Once again, I have proven my ability to drive people into a frothing rage against me. Only this time it isn’t a mob of religious fanatics and anti-choicers who have called me pond scum who will go to hell, an insect souled vile man, a black-souled amoral monster, pure evil, morally depraved, with a depraved mind, descend[ing] down the various stages into madness, and so forth…but I have this time managed to antagonize a bunch of atheists. Feel my pain.

All right, to be honest, it really doesn’t sting that much.

The godless raged at me on youtube and twitter, thanks to the recent broadcast of my talk in Montreal. I have a tangent in that talk where I deplore Dictionary Atheists, going so far as to say I hate those guys, because they’re so superficial. Apparently some people identify with shallow atheism, because they took it personally and got rather upset.

I had to think about this. Should I back down and apologize, and maybe revise my opinion of this subset of the atheist community? Have I gone too far?

Nah. Obviously what this calls for is an escalation. I think I need to summarize all the things about atheism that bug me, and that I wish people would stop doing. There simply aren’t enough atheists angry at me now. So let’s get to it and piss everyone off! It’ll be fun! Here’s a list.

Dictionary Atheists. Boy, I really do hate these guys. You’ve got a discussion going, talking about why you’re an atheist, or what atheism should mean to the community, or some such topic that is dealing with our ideas and society, and some smug wanker comes along and announces that “Atheism means you lack a belief in gods. Nothing more. Quit trying to add meaning to the term.” As if atheism can only be some platonic ideal floating in virtual space with no connections to anything else; as if atheists are people who have attained a zen-like ideal, their minds a void, containing nothing but atheism, which itself is nothing. Dumbasses.

If I ask you to explain to me why you are an atheist, reciting the dictionary at me, you are saying nothing: asking why you are a person who does not believe in god is not answered when you reply, “Because I am a person who does not believe in god.” And if you protest when I say that there is more to the practice of atheism than that, insisting that there isn’t just makes you dogmatic and blind.

In that Montreal talk, I explained that there is more to my atheism than simple denial of one claim; it’s actually based on a scientific attitude that values evidence and reason, that rejects claims resting solely on authority, and that encourages deeper exploration of the world. My atheism is not solely a negative claim about gods, but is based on a whole set of positive values that I will emphasize when talking about atheism. That denial of god thing? It’s a consequence, not a cause.

Now I don’t claim that my values are part of the definition of atheism — I just told you I hate those dictionary quoters — nor do I consider them universal to atheism. I’ve met plenty of atheists who are in our camp over issues of social justice — they see god-belief as a source of social evils, and that’s why they reject it. That is valid and reasonable. There are atheists who consider human well-being as the metric to use, and we call them humanists; no problem. There are also atheists who are joining the game because their cool friends (or Daniel Radcliff) are atheists; that’s a stupid reason, but they are atheists.

My point is that nobody becomes an atheist because of an absence of values, and no one becomes an atheist because the dictionary tells them they are. I think we also do a disservice to the movement when we pretend it’s solely a mob of individuals who lack a belief, rather than an organization with positive goals and values.

Oh, on a related note, I also get a lot of comments that atheism is a privative attribute which strictly speaking, lacks any specific positive qualities. This is true of the dictionary definition. It is not true of atheism in its actual usage: it carries a lot of accreted baggage, as this little cartoon illustrates.

Babies are all atheists or I’m an atheist by default, because I was raised without religion. Nope. Uh-uh. Same problem as the Dictionary Atheist — it implies atheism is simply an intellectual vacuum. Babies aren’t Christians or Muslims or Hindus, and they aren’t atheists, either, because we expect at least a token amount of thought is given to the subject. If babies are atheists, then so are trees and rocks — which is true by the dictionary definition, but also illustrates how ridiculously useless that definition is.

Babies might also have an in-built predisposition to accept the existence of caring intelligences greater than themselves, so they might all lean towards generic theism, anyway. Mommy is God, after all.

