I get a fair amount of mail from readers — sometimes religious believers, sometimes not — wanting to debate with me about things I’ve written. Back in the days when I didn’t have ten hours worth of work for every hour of spare time I had, I used to engage with these people in private email. But I simply don’t have time anymore. And in any case, it seems like a waste of time. Why waste my efforts on just one person, when I could be sharing them with thousands? And why waste the eloquence and intellectual powers of my regular readers and commenters? (Which are, quite frequently, prodigious. I love having an army of bulldogs who can make my arguments for me — and often make better ones than I would have — at the times when I just don’t have the time and energy to get into the fray myself.)

So I’ve decided to start taking some of these emails and opening them up to vigorous public debate in my blog. I now ask my querants if it’s okay to publish their letters on my blog, and debate them publicly instead of privately. If they say yes, it’s game on. (Please take note of my comment policy before participating. Names of letter-writers will only ever be published with permission of the authors.)

Today’s contestant has chosen to remain anonymous for the time being. They are responding to my Sept. 2 piece on AlterNet, Progressive Religious Believers’ Big Hypocrisy: Cherry-Picking the Parts of Religion they Like and Ditching the Rest. Here is their letter, published in its entirety, with no edits, and no illustrations until my reply.

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Good morning. I hope this Monday finds you well.

I’ve read a bit of your work on Alternet lately. I mostly enjoyed your piece about the benefits of casual sexual experience. I generally feel the same way. But I think your recent piece about progressive religious believers really misses the mark. It suffers from a mistake common in a lot of anti-religious writing I’ve encountered. “I would hope that the problem…would be obvious. But experience has taught me that it’s anything but — so I’m going to spell it out.”

The problem is that you’re not talking about any actual progressive religious types I’ve ever encountered. You’re talking about a straw man, a portrait of the religious progressive that certainly doesn’t represent all of them, and which may not even exist. Beyond that, you spend more than half of your essay declaring what religious
people believe. I’m a white male; I’m not arrogant or ignorantly condescending enough to tell the world what lesbian feminists believe. That would be laughably stupid. And yet that’s analogous to what you’re doing in your essay.

I’m sure I don’t need to mention that you also, like a typical myopic westerner, reduce the vast concept of “religion” to merely the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition.

I hope this brief email will give you pause, and maybe even inspire you to engage in some more thoughtful and nuanced exploration and criticism of the tensions between religion and progressivism. If not, I hope you write back and attempt to seriously engage the points I’ve raised. But based on the essay in question, I wouldn’t be surprised if you ignored me, or merely responded with curt, unconsidered dismissal. Indeed, you’re probably just going to assume I’m religious and therefore not worthy of your time. That would be incorrect, and your loss more so than mine.

Have a nice week.

Okay. I don’t really have time and energy to respond to this line by line. But I can get the ball rolling for the rest of y’all. Continue reading “"You're talking about a straw man": From the Mailbag” →

I’ve been thinking about this whole “angry atheists versus friendly atheists” thing that many of us keep nattering on about in the atheist community. And I’ve been having a thought:

I don’t think these things have to be mutually exclusive.

As I watched the film, I was filled with rage. Literal, physical rage. Heart pumping hard, fists clenching, sweating, the works. Watching the vivid, detailed accounts of the terrible abuse, physical and emotional, that was inflicted on these people by their religion; seeing the difficulty and pain they had prying the cult from their minds, even after they’d left it behind; seeing the trauma that lingered, especially in the children, and the way their lives had been stunted or twisted… I wanted to leave the theater immediately and write a dozen blistering blog posts about why religion is a toxic idea. Hell, I wanted to leave the theater immediately and start a vigilante army.

And at the same time, I was realizing that what these folks needed was not a vigilante army, or indeed a scathing atheist blog post. What they needed was a community. A community that wasn’t based on mind control and blind obedience and severe physical punishment when they don’t obey. What they needed was to be surrounded by people who could keep them company, and share their joys and sorrows, and help take care of them when things went badly, and treat them as if they mattered.

What they needed was a safe place to land.

And some thoughts I’ve been having in a vague sort of way began to crystallize. Continue reading “Angry Atheism and Community Building” →

When atheists criticize religion, one of the things we harp about most is cherry-picking: believers embracing the parts of their religious teachings they like, and ignoring or rejecting the parts they don’t. We point out that sacred texts — the Bible, the Koran, etc. — are typically filled with anachronisms and absurdities, internal contradictions and factual errors and moral grotesqueries, and that nobody actually adheres to all their teachings… not even self-proclaimed fundamentalists. (Are there any Christian fundamentalists who decline to wear blended fabrics, or who stone their disobedient children to death?) And we point out that believers conveniently pick the parts of their sacred texts that they already agree with, or that they would most like to agree with, or that they happened to be taught by the accident of which faith they were brought up in.

