Once upon a time, there was a man who thought rather highly of humanity’s potential. Sure, there were things humans did that were awful — they could be violent, and careless, and short-sighted — but they also did amazing things like science and art that other species didn’t. Overall, he thought that calling someone “human” was a high compliment. And this idea colored his thinking in such a way that it began to shape his expectations of people; maybe we should expect human beings to do more than eat and excrete and reproduce, and maybe we should recognize that the word “human” meant an awful lot more than just a certain flavor of meat or the species of your parents.

He also noticed that every single human being he ever met, without exception, was more than a perambulating set of chromosomes. Some were good at math and others liked to dance and others were kind and yet others liked to argue, and these were the virtues that made them good and interesting, and made them…human, in this best sense of the word. So when he praised being human, it wasn’t for the accident of their birth, it was for the qualities that made being human meaningful.

Unfortunately, not all humans liked having the fact that words carry greater connotations than the most narrow, most literal, most concise, dictionary-style definitions, despite the obvious fact that they all do. They got quite irate.

“I am a human because I am not a squirrel, or a hyena, or a fish, or broccoli,” some said, “and I resent the fact that you think there’s more to me than being a not-squirrel!”

“You expect me to be good at math to qualify as human?” complained some of the slower, less alert people, who failed to notice that the man had made no such specific requirements.

“The only thing that all humans have in common is that they were born to other humans, and can only reproduce with humans,” said other complainers, “therefore, that is all that ‘human’ can imply or mean. How dare you taint my pure and perfect language with complications and nuances and expectations!” 

And the man listened to their arguments for a while, and argued back for a while, and then he came upon a simple solution. He told the not-squirrels and identity-by-rutters and functional illiterates and simple-minded machine-coders to fuck off, and it was good.

“Ad hominem!” they squeaked.

“Who cares what barely human people think, anyway,” he shrugged.

We Gnu Atheists, and atheists of all kinds, are often accused of following “just another religion.”  I’m not particularly fond of the usual riposte — something along the lines of sarcastically pointing out that atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby — because I think we sell ourselves short when we pretend atheism is an absence of values rather than a positive and powerful collection of strong modern beliefs, but also because there are distinct differences in the way atheists should think, relative to theists. I say “should” because, often, where I see the starkest contrast is in atheist apologists for religion, who sometimes seem to be unbelievers still trapped in old modes of thought.

Jaques Berlinerbau is one such infidel locked in a medieval mind; he links approvingly to a long-winded, plodding essay by R. Joseph Hoffmann, who reminds me of nothing so much as a pompous clergyman, who has little too say but will puff it up into a good solid tendentious drone ands mercilessly slaughter all of his critics with ennui. They have another old criticism of the Gnu Atheists: we have a shocking deficiency of martyrs.

Say what? We’re supposed to build our movement on corded stacks of dead atheists, preferably ones murdered by torture, or Hoffmann and Berlinerbau will not take us seriously? I can’t think of a better example of the blinkered brains of our critics. Religion, especially Catholicism, loves to dwell on torment and death and finds validation, even, in the agonies of the faithful; why, God must be really, really important if his followers will throw their lives away for him. Hoffmann seems to be impressed with this line of thought, and tries to argue that atheists should grant more credit to the distinguished line of martyrs, often believers, who died to advance the cause of freethought. He thinks we ought to be more appreciative of Bruno and Servetus and Hus and Aikenhead for their deaths in the name of a cause.

Personally, I recoil in disgust at the thought. We should celebrate the lives of good people, not their deaths. Their deaths do not contribute to a cause, they only stand as testimonials to the bloody oppressive nature of our enemies; all would have served humanity better had they lived. We should no more find vindication in the execution of heretics than doctors would revel in the glory of millions of miserable deaths to typhoid and cholera and smallpox and childbed fever — we should want to simply end these horrors. A trail of tears is not a victory parade.

Atheists should not want martyrs, and neither should we desire the deaths of our opponents. Death is an end and a loss and not any kind of virtue, and that Berlinerbau and Hoffmann have these antique fantasies of good godless corpses piling up to lend gravitas to the movement, or that the vocal Gnu Atheists even imagine such a story would be desirable, says quite a bit about their inability to think beyond their obedience to a theological mindset. While they reject the notion of a god, they continue to pay homage at the altar of religious morality.

It’s god to see I’m not alone in rejecting their entire premise. Both  Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson express similar sentiments. There really is a coherent and consistent Gnu Atheist consensus that is very different from the horrid old modes of religious thought, and it takes an unimaginative and narrow mind to think otherwise.

I have learned that today is Christopher Hitchens’ birthday. I hope he gets many more.

What is it with all these New Atheist birthdays in the springtime, though?