There are a fair number of adults who ought to know better who insist on the dictionary definition, too. They’ve been brought up without god-belief, and some of them may not have even considered religion much at all. Unless they are real lightweights, genuine feathers adrift in the wind, they also carry a set of values that incline them towards godlessness…otherwise you’d expect them to fall on their knees and turn Christian the instant they first hear about Jesus. They don’t, and why? Probably because they learned some critical thinking skills from their parents. They carry positive values that make them resistant to the cheap promises of faith.

The “I believe in no gods/I lack belief in gods” debate. I have heard this so often, the hair-splitting grammatical distinctions some atheists think so seriously important in defining themselves. All you’re doing is defining yourselves as anal retentive freaks, people! Get over it. Either way, you’re an atheist — and that goes for the over-philosophized fussbudgets who insist that they’re agnostics, not atheists, because they aren’t 100% positive there aren’t any gods, only 99 44/100ths positive. Atheism is such a general club, and it’s so easy to fall into the definition, that it’s silly to sit around arguing about how close to the fence you’re sitting.

I don’t care. Tell me what virtues you bring, what experiences brought you here, why your values matter to society. The fine-grained shuffling about to define yourself so precisely is simply narcissistic masturbation.

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. The second sentence is false. Religion does not turn you into a terrorist. The overwhelming majority of religious people have similar values to yours; my church-going grandmother would have been just as horrified at people using their faith to justify murdering people as the most hardened atheist, and there have been atheist individuals who also think they are justified in killing people for the cause. So stop saying this!

I would say, though, that religion does make one more susceptible to bad ideas. After all, if you’ve spent your whole life learning to dampen your critical faculties and avoid questioning the Holy Trinity and the Magic Mother of God, it’s not so hard to accept that the people in the IRS building are plotting to put a mind-control chip in your head. I oppose religion because we can see its effects on even otherwise brilliant people: it short-circuits skepticism and leaves them open to dangerous and erroneous ideas. It’s just that usually we can trust in the cooperative social nature of human beings, and the kind of dangerous idea usually plopped into their brains is that it is good to bring sugar cookies made with a pound of pure butter to the church social.

“I just believe in one less god than you do”. OK, I don’t hate this one. There is actually a germ of a valid point in there: disbelief in itself is good and normal social practice, and even the most zealous theist actively disbelieves in many things. That’s a good point to make in a world where people cite blind faith as a virtue.

But that’s the only point that can be made from it, and it has its own perils. It implies many things that are not true. The theist you’re arguing with did not go through a process where he analyzed his beliefs logically, and excluded 99% of all gods by reason and their lack of evidence; in fact, he probably never in his life seriously considered any of those other faiths (he is 99% Dictionary Atheist, in other words). He came to his personal faith by way of a series of personal, positive (to him!) predispositions, not by progressive exclusion of other ideas, and he’s simply not going to see the relevance of your argument. Would you be swayed if someone pointed out that you disbelieve astrology, homeopathy, tarot, witchcraft, and palmistry, and he has simply gone one step further than you, and also disbelieves in evolution?

Similarly, you did not go through a list of religions, analysing each one, and ticking them off as unbelievable. I certainly didn’t. Instead, you come to the table with an implicit set of criteria, like evidence and plausibility and experimental support, and also a mistrust of unfounded authority or claims that are too good to be true, and they incline you to accept naturalism, for instance, as a better explanation of the world. Turning it into a quantitative debate about how many gods we accept, instead of a substantial debate about the actual philosophical underpinnings of our ideas, is kind of lame, I think.

I could probably come up with a few more peeves — I am genuinely a world-class expert in finding fault — but let’s stop there. My main point is that one general flaw in many atheists is a lack of appreciation for why they find themselves comfortable with that label, and it always lies in a set of sometimes unexamined working metrics for how the world works. You are an atheist — take pride in what you do believe, not what you deny. And also learn to appreciate that the opposition hasn’t arrived at their conclusions in a vacuum. There are actually deeper reasons that they so fervently endorse supernatural authorities, and they aren’t always accounted for by stupidity.

A reader responded to my article where I said I found no solace in lies by sending me a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay. This could be part of the godless liturgy for coping with funerals; it’s so true to the spirit of our thinking, and so antagonistic to Christian attitudes. So I’ll share it with you, too.