Now, fundamentalists and other conservative believers will hotly deny this charge. They’ll insist that they really do follow the literal word of their sacred text. And they’ll come up with any number of contorted excuses for why they embrace parts of their religious text and reject others: why they’re wearing cotton-poly blends, why their disobedient children are still alive.

But progressive and moderate believers take a very different approach. They freely admit to cherry-picking. “Sure,” they say. “The Bible says a lot of things — things that are anachronistic and absurd, factually inaccurate and morally grotesque. The Bible (or whichever sacred text we’re talking about) isn’t a perfect document written by God — it’s a flawed document written by people who were trying to understand God. You think you’re telling us something we don’t know? Yes, we cherry-pick. We should cherry-pick. We have minds, and moral compasses, and we’re supposed to think for ourselves. Isn’t that what atheists do? When you read works by thinkers you find inspiring, you get inspired by the parts that resonate with you, and you reject the parts you think are screwed up. Why shouldn’t believers do the same thing?”

Yeah. See, here’s the problem.

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Thus begins my latest piece for AlterNet, Progressive Religious Believers’ Big Hypocrisy: Cherry-Picking the Parts of Religion they Like and Ditching the Rest. To find out more about why cherry-picking is just as big a problem for progressive believers as it is for religious extremists — and why cherry- picking is even a problem in the first place — read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

(Oh, and for the record: I didn’t put the word “hypocrisy” in the title. AlterNet often re-titles my pieces — it’s standard practice in magazine and newspaper publishing — and they did so with this one. I wouldn’t have chosen to do so, as it doesn’t quite express what I was getting at, and has a somewhat harsher tone than I was aiming for in this piece.)

Or not.

Over at JT Eberhard’s excellent WWJTD? blog, we’ve been having a fun game of “feed the Christian to the lions.” A devout believer sent him a prayer, which she hoped he would pass along… and about which she said, quote, “I just thought the words had a lot of merit all by themselves…”

JT posted the prayer. Very kindly, I thought. His reputation as a hardass, confrontational, take- no- prisoners firebrand is clearly undeserved. And he asked his regular atheist readers to, shall we say, comment on this prayer, and discuss whether they did, in fact, find any merit whatsoever to the prayer. More specifically, he asked his readers to take at least one paragraph from the prayer, and eviscerate… er, examine it, and explain why we did or did not find it beautiful.

The lions are having a very tasty meal.

I’m not posting the whole freaking prayer here. JT has a stronger stomach than I do. But I thought y’all might enjoy my response to this challenge.

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“I just thought the words had a lot of merit all by themselves…”

Really? You thought these words had merit, even without the assumption of God’s existence that pervades them?

What merit would that be, exactly?

Let’s do as JT requests, and take a sample paragraph:

“Please keep me safe from all danger and harm. Help me to start this day with a new attitude and plenty of gratitude. Let me make the best of each day to clear my mind so that I can hear from You.”

Here’s how this atheist views this paragraph:

There is no magical creator protecting me from danger and harm. And assuming that there is one would make me less likely to act on my own to protect myself from danger and harm. If I am to be protected from danger and harm, I want to rely on myself, and on the people in my life who have shown themselves to be worthy of my trust.

I value both new attitudes and gratitude. I endeavor to keep my mind and heart open, to see the world with fresh eyes as much as possible. And I feel intense gratitude towards the people who have worked hard to make life better. But I assume you mean that I should feel grateful to your god — and I don’t, since I don’t think he exists. And I don’t need help from an invisible magical creator to feel either gratitude or newness. These are emotions and experiences generated by my brain.

I find it useful to clear my mind from time to time. But there is no magical creator speaking to me when I do so. And when I do clear my mind, pretending that the ideas and feelings my brain comes up with are actually coming from an infallible magical being… to me, this is an extremely dangerous concept. It would make me less willing to question these ideas and feelings — even when an overwhelming body of evidence contradicts them. I do not want to deceive myself into thinking that my brain is perfect.

Seriously: What part of this did you think had merit without the assumption of God’s existence? What part of this did you think an atheist would agree with?

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If you want to play, too, go read the whole prayer on JT’s blog… as well the other responses to it. And if you post a response there, please do me a huge favor and post it here, too. (And vice versa as well — if you post a response here, please post it at JT’s blog.) Have fun, lions!