I’m home! I even got a good night’s sleep! And just to fire me up, Jeff Sparrow replies to my criticism of his article claiming that the New Atheists are a gang of neo-fascists. Bracing!

It’s especially fun since he begins the piece by disavowing one of my criticisms: “I do not think that the New Atheists are fascists, and nowhere did I say that they are.” No, he’s cleverer than that. He argued instead that the New Atheists were replacing anti-semitism with anti-Muslim racism, that they were converging with the populist right (does this mean we can invite Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh to our conferences now?), claimed that “enthusiasm for the rhetoric of the Islamophobic Right is entirely characteristic of the New Atheism,” played a little game in which he dared readers to distinguish New Atheist quotes from neo-fascist quotes, and suggests that atheism is practicing the “functional equivalent of 20th century anti-Semitism”. But oh, no, he doesn’t come right out and say New Atheists are fascists. It’s only the entire freaking point of his essay.

He does now firmly come out and say this:

I did, indeed, write that many of the main speakers in the two conferences scheduled for Melbourne in 2011 are very, very right wing. That’s because … um… they are.

Which is confusing. What two conferences is he talking about? There was one in 2010, and an upcoming one in 2012, but only a few of the speakers have been announced for the 2012 event, and his two major examples of atheist fascists, Harris and Hitchens, weren’t at the 2010 meeting. Even if we only use the partial lineup for the next event, and if we accept his claim that Harris and Hitchens are right-wingers (which I do not), it’s hard to claim that two is “many”.

And that was part of my counterargument, that he was cherry-picking two speakers and claiming their views were representative of the whole New Atheist movement. I would have expected that he’d at least try to shoot me down by finding more examples of neo-fascist New Atheists, and he tries, but he doesn’t do very well.

To the evil duo of Harris and Hitchens, he now adds Richard Dawkins, because he said “Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today”…which doesn’t sound racist or fascist. He’s targeting an ideology, not a people; if you asked him, he might even go on to say that Christianity is the second greatest force for evil. If we can’t even criticize ideological craziness without getting slapped with the accusation that we’re racist, we’re in trouble. Next thing you know, someone will pull up my denunciations of crazy American politicians Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and declare that I’m clearly anti-woman and that I hate white people.

It’s a bit of a reach to include Dawkins in there, but his next efforts are even more ridiculous. To punch up his claim that racist Islamophobia is a serious problem in the movement, he cites…Herman Cain, teabagger politician, and a poll of Victoria schoolchildren to show them rife with petty racist bigotry.

I had no idea the tentacles of New Atheism reached so far.

Taslima Nasrin, AC Grayling, and Peter Singer were also at the 2010 convention — perhaps Mr Sparrow would like to cobble up a rationale for accusing them of being closet right-wingers out to exterminate the Muslim world? That would be even more entertaining than flinging Herman Cain in our faces.

Sparrow also makes the claim that these few speakers he can find who he doesn’t like are representative of the New Atheist community, or are leaders of the organizations (we don’t even have just one, we’re that splintered). This is nonsense. The New Atheists are not personified by any one individual, or even by a group of individuals; the Four Horsemen theme was prompted by a meeting of four individuals — Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens — to discuss their recent books and their attitudes towards religion. It was an entertaining meeting of a book club, basically, not a cabal of the party leadership to determine the path of world conquest. The reason these people get invited to conferences is because they have interesting ideas and are provocative speakers, not because they’re in charge. Sparrow doesn’t have a clue about who the real leaders of the atheist movement are.

He also doesn’t understand the relationship of the atheist community to these inspiring educators and rhetoricians and idea generators. We aren’t the sheep he’s looking for. Every one of these people gets up, presents their views, and then gets praised and criticized by the audiences; they don’t give orders, they express themselves, and the listeners talk and argue and agree or disagree. I’ve been to atheist meetings where Christians and Buddhists and weird New Agers have been given a time-slot to speak; so? This is not a movement that demands ideological conformity, and that likes to be challenged.

