"New Atheists" and Libertarians: Separated at Birth?
Brian Doherty | January 8, 2007, 12:58pm
Gary Wolf's November cover story for Wired, which I just got around to reading (and which Ron Bailey ably blogged about earlier), is a fine piece of journalism by many measures, and well worth reading. It's about the rise in a more militant intellectual atheism, told through profiles of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris (see Chris Lehmann's perspicacious and witty critique of Harris's The End of Faith from Reason's Jan. 2005 issue here), and Daniel Dennett (see Ronald Bailey's May 2003 interview with Dennett in the always-ahead-of-the-curve pages of, where else, Reason, here).
What kept leaping out at me was how many of Wolf's critical comments on the "new atheists" sounded very similar to complaints and critiques I often hear about libertarians of a certain stripe. A sample:
I have become a connoisseur of atheist groups -- there are scores of them, mostly local, linked into a few larger networks. There are some tensions, as is normal in the claustrophobia of powerless subcultures, but relations among the different branches of the movement are mostly friendly. Typical atheists are hardly the rabble-rousing evangelists that Dawkins or Harris might like. They are an older, peaceable, quietly frustrated lot, who meet partly out of idealism and partly out of loneliness.
Still, [atheist lecturer Clark] Adams admits some marketing concerns. Atheists are predominant among the "upper 5 percent," he says. "Where we're lagging is among the lower 95 percent."
This is a true problem, and it goes beyond the difficulty of selling your ideas among those to whom you so openly condescend......
As the tide of faith rises, atheists, who have no church to buoy them, cling to one another. That a single celebrity, say, Keanu Reeves, is known to care nothing about God is counted as a victory....
......the New Atheism does not aim at success by conventional political means. It does not balance interests, it does not make compromises, it does not seek common ground. The New Atheism, outwardly at least, is a straightforward appeal to our intellect...
Ah, the travails of not having ones mind for rent, to any God or government.
Pi Guy | January 8, 2007, 2:34pm | #
@John: I commend you on avoiding gross generalizations. *sarcasm*
I consider myself a serious atheist, a serious libertarian, and, alas, a former Catholic. I have never been a part of any
"whacked out religious group" (unless you count the Catholic church until my confirmation at the age of 14) and often am made to feel as though I exist at the fringe of society. On the other hand, people who thought that the world was round were also relegated to the fringe at one time. I think that I'll stick with people who remember that this is the 21st Century, thanks.
BTW: Dawkins is not merely hard on religion. He's hard on
anyone who faithfully accepts, without evidence, assertions that lack empirical support be they religious, psuedoscientific (like, say, astrology), or political. His greatest concern, however, and the motivation for his militant stance on religion, is that he contends that moderate believers pave the way for societal tolerance of extreme fundamentalists of any denomination by making faith virtuous in its own right. It's probably difficult to criticize
their beliefs without casting some doubt on your own.
NOTE: Article 124 of the Soviet Constitution actually says:
- "Freedom of religious worship and freedom of antireligious propaganda is recognized for all citizens."
If anything, that's sounds like
support for religion.
As for me, I wish O'Reilly would shut up already about the WoXmas and that the Jehovah's Witnesses would stop leaving Garden of Eden pamphlets in my storm door.
I relish the day when I am free from religious propoganda but don't expect things to change in my lifetime. It's been my experience that many people would rather continue believe something that isn't justified by reason than to come to accept something new that is, in fact, justified if it means that they must admit that they've been wrong all this time.
plunge | January 8, 2007, 3:52pm | #
John, you're still lying.
"He calls religous endocrtination by parents "child abuse"."
Have you actually read what and where he said this? He said it in the context of discussing parents who threaten their children with hell: one of the most violent and evil concepts ever imagined. Many kids demonstrably and by their own accounts are traumatized by the idea. In that context, I don't see how Dawkins is so out of line on calling that a form of abuse, albeit psychological.
"If it really is child abuse, why shouldn't the government intervene? That is precisly the conclusion Dawkins expects people to make. He just didn't have the balls to come out and say it after people called him on it and his signing of that petition."
Blah blah blah: in other words, you have no argument or defense of your lie against his clear statements to the contrary, and all you can do is try to imply this or that about what you want us to think he "really" wants.
