Via PZ Myers, we have an article from Raw Story in which Melinda Barton calls for a putsch of atheists on the left.
PZ does a smashing job of taking down this, well, whackjob’s arguments (such as they are), so do toddle over there and read his original post and the followup, which addresses the editor’s note atop the piece. I want to address her casting of atheism as a religion.
The whackjob is a special sort of atheist, one so absolutely certain of the inerrancy of atheism and so virulently opposed to religion that he will latch on to any and all outrageous claims in defense of the former and against the latter. He will meet any criticism of atheism or positive representation of religion as a horrible attack on his way of life or as support for religious extremism and oppression. Just as the religious extremist holds that his belief in a supreme being alone makes him morally and spiritually superior, the atheist extremist holds that his belief that no such being exists and virulent opposition to the reverse make him intellectually and ethically superior. Finally, he will ignore any and all reason or evidence that refutes his claims.
Sounds like religion to me. This is something that people who criticize atheism and atheists do alla the damn time: make it into a religious system rather than just a rational rejection of religion. Check out the false equivalence here:
Ultimately, however, the supernatural’s existence or nonexistence cannot be supported by evidence or proven by reason. Both are a matter of faith and therefore belief. In the absense of verifiability, neither can claim to be absolute truth. Placing a burden of proof on either “side” in the matter would be futile as neither could rise to the challenge. Tolerance for differences of belief would be far preferable.
Sound familiar? It’s the same argument used by the intelligent design types, which falsely equated science and intelligent design. That false equivalence helped the idea of ID gain legitimacy and traction, because it planted the idea that it was just presenting another “side” to the “debate” and that not teaching ID in science classroom was displaying “intolerance for difference of belief.” She’s falsely equating the atheistic stance of “nobody’s managed to come up with evidence of a god in thousands of years, so I conclude there is no god” with the religious stance of “I believe in the existence of God, even though I can’t prove it.” One is a logical deduction, the other is a statement of faith. But she can’t accept that simple logic can lead to a rejection of religion, so she casts it as simply another matter of faith — in other words, a religious belief.
Her own frame of reference — she’s a Jew — is one of religion. She appears unable to conceive that there could be anyone who simply rejects the existence of the supernatural without doing so as part of a religious belief system.
I’m not even going to get into her call for throwing the atheists under the bus because she finds their atheism uncomfortable. But it is getting kind of crowded under the bus, what with all the gays, women, pro-choicers and blacks various Democrats are throwing there.
I don’t get it. If there’s no way to prove your religion – why would you believe in it? What makes atheists responsible for disproving the existence of God? It’s like asking scientists to disprove the existence of sentient chocolate rabbits – what makes you believe they exist in the first place? According to Barton, there isn’t any evidence that would make you think this – so where did all of this religion stuff come from anyway?
Most of the comments I’ve read online from self-described atheists tend more towards the “who cares?” side, with a strong dose of anger at being condemned or limited by fuckwits from the AmTaliban. I’m more than happy to hang with such atheists, certainly in preference to many “Christians.”
For me, atheism comes about as a result of simply not being able to convince my heart and mind that there is even a remote likelihood that there exist such things as an immortal soul, an afterlife, a Heavenly Father, etc. And not for want of trying, either, having gone through RCIA in my late 20s and spending at least a decade thereafter going through the motions of belief. But, it turned out to be like piano lessons for the musically untalented. No amount of study and practice could make my “Ode to Joy” sound like anything other than a savage beating of the ivories with a dead tuna.
I always like to use unicorns to point out the idiocy in these kinds of arguments.
If somebody says that unicorns exist, and somebody else says that they don’t, nobody would ever say that these two beliefs are equal. That’s because nobody has ever been able to produce a unicorn or come up with credible evidence that one exists. And yet when we talk about the gods, belief and non-belief are somehow both equally rational stances? I don’t think so. Nobody’s ever been able to show any credible evidence of the existence of the gods, so just like not believing in unicorns is sensible and rational, so is not believing in the gods.
