller number of Americans over the years). This is in part because liberalism is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of man--or God. But it is also because modern liberalism derives, at its deepest level, from ancient liberalism-- from the classical virtue of liberality, which meant generosity and openness. To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.

 

It is to accept, in other words, that, although I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not. That, in the end, is what separates the atheism of Socrates from the atheism of the French Revolution.

 

Why does it matter that a handful of writers who refuse to accept this basic human reality have recently sold a lot of books? On one level, it obviously doesn’t matter very much. The United States remains a very religious nation. While there are small communities of atheists, agnostics, and skeptics in every state, and substantial ones in a few--Washington state leads the country with 25 percent of its residents claiming to worship no God; North Dakota comes in last with 3 percent--there aren’t nearly enough unbelievers to leave a significant mark on the nation’s culture or politics as a whole.

 

Still, the rise of the new atheists is cause for concern--not among the targets of their anger, who can rest secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the religious will, here in America, dwarf the ranks of atheists for the foreseeable future; but rather among those for whom the defense of secular liberalism is a high political priority. Of course, many of these secular liberals are probably the same people who propelled Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens onto the best-seller lists by purchasing their books en masse-- people who are worried about the dual threats to secular politics posed by militant Islam and the American religious right. These people are correct to be nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders. The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism.

 

The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails.

 

Damon Linker, author of The Theocons, is a senior writing fellow in the Center for Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Neon Genesis]

I'm not sure about the politics of Dawkins and the others, but isn't Hitchens a conservative rather than a liberal? At least I seem to recall reading Hitchens supported the Iraq war for some reason.

[Vigile]

Hitchens and Harris supported the war I believe. Hitchens was for a time nothing but a mindless Cheney lackey. He's since changed his tune as I understand it. Doing a waterboard demo put an end to that.

 

[Etchison]

The article is well-written and he makes a few good points, but I disagree with his bland conclusion.

 

I agree somewhat with Hook as quoted in the article. As long as any irrational belief takes an internal, non-authoritarian framework, the faithful should be left alone in their choice. HOWEVER, and this is what the author fails to see: when this faith takes a public, invasive form, it should be suppressed with an equal and opposite reaction from the cumulative voices of reason. Without the voice of reason, society is doomed to follow one brutish form of belief after another. That is why the adherents of Harris and Dawkins are becoming more assertive in their atheism.

[Guest DuWayne]

I appreciate where he's going, but I think he's dead wrong about his conclusions.

 

First, I think that there are innumerable reasons to support a much more secular society. Living in the U.S., I am frankly tired of the excess deference we give religion. From allowing people to refuse medical care for their children, or to vaccinate their children, to finding bigotry downright socially acceptable - as long as it's done in the name of religion, we just let it be. There is simply no excuse for bad behavior and outright criminal acts, yet we're expected not only to allow it, but are accused of bigotry ourselves if we criticize people for it - all because they do it under the auspices of religion. In all honesty, I am not that far out from denouncing my faith and I felt just as strongly about this long before I denounced my faith, as I do now. We have always given way too much deference to religion in ways that are a detriment to society at large.

 

Second, I think it's a mistake to go into the writings of Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens and Harris, assuming that they need to show something more than what they have. It assumes that the goal should be something more than achieving a more secular society and/or convincing people of faith to leave that faith. Both of those goals are quite reasonable on their face. Especially when I consider the trauma I went through. I went from Christianity being the absolute foundation, what I was building my life on, to finding it all crumble in the face of inconsistencies and overwhelming evidence that I just couldn't reconcile with that faith. I was going to be a missionary, then settle into my own church and become a great theologian, all the while writing beautiful music to bring glory to my god and bring others to his grace. I had a fanatical level of belief that I would have happily given my life for. It's one thing to be willing to give your life for something noble and good, but for unsubstantiated beliefs?

 

Letting go of that was exceedingly painful, but quite honestly that kind of faith is exceedingly dangerous. Even though I didn't believe my god wanted me to blow myself up and take a bunch of infidels with me, I could have justified an awful lot of the fucked up with that faith. And people do it every day. From folks who believe their god wants them to reproduce with children, to folks who believe that taking their children to a doctor interferes with god's will. No, not a lot of people have those kinds of crazy beliefs, but the faith that allows people to watch their child die of easily managed illnesses is not that rare. Just because that faith has more benign outlets, does not make it in itself benign. And just how benign is it, when that faith is largely responsible for state constitutional amendments that deny roughly five percent of the population the right to marry people they are inherently attracted to?

 

So no, I think the goals they imply, are plenty enough reason to write the books they did.

[Guest DuWayne]

I'm not sure about the politics of Dawkins and the others, but isn't Hitchens a conservative rather than a liberal? At least I seem to recall reading Hitchens supported the Iraq war for some reason.

 

He used to be a pretty flaming liberal, but fell in with the neocon agenda in a big way. I attribute it to problems in his personal life and becoming something of a sodding drunk. To date, he has spoken at at least one convention where he basically called for genocide against Muslims. No big fan of Islam me, but genocide is something I am not keen on in any circumstances.

[Yrth]

The article is well-written and he makes a few good points, but I disagree with his bland conclusion.

 

I agree somewhat with Hook as quoted in the article. As long as any irrational belief takes an internal, non-authoritarian framework, the faithful should be left alone in their choice. HOWEVER, and this is what the author fails to see: when this faith takes a public, invasive form, it should be suppressed with an equal and opposite reaction from the cumulative voices of reason. Without the voice of reason, society is doomed to follow one brutish form of belief after another. That is why the adherents of Harris and Dawkins are becoming more assertive in their atheism.

