A recent Associated Press story, headlined “Atheists split on
how not to believe,” has set fingers tapping throughout the
blogosphere. The gist of the story as I read it is that there are
soft atheists and fundamentalist atheists, and the softies are
concerned that the fundies are becoming too outspoken, too uppity,
indeed that they are giving unbelievers a bad name — a good trick
that, like trying to give a bad name to an oil slick.
As usual, the impetus for this new development was 9/11, and the
death and destruction caused by religious fanatics, after which
some atheist intellectuals decided there was complicity in silence,
thus they would be silent no more.
The spokesman for the soft atheists has been Greg Epstein, a
“humanist chaplain” at Harvard University. The Rev. Epstein is
encouraging the fundamentalists or “New Atheists” to pipe down, and
warns that their outspokenness is keeping fence-sitters from coming
over to the side of the humanists, a dubious allegation, at best.
Though I can’t prove it, it seems to me that passionate advocacy
attracts converts as often as it drives them away.
The soft atheists have it in for three bestselling authors in
particular: Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion),
Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation) and Christopher
Hitchens (God Is Not Great). Though they differ on many
points of scripture, all three are passionately anti-religious.
Dawkins considers God “a psychotic delinquent.” The doomsayer
Harris thinks religion will destroy the world if not stopped, and
Hitchens holds that “religion poisons everything.” Epstein finds
these authors rigid and intolerant, which ultimately makes them no
different from the religious fundamentalists they condemn. Nor is
he alone. As one English dean told the Guardian, Dawkins is “just as
fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube.”
Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, another secularist, has also criticized
the New Atheists, and suggests their tone is alienating important
faith groups whose help is needed to solve the world’s problems. “I
would suggest possibly that while there is use in the critiques by
Dawkins and Harris, that they’ve overdone it,” Wilson told the
AP.
Epstein and Edwards have a point. Dawkins et al. are intolerant.
Hitchens, in particular, is intolerant of a great many things:
Hypocrisy. Vacuity. Bad books. Henry Kissinger. He is especially
intolerant of the multiculti Europeans whom he considers too
tolerant of intolerant Islamic fundamentalists. Though to expect an
old pugilist like Hitch to ease up on believers would be like
asking Joe Frazier to go easy on Mohammed Ali.
Certainly Harris and Hitchens are no different from outspoken
skeptics of yesteryear. “I see little evidence in this world of the
so-called goodness of God,” said H.L. Mencken nearly 75 years ago.
“On the contrary, it seems to me that, on the strength of His daily
acts, He must be set down a most stupid, cruel and villainous
fellow.” Writing half a decade earlier Col. Robert G. Ingersoll
noted that, “The Agnostic does not simply say,
‘I do not know.’ He goes another step and says
with great emphasis that you do not know.” In their day Mencken and
Ingersoll were both widely jeered. They were also highly respected
by their intellectual peers.
ARE PASSIONATE ATHEISTS being unfairly demonized? Absolutely, if by
labeling them “militant” and “fundamentalist” they are likened to
terrorists who fly jets into buildings and wrapped in TNT saunter
into crowded wedding receptions.
Still it is important to ask whether atheists — as alleged —
are out to eradicate faith. And if so, in what manner? Epstein,
sounding very much like a New Age shaman, insists that “Humanism is
not about erasing religion. It’s an embracing philosophy.” That’s a
warm and fuzzy sentiment, but the fact is many atheists do long to
see religion go the way of the coach-and-four — much like early
Christians had no desire to embrace pagan religions — though most
favor bringing future generations around not by the sword, but
rather by reason, logic and scientific evidence.
But wouldn’t the triumph of secularism mean the eradication of
the basic tenets of Judeo-Christian society? Wouldn’t it mean that
the U.S. would evolve into a sort of United States of Sweden
(Sweden being the world’s most secular society)? America already
allows abortion on demand and bans Christmas trees in airports —
how much farther down the secular slope could it go? Same-sex
marriage could conceivably replace same-sex unions, but there seems
little danger of a Soviet-style ban on religion, or the conversion
of churches into horse stables. Secularism, after all, has not
completely devastated Scandinavian societies. In fact, the greatest
crisis these countries face is from their fundamentalist Muslim
populations.
It was these fundamentalist Muslims that stirred the New
Atheists and forced them to speak out. Now that they’ve seen what
religious fanatics can do, I suspect there will be no silencing
them.
