We’ve been battling the stupid philistines within our own communities so long that it’s easy to forget the atheist tone police — those people who like to chide atheists for being too harsh on religion, who make excuses for faith, and who recoil from confrontation with nonsense. Alex Gabriel will have none of that.
It is a form of privilege to be an atheist who’s never experienced religious abuse, as many of us have who are antagonistic.
It is privilege blindness to expect — without a clue what we’ve experienced or what it means to us — that we give up our self-expression so that you can form alliances with faith communities that deeply injured us.
It is tone-policing if when you’re not telling us to shut up about it, you’re telling us how to talk about it. How dare you tell us to be more respectful.
It is splaining if your answer when we detail histories of religious abuse is ‘Yes, but’ — or if you tell us we can’t blame religion for it since not all believers do the same. We know the details. You don’t.
Ah, excellent. I’ve never been fond of the milquetoast approach to atheism.
I’m one of the privileged people in the first line quoted. I used to think I’d been brought up religious, but I revised my opinion as I met more people who really had been abused by dogmatic religion as children — my liberal Lutheranism and secular parents with only nominal associations with religion was more of an inoculation with a dead virus than an exposure to the real disease. But it was enough to trigger a strong reaction when I did encounter religious stupidity.
Just yesterday, I got in my car to run some errands, and the radio had been left on to a local station (my wife listens to music on her commute), which on Sunday was broadcasting a sermon. It was a generous and liberal sort of sermon — the guy was going on about how we have to be open to change, and receptive to new ideas, which I thought was a nice message…until he started yammering on about why we should be that way. We need to be generous in thought because that’s how Jesus was. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus — he started spinning out this revisionist biography of Jesus that fell just shy of declaring that Jesus had been a gay democrat who campaigned to save the whales.
It annoyed me. I could change the tuner and probably find a Christian preaching a wrathful Jesus, or a law-and-tradition-abiding Jesus, or an American Jesus who wants the brown people executed. Jesus, the Stretch Armstrong of Christianity.
I didn’t experience the pain of a religious upbringing, but I did experience a science education, and I will say this: how you know something matters. If you want a mind that adapts and responds intelligently to changing evidence and circumstances, you don’t get it by telling your children to worship and obey a myth. You don’t invent imaginary heroes who were paragons of perfection and tell the kids to follow them — even if you are promoting ideals I personally find copacetic, you are committing child abuse by short-circuiting their capacity for critical and independent thinking.
So I agree with Alex, but for different reasons…and I respect those differences. Fight on, everyone. And don’t try to demand that everyone on your side must have the very same perspective on the struggle that you do.
When I am asked if I am religious, I simply respond that I do not do the prejudices and superstitions of ancient tribal sky-god cult priests.
That usually elicits a strong reaction (Christians recognize themselves in that one), and then I point out that if I said that in reference to a Mithra cult, or Zoroastrianism, no one would be offended or find my statement to be in the least unusual. But then, I ask, why should the Jesus cults be considered any differently, or accorded any more respect? Where is the evidence that they are any different? No one has really given me a good answer for that one, other than weak, nebulous bits about faith and such. I point out that the followers of Mithra and Zarathustra were every bit as sincere.
I am not one of the privileged few to grow up in a secular household. I was damaged deeply by religion, in both my family and my community. The only thing that saved me was my father, who valued critical thinking (though he infrequently practiced it) and taught me to think for myself and to question all the assumptions. When I did, I ended up leaving religion altogether, and eventually came to recognize it as one of the greatest evils of the modern age.
That experience has left me with an understanding of just how much religion is costing society, with most of those costs going completely unrecognized. Not that there is no need for spirituality as I define it (a deep and humble reverence for and love of the world and the people in it), but religion is an impediment to the spirituality that it has appropriated in an attempt to legitimize itself. The world is in dire need of spirituality, but religion is clearly not the way to get there. And that is why I have no respect for it, and refuse to accord it the deference it demands for itself.
There’s also a generational component. When I was a kid, everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY (in my working class city of 125,000) belonged to some denomination or another, of organized major religions. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists and Christian Scientists were considered weird, but you were a Catholic, a Protestant Of Some Major Denomination, a Jew, or an Orthodox Greek. And there were kind families and asshole families in each cohort. And there were more and less devout in each cohort. At least the Jews gave it a name: Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox. But one’s politics were never part of the association. Orthodox Jews and devout Catholics (such as my father) would gladly vote for liberal politicians. And the little slogan ran: “it’s not where you go on Sunday, it’s how you behave the rest of the week” was the Golden Rule, as far as ethics were concerned.