Dirge without music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and laurel they go: but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains – but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love –
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind:
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Beautiful words somehow bring a little comfort to us, I agree, but better still are beautiful words that also ring true.

Here’s a great opportunity for a paid summer internship with the SCA. Apply!

SCA Summer 2011 Internship Program

The Secular Coalition for America (SCA) is pleased to offer one paid internship position for summer 2011. SCA is seeking a highly motivated undergraduate junior- or senior-level student with a demonstrated interest in being active in the nontheistic movement. The student must live and attend school more than 50 miles outside of the District of Columbia.

SCA is a 501(c)4 advocacy organization whose purpose is to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the nontheistic community in the United States. Located in Washington, D.C., our staff lobbies U.S. Congress about issues of special concern to our constituency and advocates for the separation of church and state. To learn more about SCA, visit www.secular.org.

The internship will provide activities and opportunities to learn about, assist with, and work with the four main areas of SCA’s office: lobbying and advocacy, grassroots and outreach, development and fundraising, and media relations and social media networking.

SCA will provide housing through the Washington Intern Student Housing (WISH) (www.internsdc.com). The intern will be required to share a townhome or apartment with up to three people of the same gender. The group living situation will allow the intern to meet other interns working in D.C. as well as provide social opportunities. WISH provides all housing necessities except a computer, personal items, cell phone, bedding, towels, and clothing.

The internship will be a 12-week program and will run from Monday, May 30, 2011, through Friday, August 13, 2011; work hours will generally be Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Occasional weekend and evening hours may be expected. The internship will pay $500/week = $6,000 for the summer (minus required district and federal taxes). Transportation costs to and from Washington, D.C. will not be provided.

To apply for the SCA Summer 2011 Internship Program, please fill out the following application and send the following documents to internship@secular.org.

Complete applications must be emailed by Feb. 18, 2011. A selection will be made by March4; only the selected candidate will be notified.

If you have questions, email them to internship@secular.org. Do NOT send applications by regular mail. No phone calls please. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

Here is the application form in rtf and pdf formats.

He has sent me a response to my criticisms of his criticisms of the New Atheism. Look below the fold for what he sent me.

[Read more…]

Another of those common, erroneous strategies used to criticize those danged Gnu Atheists is to first invent a definition for New Atheism that the Gnu Atheists themselves would find foreign, and then to jump all over it for a prolonged period of time until they’ve convinced themselves they’ve finally defeated their nemesis. It’s the cardboard cutout tactic — it turns out that cardboard versions of us put up much less of a fight than the real thing.

I’m afraid Stephen Asma has committed the same error. He has written a long, meandering essay that accuses the New Atheists of having a narrow worldview because, he thinks, all we know about is Christianity and Islam. What about Buddhism, he asks, or animism? And then he does tell us some interesting things about Buddhism and animism, but they’re all entirely irrelevant, because he has completely missed the point.

Asma errs by thinking he has encapsulated the Gnu Atheists as people who reject Christianity and Islam because they do a poor job of explaining nature and guiding morality, and that therefore he can make a case for the inadequacy of that atheism by showing that there are other religions that do not consider explaining and moralizing to be their primary duties: Buddhism, for instance, is about finding psychological contentment, while animism is a reflection of mankind’s helplessness and lack of control. We could argue about those characterizations — Asma admits that Buddhism as practiced has supernatural and ritual elements, too, for instance — but let’s not, for now. I want to argue with his narrow and erroneous worldview of what a Gnu Atheist is.

Gnu atheism is not simply about what isn’t. Our views do find expression in specific criticisms of specific faiths, but those are just the epiphenomena of a deeper set of positive values that Asma completely misses. Certainly I will make moral arguments against religious pathologies — Catholic priests raping children is bad — and I will judge beliefs by the foolishness of their explanations — creationist dogma is utterly absurd. But to say that is the guiding philosophy of atheism is to mistake the actions for the cause. I have one simple question you can ask of any religion, whether it’s animism or Catholicism, that will allow you to determine the Gnu Atheist position on it.

Is it true?