"No, they think that people shouldn't have the right to profess their religous views in the public sphere."
You're lying again. Please, show any evidence that all that this is what ANY of the big bugaboos want. You hear this refrain about the ACLU, Dawkins, Harris, and all the rest: except that all are defenders of speech and free inquiry in the public square, religious speech included with all the rest. Generally, liars like yourself simply try to misrepresent their objection to _government_ sponsored special privilege to religious expression as an opposition to _public_ expression by private individuals.
I think you'll find that on a board of libertarians, not many of us are going to fall for that sort of rhetorical swithceroo.
plunge | January 8, 2007, 4:41pm | #
"The claim that babies are born atheist is an interesting one, but it doesn't seem to work. Using the dictionary to try to infallibly demonstrate this point doesn't seem to work either, since what people mean by words sometimes isn't the same as what the dictionary says."
Well, for centuries, the word "atheist" was also defined in dictionaries as people who are immoral and evil. I think we atheists are just fine defining atheism, instead of people eager to either slander non-believers, or make straw man arguments easier on themselves.
I often find that most people who insist that atheist means "dogmatic belief that there is no god" often don't even themselves use the word like that in practice. For instance, if they ask if I believe in god and I say no, THEY will call me an atheist. And then they will spin around and demand I justify my "belief." That is the sort of incoherent rhetorical treatment non-believers get tired of.
But hey, what words we use are not important. I'm also perfectly happy being called a non-theist. That's basically what I (and most atheists) mean by "atheist."
"When people say the word "atheist," they usually are referring to someone who has had time to consider the question of God, namely, a person who is a teenager or older."
Correction: when most people who are brought up to hate and despise atheists say they word, this is what comes to mind.
"Ascribing atheism to a baby is like assuming that babies are anarcho-capitalists, since they surely have no idea of what government is."
The reason babies are non-believers is not any fundamentally different from the way I am a non-believer. The baby CAN'T believe (anything), and I DON'T believe (in God specifically), but for both of us, this lack of belief stems not from any act: we just are that way because we haven't become believers.
"BTW, I have a Merrium-Webster Dictiobary right in front of me which defines atheism as "one who denies the existence of God.""
You're leaving out what it probably also says (depending on the edition): 2. Godlessness.
Here's a pretty good rundown on how different dictionaries treat the definition through the years:
http://atheism.about.com/od/definitionofatheism/a/dict_standard.htm
Suffice to say, dictionaries (especially Webster) are generally written by theists. But when atheists look back at atheism through the centuries, what it has meant to various people, famous atheists, and so on, we see a pretty clear line of defining it the way we say and the way the word derivates: without god belief. You'll also find "disbelief in God" which is ambiguous: it can imply either lack of believing or actively believing not. Which is ok, because atheism encompasses both views (strong atheism is a subset of weak atheism).
plunge | January 8, 2007, 4:53pm | #
Here's another pretty good summary of the controversy over what "atheism" means:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/atheist4.htm
Keep in mind that since the issue is semantics, there is no real "right" answer, and in the end, in a perfect world, I don't think it matters who is right. But in the short-term it often DOES matter, because all the different definitions are all used at different times by different people, giving a lot of rhetorical room to haggle over various things for bragging rights.
Again, I think the key takaway is that:
1) theists are the ones who will decide "common usage" but theists are of course generally hostile to defining atheism in a charitable way (hence the fact that "wickedness" is still found as definition for atheism in some dictionaries, though some at least note that this is archaic)
2) even those theists who insist that atheism means "belief in no god" most strongly still use the word inconsistently themselves, regularly applying it to people who simply don't believe despite their claimed bright line definition
3) the majority of self-identified atheists define the word as the more inclusive "lack of belief" which at the very least gives us the right to a sort of "technical" definition.
4) the real goal in defining things is clarity and consistency. I don't really care about what words are used to define what, but I strongly suspect that certain definitions are insisted upon by theists for the purposes of equivocation (i.e. ease of confusion and swapping around definitions without acknowledging it)
I think most atheists wouldn't mind if you called them a non-theist. The problem with using that instead of atheist is mostly just historical habit and a sort of parallel to the seizing upon the term "queer" by the gay-rights movement: we don't want to let people to hate us control the words we use to describe ourselves.