 

The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism.

 

The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails.

I see what you're saying, but I think the author does too, and what he's saying is that it is not constructive to fight fire with fire. It isn't enough that we are totally in the right, you know? There are pragmatic realities that need consideration.

[Guest DuWayne]

I see what you're saying, but I think the author does too, and what he's saying is that it is not constructive to fight fire with fire. It isn't enough that we are totally in the right, you know? There are pragmatic realities that need consideration.

 

 

But herein lies the problem; the sit back and shut up has never really worked. You need to keep in mind that the people who really get offended by Dawkins and Dennett are going to get offended by pretty much anyone who seriously challenges their faith. But there are also people who are going to get something important out of it. I know that for a fact, because I did - that, long before I was ready to step away from my faith. I was already figuring out that we had a serious problem with religious influence in our society, but Dennett in particular was able to articulate more of what was happening than I was even conscious of. Dawkins on the other hand, was rather influential at the end of my struggle - perversely because he had rather pissed me off. It was his comments equating religious upbringing to child abuse, made me mad as hell - until I had been dwelling on it for months. Not constantly to be sure, but it was mulling around for a very long time before I realized that he was bloody well right. Not only was he right, but it was a reasonable descriptive of what had happened to me. Harris and Hitchens, on the other hand, never did it for me - both piss me off, especially Hitch. Both of them are way too shrill for my tastes, but that's me. But I know that they have done it for others and accept that what they have to say has value as well (except when Hitch calls for genocide).

 

The pragmatic reality is, that there are a lot of people out there who are suffering much the same bullshit that I did for years. People who are terrified that people they love are going to be condemned to hell - tormented by the fact that there are millions of people who will suffer that fate not because they are bad people, but because they don't worship the right god or even because they don't worship the right god properly. I spent much of my early life frantic to get out and bring people to Christ because I didn't want them to suffer eternal damnation. And frankly, using the same tactics that evangelicals use is a great way to help others, plant seeds, like the evangelicals like to say. For my own part, I do exactly the sorts of low key things I did as an evangelical. I help my neighbors, just because I care. I'm generous with my time and money. I am kind to strangers (most of the time) and always on the lookout to lend a helping hand. And when someone asks me why I would do that for them, I tell them it's because I believe it's the right thing to do. That can start a great conversation that at the least, plants a seed. And often enough, I find people relate to my beliefs - strange though they are. (I'm not an atheist, except in the broadest sense of the word, i.e. I'm not a theist)

 

But some folks just respond better to the hell and brimstone approach and Harris gets there. About the worse that can be said, is Hitchens flies right past it into fringe lunacy. I really don't think it's reasonable to throw either Dawkins or Dennett into that category, because they really aren't that harsh in their language, though their conclusions can seem tough.

 

I just have to think that fighting fire with fire, really isn't that bad an idea, unless we want to live forever in a society that is bound by religious ignorance. I'm sorry, but I am not interested in living in a society that thinks it's ok to let parents restrict their children's access to health care, because their god forbids it. I'm not ok with letting parents refuse to vaccinate their children because their religion says it's a bad thing to do. I'm not ok with society socially and legally marginalizing segments of the population because their relationships don't look like the relationships their god approves of. I'm not ok with people insisting that their public schools spend millions on lawsuits, because they want their myths taught in science class. I'm tired of spending millions on lawsuits, because the people want to shove their myths in my face, when I walk into city hall, or a public park, but want to make sure their myths are the only ideas represented. I'm not ok with sitting down and shutting up, when people want to spew ignorant bullshit in my face. And I am really not ok with biting my tongue when someone wants to marginalize the hell that I went through, leaving my faith, by telling me that I just don't understand. That I missed something. That I just need to meditate on the word and pray some more. Enough is enough. I am not going to sit down and shut the hell up, while people around me are poisoning their minds and marginalizing who I am and what I've become.

 

The one thing that I picked up and picked up hard - the thing that will never leave me, no matter how long I live. Love your neighbor. Love unconditionally. I'm not perfect at it, but it is what my life has always been about and always will be. I still occasionally feel twinges of remorse, twinges of fear. You don't leave twenty some years of brainwashing without those twinges sticking around for quite a while. But I feel so much more at peace over all, than I ever did. And there are a great many people I love living that same fear and frantic need that I did. People who are not living for life, but flat out living for their death. I'm just not ok with that and not getting into a war of attrition with those forces is not going to change a damned thing.

[Tabula Rasa]

Very good article! I'm still pondering all it's possible implications,but the important thing is it made me realize I need to tone down the disgust I have for christianity and christians and be more compassionate.

 

(I think the reason I've felt so much blazing anger at christianity after my decon is because I still believe in some sort of higher power, and it sickens me that the abrahamic religions depict it as a psychotic,sadistic, bloodthirsty monster. That, and it defies logic to think that an omnipotent being would get it's cosmic panties in a wad because we weren't worshipping it. In other words, a transcendent being isn't going to care if it's creations kiss it's ass or not.)

 

Even though I think the whole belief system is hateful and disgusting, doesn't mean I need to get as hate filled as all those fundie christians who think all us non christians are going to burn in hell. No, I really need to remember that while they believe an awful faith, most christians aren't bad people, they've just been suckered like we all once were by a terrible lie. And I need to try to lend a hand if any of them want out of the nightmare.

 

Peace,

Tabula