I’ve told people this many times. The Gnu Atheism is a positive movement that emphasizes the truth of a claim as paramount; it is our number one value. This is why you’re finding so many scientists who consider themselves in this movement — it’s because that’s how we’re trained to think about hypotheses. Also, because there are many scientists and philosophers behind this idea, I should also emphasize that we’re also well aware that “truth” is not some magic absolute, but something we can only approach by trial and error, and that truth is something you have to work towards, not simply accept dogmatically as given by some unquestionable source…which is another difference between us and religion. A scientific truth is more complex than a colloquial truth, it’s requirements being that it is free of contradiction with logic and reality and supported by reason and evidence.

Asma’s big mistake is assuming that our central question is, “Is it good for us?”, which leads him into all these pointless anecdotes about how praying makes him feel better, and how animism helps impoverished people cope with their circumstances. I don’t care if religion makes someone feel better. Stacking illusions over a grim reality does not turn it sweet. I have my anecdotes, too; I remember the tragedy of my little sister’s death a few years ago, and how I sat through a funeral in which the preacher declared with absolute certainty that she was in heaven, and all I felt was anger. Lies do not make me feel better. There is no consolation in fantasy. You can sugar-coat the truth as much as you want, you can make up extravagant stories of my sister living in constant joy and rapture, frolicking with lambs and puppy dogs in fields of sweet clover while angels on gentle zephyrs sing to her, and it would not give me one instant of comfort. I do not lie to myself, and other people lying to me under the delusion that it will make me happier I find unconscionable.

Seriously, it’s worse than that. I despise people who try to swaddle truth with lies in the name of consolation. It kills ambition, the striving to make the world better in the future, and it can allow evil to lurk unchecked. Those child-raping priests persisted because people lied to themselves, telling themselves that no man of god could do something so heinous…and even when finally exposed and removed, they continued to live in denial, reassuring each other that the institution that protected those vipers really was a force for good, overall.

So Asma is barking up the wrong tree when he thinks this is the relevant question:

So how do we discriminate between dangerous and benign religions? That is the more fruitful question, because it invites the other world religions into the discussion. Both the developed and the developing worlds can profitably examine their unique belief systems in light of larger human values. Like Harris et al., I agree that we should employ the usual criteria of experience to make the necessary discriminations. Religious ideas that encourage dehumanization, violence, and factionalism should be reformed or diminished, while those that humanize, console, and inspire should be fostered.

He really doesn’t get it. He could show me a religion that is nothing but sweetness and light, happiness and good thoughts and equality for all, and it wouldn’t matter: the one question I would ask is, “Is it true?” It wouldn’t matter if he could show empirically that adopting this hypothetical faith leads to world peace, the voluntary abolishment of crime, the disappearance of dental caries, and that every child on the planet would get their very own pony — I’d still battle it with every fierce and angry word I could speak and type if it wasn’t also shown to be a true and accurate description of the world. Some of us, at least, will refuse to drink the Kool-Aid, no matter how much sugar they put in it.

It is also the case that every religion describes itself as benign. Ask the true believers in even the most hateful, violent faiths, and they will all say they are workin for the betterment of their people. Women like wearing burkas, they will say, and they’re happier when liberated from civic responsibilities, like voting, or doing a man’s job.

Asma does go on at length about the virtues of animism in the third world, where it is a coping mechanism to live with difficult lives and high-risk environments, but I think he’s also wearing those rosy glasses that transmit lies to his nervous system. It makes them happier, he claims, but African animists still die of starvation, thirst, and disease, and African animists are using their faiths to accuse children of witchcraft to justify setting them on fire, or butchering unfortunate albinos to use their body parts in magical rituals. So even his examples of a benign religion don’t hold up unless we close our eyes to much of what’s done in their name.

Asma concludes with a typical unsupported plea; atheism’s “proponents need to have a more nuanced and global understanding of religion.” No, we don’t. Show us that it’s true, first, and then we can talk about nuance, and implementation, and consequences. Telling us how it makes some people feel good doesn’t even begin to address our core objections.

All you godless folk: some busybody wants to know about your sex life. Go ahead and tell them in this survey:

This is a short survey about how your sexuality has developed over time and how it has changed in relation to your lack of belief in a god. The research is being conducted by Dr. Darrel Ray, author of The God Virus and Amanda Brown at the University of Kansas.