And no, the Bible is no more proof of the existence of God than are fairy tales proof of the existence of unicorns.
dr. myers used the unicorn example too, tho he went so far as to settle for “unicorn scat” as proof.
there’s a phrase you don’t see every day.
I didn’t have any problem with the article. It wasn’t about atheism in general, but atheist extremists. Perhaps she was too loose with her terms, such that that point wasn’t always clear, but on the whole there were a lot of good solid points to be made. It’s funny to see the other side of this. I’m a Christian, and I often bristle when I see articles like this that mean to attack merely Christian extremism, but are too casual in their arguments and end up painting with too broad a brush. While such articles bug me, I’ve long since learned to let it slide.
The similarity between what I feel when my beliefs are attacked, challenged, questioned and what atheists seem to feel when theirs are leads me to think that atheism is a matter of faith to most atheists. That is, atheists seem to have similar feelings about their beliefs as believers do about their theism.
Let’s look at the unicorn example. I don’t believe in unicorns. I don’t think that unicorns exist, but if someday someone discovered something like a horse with a horn growing out of its forehead on some remote island in New Guinea or on another planet, I’d be surprised, but it wouldn’t shake my worldview much. This doesn’t make me an a-unicornist, it’s more like unicorn agnosticism. By contrast, aunicornism would be the ideological commitment that no unicorn or unicorn fossil will ever be discovered anywhere, because there are not now, nor have there ever been unicorns here or on any other planet. The difference is that aunicornism is a stronger claim than any available evidence can prove. To be an aunicornist instead of a unicorn agnostic is to make a leap of faith from what can be demonstrated by the evidence to what cannot. To be sure, unicornism– the belief that unicorns exist, but for whatever reason we can’t see them–is more obviously a leap of faith, because it’s silly, and unlikely to be true. Also, depending on what kind of unicornist you are, you probably hold other beliefs, many of which are demonstrably false, in order to justify the existence of unicorns despite the available evidence. But just because aunicornists are more likely than unicornists to be right, doesn’t mean that they are rationally compelled to the level of certainty they hold. And that is what I mean when I say that both unicornism and aunicornism are matters of faith.
Me too. I think my moment came when I was a junior in high school, sitting through my church’s confirmation process (I was raised Catholic), and earnestly praying and trying to feel some sense of religious awe/wonderment/whenever. And I just didn’t get it. I just kept thinking that I was fooling myself and going through the motions.
Sorry. I ended up putting my actual comment in that last blockquote.
Because it’s pleasant to believe. Because it’s fulfilling to the person doing the believing. The true purpose of faith, in my opinion, is to serve the faithful. Not with money from duped followers or delusions of superiority over other people or anything like that, but with the enjoyment that comes from believing in something and being happy to believe in it.
Suppose for a moment that there’s no afterlife and no God. Were that the case, then life here would be all any of us have. Therefore, it stands to reason that that life should be as happy and fulfilling and so forth as possible. It stands equally to reason that one should not spend one’s entire life dreading death and its associated consequences. Rather it makes more sense to adopt beliefs that add to one’s quality of life, such as, if one finds them helpful, the belief in an afterlife, or the belief in a deity of sufficient compatablility to the person in question that he or she is happy to believe in that deity.
If there is no afterlife, then it doesn’t matter beyond this lifetime what we believe, therefore there is no advantage in being accurate about it, especially should that accuracy be distressing to someone. An atheist, once dead, would be no better off than a person of devout spiritual beliefs. The only relevent question for any person would be, “what do I want to believe/what beliefs will make me happiest?” Therefore there is no more point in adopting atheism should atheism be unpleasant to believe, than there is in adopting a religious belief that one considers unpleasant to believe.
As this life is all that anyone knows we’re going to get, the logical thing to do is to believe what one pleases, what one finds fulfilling. Accuracy is for SATs and vote counts. If God had meant us to be accurate in our religious beliefs, She’d have proven Her existance to us conclusively. Lacking any evidence either way, there are no overriding authorities on the matter of belief, so everyone can believe, or not believe, whatever they damn well please—proof is unnecessary in light of other reasons to believe.