Then, in the early 80s, Pope Pampers The Great made his deal with Reagan to turn Poland over to the West in return for aggressive policy work against abortions, contraception, and gay rights. The Catholic Church became obsessed with sex, and intolerance. At almost the exact same time, the Moral Majority assholes (who were neither) turned evangelical Christians over to Reagan as well, with similar agendas of regressive intolerance. By the time the 90s rolled around, most of the major religions, with the exception of some Methodist branches, had all sided firmly with the harshest of GOP policies and politicians, and being devout was almost synonymous with being a shitstain. Devotion was 95 percent correlated with treating your fellow humans — and most particularly the ostracized and disenfranchised — as lepers. I officially left the Catholic Church in 1988 after a soul-searching conversation with the head of the Jesuits in Asia degenerated into him ranting about the Pill and giving women the right to vote.
Nowadays, with the exception of Jews, who never proselytize, nearly every devoutly religious person I know (with a handful of exceptions, fewer than 20 percent) is an intolerant self-righteous asshole. That simply wasn’t so 40 years ago. Nobody ever told me to “get right with The Lord” until I was well into my 30s. It really is a Libertarian/GOP take-over of most major denominations that has made organized religion a really nasty business. And as nearly all of these denominations have continually injected themselves into politics, inevitably siding with the Haves against the Have-nots, and invariably preaching hate and intolerance, then yes, it is actually a Moral Imperative to fight back against them tooth and nail. The devoutly religious, or easily 80 percent of them, are forces of evil, plain and simple, the shittiest people I know.
When I was a kid in the fifties and sixties, my Southern Baptist family and congregation were just as irrational and bigoted as now, but they thought that it shouldn’t be brought into the public arena of politics except on election day, They have since become encouraged and have entered the fray of public discourse, Nothing has been improved by this. On the plus side, I haven’t been to church in 40 years.
QFT.
We need all hands on deck. That doesn’t mean we just suck it up and unconditionally endorse misogynists/harassment apologists/privileged fuckwits/Richard Dawkins/anti-feminists etc. They are not entitled to anyone’s support, and for every individual there are lines that cannot be crossed by alleged allies without putting them squarely in the enemy category. (Although apparently the same lines can be crossed by Democratic candidates, but that’s a whole ‘nother derail). I just think it is in our broader, collective interest(s) to effectively show up – with our explicit caveats, of course – when even shitweasels are seriously on to something.
@anbheal #2:
I think you’ll find the RCC has been doing this for many centuries longer than you suggest. They’ve turned it into an art form. They even award themselves prizes for it.
@5 Rich Woods — yeah, they sure have. I guess I mean that the sermons I heard between 1966 and 1981 or so never seemed to obsess on divorce, abortion, birth control, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, voting Republican, GOD WILL CONDEMN YOU IF YOU VOTE DEMOCRAT, until the Vatican and the GOP decided to bed down together.
At the very least they were consenting adults.
@anbheal
40 years ago the United States was so thoroughly religious that there probably weren’t enough nonreligious people around to notice. Atheists were demonized back then even more viciously than they are today — just look at what people were saying about O’Hair, for instance; she was the most hated woman in America at least back in the 60s after her successful lawsuit about getting state-sponsored prayer out of public schools.
I hate to say it, but it sounds like you have rose-tinted glasses on when you reminisce on those denominations. Every objective source I can find shows that the U.S. was more vicious towards atheists and homosexuals back then.
@7 ironchew — you’re probably right….and I guess that’s a happy evolution. So I shouldn’t be so pessimistic.
It just seems as though people wear their religion on their sleeve in Blue States now more than they did in the 70s. Back then, we called them Jesus Freaks. In the 80s, we called them Born Again. In the 90s, we called them Congress. Now we call them the Law Of The Land.
Well, I grew up in the 70s tradition of liberal Christianity — balloons in church, the sanctuary movement, support for freedom riders, building houses in Appalachia, young people leading church services with guitars and John Denver songs. And there are still a lot of people like that in some of the major denominations — way more than 20%, anbheal, as evidenced by how many of those denominations have started to allow gay marriages and even, in some cases, gay pastors.
But it’s also true that those major denominations are slipping in membership and losing people to the hate-based GOP churches. And there are also some pretty big regional differences, so it sounds as if you live in a particularly hate-filled pocket. Even though I no longer identify with the church, it’s still very sad to see it’s decline.
I wonder if maybe the growth of the atheist movement might be part of the reason for the decline of the liberal church — as in, maybe a lot of those who participated in it before were closet atheists who participated for social reasons, but now they’ve abandoned it and struck out on their own? I don’t know.