This survey is for ATHEISTS, AGNOSTICS, SPIRITUALISTS, HUMANISTS, and SECULARISTS. We need to have people who do not believe in a deity, or organized religion, of any sort.

I went ahead and filled it out, but I’m afraid mine was rather boring. I left religion well before I had a sex life, so I couldn’t testify to any wonderfully liberating effect — puberty was a much more powerful force than religion.

Do you remember those ridiculous childhood arguments, “My big brother can beat up your big brother”? They were pathetic then, and no grown-up with any self-respect would think that that kind of fantasy boxing by proxy is any kind of way to settle a disagreement…but we atheists have to remember that we aren’t dealing with self-respecting grownups. Scott Stephens, some guy at ABC news, has taken that tactic and made it even more feeble and irrelevant: his argument against the New Atheists is basically “Your big brother can beat you up, ha ha, I win.” This is such a dreary and dishonest approach; it involves puffing up dead or less popular atheists into demigods who strode the earth with cosmic seriousness, while anyone new and slightly less moribund is sneered at as inferior, the weak and enfeebled scions of a diminished age, and therefore deserving nothing but dismissal.

There seems to have been an innate sense among atheists that the Promethean quest to topple the gods demands a certain seriousness and humility of any who would undertake it. Hence those atheists worthy of the name often adopted austere, chastened, almost ascetic forms of life – one thinks especially of Nietzsche or Beckett, or even the iconic Lord Asriel of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – precisely because our disavowed idolatrous attachment manifest in practices and habits and cloying indulgences, and not simply in beliefs (this was Karl Marx’s great observation about the “theological” dimension of Capital).

By comparison, the “New Atheists” look like sensationalist media-pimps: smugly self-assured, profligate, unphilosophical and brazenly ahistorical, whose immense popularity says rather more about the illiteracy and moral impoverishment of Western audiences than it does about the relative merits of their arguments.

Ah, yes, that makes it easy. Those New Atheists aren’t wizened mummies who whisper a few gnomic words of wisdom and then lie back to contemplate eternities — why, they strut confidently (how dare they!), they write a lot (how undignified!), and they engage vigorously with the popular culture (then they must be boorish louts). Nietzsche would kick their butts and Marx would shame them into silence.

I disagree — these New Atheists are simply basing their ideas more strongly on science, something the theistic critics don’t seem to comprehend — and I don’t consider them less than the Old Atheists, just different, and even there, we’re all making the same argument that gods don’t exist.

Which brings up the relevant point: Old Atheists and New Atheists don’t disagree on the existence of gods, so isn’t invoking both generations of atheists simply doubling your opposition? And if the New Atheists are such scrawny, flabby specimens, why aren’t you simply clobbering us with those powerful arguments you developed to crush our predecessors? Oh, is it because you never had any crushing arguments of that sort?

Scott Stephens has made no counter-argument to atheism at all, except to name-drop an assortment of atheists he thinks were more “serious” in his opinion than any contemporary atheists who would bother to disagree with him. That says nothing about atheism, but much about his own inadequacies.

This is the same nonsense that Terry Eagleton and David Hart, among many others, have tried to pull off, and it simply doesn’t work. Go ahead, you can wave my big brother over and try to belittle me with his awesomeness, but it just means the two of us will work together to punch you out and take your lunch money, wimp.

The next Australian census is coming up in August, and the Atheist Foundation of Australia has begun an awareness campaign to clarify one issue. When you’re asked about your religion, don’t simply answer by default with what faith you were brought up in; answer accurately about your current views. There are a lot of people who just blandly answer with whatever church they attended as a child, which tends to inflate the perception of the importance of religion.

For instance, I was brought up as a Lutheran of Scandinavian descent, and of course that has affected my cultural attitudes, but it would be as silly for me to say I’m a Lutheran as it would be to say I’m a Swede. I’m an American atheist. Similarly, Australians, if you were brought up in the Anglican church and still feel a nominal attachment to that faith, don’t answer by where you park your car when you go to family weddings and funerals, but by your actual philosophical leanings, whatever they are.

That’s not so hard, now is it?