Finally, Sparrow condemns us because we haven’t thrown Hitchens from our ranks, and that we’re supposed to “speak out against the Islamophobia that’s self-evidently rife in the atheist movement,” a perfectly lovely demand that is offensive in its assumptions; shall he also tell me that I must stop beating my wife? There is racist Islamophobia scattered about within the New Atheist movement, just as there are racist atheists, anti-gay atheists, and Republican atheists, and we’d be fools to deny that a diverse movement built on a criticism of the folly of religion wouldn’t contain many individuals with a range of views orthogonal to our focus. But the outliers are not the movement. If Sparrow had actually attended any of these conferences and known any of the attendees, he’d know that the average participant is strongly left-leaning and progressive, but that there are also a significant number of Libertarians in the ranks with radical capitalism as their religion — but there is no purge in progress, which might annoy a Marxist like sparrow.

As for Hitchens, I adore the guy as a brilliant speaker and writer, as somebody I would go out of my way to listen to, and as an interesting human being who I sincerely hope can recover from his current affliction. But that does not imply that I listen to him unquestioningly, or that I and others won’t disagree with him on specifics. I was at the Freedom From Religion conference in 2007 in which he spoke and was at his most bellicose, and he was not given a free pass: the majority of the audience was vehement in its rejection of his ideas, and I flat out called them insane.

To people like Sparrow, though, the fact that we allowed him to speak, and that we even liked many of his ideas while specifically rejecting the war-mongering and Muslim-bashing, is a sign that we’re all right-wingers.

Jeff Sparrow is very worried about the Global Atheist Convention coming to Melbourne, Australia next April. Why? Because we’re all goose-stepping fascists come to destroy liberal and progressive dreams with our “very, very right wing” atheistical fanaticism. Which leaves me baffled and confused. Don’t I count? I’m a guy who finds Barack Obama to be far too conservative (I know, that’s setting the bar low), surrounded by wanna-be theocrats in a land straining to escape the Enlightenment, with the giant heads of O’Reilly, Beck, and Hannity howling at me from the television, and somehow, I am the problem?

Sparrow doesn’t mention me at all, of course, but that’s the thing: I consider myself comfortable and not at all an oddball in the company of New Atheists, but Sparrow simply damns the whole movement by equating all of New Atheism with neo-fascism. He accomplishes this by ignoring the diversity of political views within the New Atheists — we’re a madly disorganized mob, united only by our dislike of the god-thing, so politics isn’t a criterion for being one of us — and cherry-picking a couple of prominent New Atheists as proxies for all of us. So he quotes Christopher Hitchens, probably the most belligerent critic of Islam in our ranks, and Sam Harris, who can also be harshly critical.

It is … impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they could do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they get started.

Christopher Hitchens

The […] failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants.The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

Sam Harris

And here’s where I’m in an awkward spot, because I do disagree with both of the quotes to a certain extent. I am a knee-jerk pacifist who would not ever want to encourage eagerness to kill anyone, and I also would not praise the sensibility of fascists without also immediately stomping on their ‘nads with my Steel-Toed Boots of Sarcasm +3 (which, for all I know from this partial quote, Sam might have gone on to do himself). So I distance myself somewhat from their views.

The will to kill, and actually killing people, is not a sensible approach. Not only is it practically impossible to exterminate all of our enemies, but even if it were, it would be abhorrent and evil, and make us worthy targets of genocide ourselves — so we’re left with the historically common strategy of selectively murdering a scattering of opponents, which never works. At best we could temporarily cow a population, and perhaps deprive a generation or two of children of freedom and security, but we would never win over a nation to a common cause, or even away from revenge. It always baffles me that right-wingers can cheer for a cartoonish revenge fantasy movie like Red Dawn, which shows brave Americans nobly and self-sacrificingly resisting an imaginary Soviet invasion, and yet not realize that every time our tanks roll into some small country, we are replaying that movie for them for real…and we’re the villains.

