More on the angry atheist

02Jan07

Your disbelief in fairy tales is not under discussion. Neither is your intolerance for the horrors committed in the name of religion. These are extremes, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any large group where there are no extremes. What is really the core argument here is that the attitude that all organized is harmful is itself harmful for the case of atheists. It is also in my opinion intolerant, even if it is really well intentioned – after all, we’d all like to rid this earth of stone age thinking and blind faith in an ancient book.

The Thought Menagerie has taken the time to respond to my post. Half of the post is largely irrelevant, because as I said above I don’t disapprove of the opposition to religious indoctrination and I do believe that most atheists are not intolerant assholes. I’ll respond to the relevant part below.

The “angry atheist” is a natural mud-flinging response by a group completely unused to criticism of any sort. Hundreds of years of fear, intolerance, torture and murder was the de-facto response to any sort of negative or derogatory statement about religion and the faithful are bound not to enjoy the right of non-believers to stand up and call it silly. It is ironic that the religious have no trouble speaking their minds and very often putting those rights to action, from the burning of flags and embassies to the preachers and ministers espousing (and killing against) the sins of the abortionists or unbelievers.

This I agree with. But it doesn’t apply to the moderates, the people who shrug at cartoons and essays and movies making fun of their beliefs and move on.

The moderates ask what is wrong with harmless belief. Harris and Dawkins’ have said enough to explain that the moderates provide a buffer and nest for the extremists. As I mentioned in my comment:

Harmless beliefs don’t have abortion doctors murdered, or teachers torn limb from limb or nations and people vilified for no reason. They do not bomb embassies or fly planes into buildings. They don’t burn people alive for being witches and Satan worshipers (this still happens today in South Africa amongst the poor and uneducated but well indoctrinated communities) or have them stoned to death when they happen to be unlucky enough to be raped.

The argument for why moderate religious people make fundamentalism more acceptable or even spreads it seems to be that the fundamentalists can point at the moderates and say, “Hey look, there’s lots of people like us. We’re just more commited to our case, but since we’re in the majority we should be respected.” This is no fault of the moderate religious people. It’s more of a fault on those who actually respect the fundamentalists on the grounds that there are many like them, only not as extreme. It’s also a fault on the media and the fundamentalists themselves. By producing statistics and polls that, while truthful, are extremely misleading because most of the people in the stats are not fundamentalists, they fool the public and the officials into thinking that their views are common when in fact they’re not. Even if the majority of people in the US and elsewhere might be against things like gay marriage on religious grounds, only a small minority actually call for burning homosexuals or further decrease their civil liberties.

These kinds of number tricks have fooled the public for too long. For example, the largest political party in Norway last election recently announced their support for a continued coupling of state and church. This was based on an internal poll where less than 3% of the party’s members voted. The fact that polls suggest that an open atheist otherwise competent wouldn’t be elected in the US because of his atheism is also scary. But is it really evidence that moderate religion is just as harmful as fundamentalism? I don’t think so. I do recognize the need for a discussion of religion’s position in society, but even suggesting that religious freedom ought to be decreased, even if you’d never support it in practice, to me seems like intolerance.

The fact that the American president has personal little chats with the sky-god that dictate the course of a bloody war against another nation should be of utmost concern globally. How is this different to another version of the same God whispering in Osama’s ear and giving him good aeronautical advice? The fact that there are people with access to the red button who refute common sense and believe that the one god created all that there is 6000 years ago makes me sick to my stomach.

Again, this is about the extremes. Religion ought to be kept out of politics (excepting debates directly about religion, of course). But still, I’ve yet to see evidence that links moderate religion to the rise of fundamentalism. As I’ve said, I agree with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others on most things, it’s just the claims that extreme cases is an argument against more moderate cases that I don’t agree with. I agree completely that religion is a fairy tale mostly spread mostly for the benefit of religious leaders, but since it is so widespread and developed independently among almost all peoples of the earth, I think we’ve got to regard it as a human trait, however unfortunate. We can’t dismiss religion as being “harmful” any more than we can dismiss other human traits as harmful. Jealousy can cause harm, but it can also cause people to be closer to each other, if for nothing else for the fear of what the partner might do when they’re not around.

I think we need to regard religion in the same way. When somebody kills another human being because of jealousy, it has gone too far. Similarly, when somebody kills another human being because of religion, it has gone too far. Religion has done far more good than jealousy ever has, but also far more bad.

Also, the angry atheist image is spread by the fundamentalists themselves, seeking to portray everyone who doesn’t support them as the devil’s spawn. This is a stupid, but nonetheless common strategy we see every election. Throwing dirt at your opponent seems to be just as important, if not more important than focusing on your own opinions. This image needs to be debunked, both by pointing out its flaws and by reducing the anti-religion propaganda down to the actual, factual core. Sure, religion is harmful. Show me exactly how, and don’t give me speculations as to how moderate religion influences extremists. As I’ve said several times, there will always be extremes. What’s interesting is how do you stop the extremes, and is there a real relationship between the amount of moderate religious people and the amount and extent of religious fundamentalism.

Another thing that came up during the discussion of the previous post was labeling religious indoctrination “child abuse”. I’m not as sure on my position on this one, because in some cases it clearly is child abuse. But is it always child abuse? Is it any worse than parents telling their children scary stories about the Boogeyman or some other scary fairytale? Of course, religion is a fairy tale that parents keep telling their children long after they’ve outgrown the Boogeyman. In fact, religion is a fairy tale that the parents themselves believe in. It’s a bit like if parents told their children that aliens come and conduct experiments on us as we sleep, and then their children started telling their children, and so on for generations, until the general public fears the aliens that come while they dream and indoctrinate this belief in their children.

But does religious indoctrination in general cause trauma? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I disagree strongly with indoctrination in children, and luckily I was never subjected to it.

Filed under: atheism, extremism, religion, theism   |  10 Comments