I disagree with Harris and Hitchens, especially Hitchens on this one issue, but I also defend them, and not just in the sense of defending the principle of free speech, but because I also agree with them in part. Somehow, the meaning of “progressive” has weakened so much that it can be equated to radical, militant tolerance of every blithering looniness someone might spout, with tactics that constitute little more than limp-wristed surrender to the excuses of bigots.

Too often, the conversation between so-called ‘progressives’ and their opponents is one of gelatin-spined appeasers trying desperately to stave off the tyrants of the right by frantically retreating from the conflict.

“I want to chop off my daughter’s clitoris,” says the Islamist. “Oooh, that’s not nice,” says the ‘progressive’, “and your deep, rich cultural traditions make me hesitate to object.”

Meanwhile, the New Atheist says “NO. There is no ambiguity here: your children are individuals, you have NO RIGHT to butcher them. And being an ignorant barbarian is no excuse.”

“I demand that the public schools respect my mythology and teach everyone that the earth is 6000 years old,” says the Christian Dominionist, “and also, you can’t ever say a word to my children that contradicts Scripture.” The ‘progressive’ replies, “Well, we wouldn’t want to offend anyone, so maybe we can find a curriculum that doesn’t use the “e” word and doesn’t stir up any conflicts between science and religion. Let’s compromise.”

The New Atheist says, “You’re wrong. You’re worse than wrong, you’re stupid. We’re going to educate your children whether you like it or not, because they have a right to grow up without your self-inflicted brain injury.”

“Belief in God is an essential part of being human and must be nurtured for the good of civilization,” says the Evangelical. The ‘progressive’ cheerfully agrees, ignoring the sectarian tribalism that religion fosters, ignoring the absurdity of the Evangelical’s very specific, very peculiar adherence to a dogmatic mythology, for which this happy acquiescence to an absence of critical thought is a convenient foot in the door.

The New Atheist instead argues that religion must be relegated to the status of a personal quirk, an affectation or hobby, and that the real heart of modern civilization lies in science, and reason, and evidence-based decision-making. Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests — put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don’t ever wield the damned thing ever again.

“Homosexuals are a disgusting abomination,” scream the fundamentalists. The ‘progressives’ respond, “Oooh, well, we were going to advocate tolerance and equality, but in the light of your rousing certainty, we’ll yank this commercial that blandly suggests that maybe gay people are human just like you.”

The New Atheist, at this point, just facepalms incredulously and walks away from these lily-livered fair-weather advocates for equality.

Mr Sparrow’s argument that all New Atheists are fascists rests on one point: the blanket claim that we’re all Islamophobic bigots who want to exterminate all Muslims, and he suggests that it is reasonable to disbelieve in a god, but we have to do it while somehow not annoying Islamic fundamentalists. Somehow, in his mind, the Global Atheist Convention has become a staging area for a few days of focused hate on Islam — and he demands that we take a stand and denounce the speakers. Having attended the last Australian convention, that’s a weird characterization of the occasion. Sparrow might want to look at the Dublin Declaration on Religion in Public Life, which is a much more accurate summary of the attitudes expressed in these New Atheist gatherings.

It’s a very progressive document. Not in the sense that some ‘progressives’ believe, in which the only progressive value is surrender, but in the sense that it actually stands firmly for positive values, like freedom of conscience and thought, equality before the law, and secular education for all. That we actually believe in something, and that we stand up for it in speech and deed, does not imply that we’re totalitarian fascists, except to people who think the only true progressive response must be silence, and inaction, and acquiescence.

Sparrow knows this. He has another column where he rebukes the idea of reform by conciliation and appeasing the right, but he only takes that stand on purely political issues. It’s strangely common to see how adding religion to the mix of issues seems to make so many people drop to their knees and start bowing in obedience.