Nobody has any proof that chocolate is fat-free and cures cancer, but we eat it anyway. Simply because it tastes good, and that’s enough. And at the same time, there’s no reason to eat chocolate, so people who don’t like chocolate have no reason to eat it. Everybody’s happy, and the system is only screwed up when some or other nutcase either starts force-feeding everyone chocolate or denying it to people. To each her own; live long and prosper and fucking enjoy yourselves on the way!
Let’s say there are two types of atheists: provisional atheists and dogmatic atheists. The line I draw between them depends on one’s approach to the evidence for or against . If they’re willing to engage with the evidence rationally and open-mindedly, I would say they’re the former. If they dismiss contrary evidence, construct elaborate theories to explain away contradictions, while accepting supporting evidence without question, they’re the latter.
I don’t suppose it’s terribly important whether the provisional atheist has more in common with an agnostic than a dogmatic atheist, such that you’d say that a provisional atheist isn’t a real atheist at all, but rather an agnostic. I do think the leap of faith to saying there is no god is more significant a step than provisionally concluding based on the evidence that there isn’t a god, which is why I left the provisional atheist on the far end of the agnostic scale. YMMV.
I don’t know enough about any other religion besides Christianity, but Christianity is based upon historical matters of fact. Either Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected, or he didn’t. Whether or not you believe this will have a big effect on your worldview, but like any historical matter of fact, the evidence that would prove or disprove it is subject to interpretation, all the more so because everything happened so long ago.
Think of how much political viewpoints depend on matters of fact. If Saddam Hussein really was behind 9/11, it would have been a good idea to go to war. And if you want to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, there are plenty of ways to interpret the evidence so that this is true. Similarly, if you want to believe that George Bush stole the election in 2004, there’s plenty of ways to interpret the evidence so you can believe that if you want.
The more important a belief is to your worldview, the more hoops you will jump through to avoid believing the opposite. Most people, even intelligent people, don’t really decide their beliefs based on what the evidence supports, but on what they want to be true. If God wanted to provide evidence that he existed–say by coming to earth, performing miracles, dying, coming back from the death, and then subsequently instructing his followers to tell everyone they knew about him–there are plenty of people who would find ways to dismiss that evidence.
If there were a way to “prove” your religion, it wouldn’t be religion anymore. Faith is believing in things specifically because they can’t be proven. Demanding (or, god forbid, providing) proof is fundamentally opposed to the concept of faith. The truly faithful fear evidence and explanations because life is only meaningful to them when it’s mysterious.
If “I don’t have any evidence, therefore i don’t really believe” makes one an agnostic, then we’re back to the “giving equal weight to ideas that aren’t really equal” thing. The dichotomy you’re looking for is weak vs. strong (or implicit vs. explicit) atheism; the first says “No, I don’t believe. And why should I have to prove that?” while the second says “No, I don’t believe. And I have PROOF!”. Agnosticism is more “Well … I really have no way of knowing. I don’t have an opinion either way”.
Kyra’s post is probably the worst in this thread. It assumes that all people live in a vacuum, and that what they do/believe has no effect on those around them. Plus, are truth and principle not more important than momentary happiness as a result of illusion? Does what we do, believe, and pursue in life only have to amount to our own happiness and gain to be valid? Surely covering our ears with our hands and living in a delusional fantasy world which requires no justification isn’t the solution to possibly the most debated question in human history.
The only evidence we have of these historical “facts” is the Bible. Where’s the contemporaneous corroborating evidence? It’s not like there weren’t any other civilizations lying around with, oh, written language and recordkeeping and an interest in resurrections in Judea and quelling any movements that might gain followers.
Moreover, why should atheists have to prove the absence of God when there’s no evidence that God exists in the first place? If someone is going to claim that God exists, it’s up to that person to prove their claim. Atheists, by and large, aren’t making claims of the absence of God; they’re looking at the available evidence and saying that there’s no proof God exists. It’s been thousands of years, and not one bit of unicorn scat.
I’d say the advice to be civil is just plain sensible, in a situation where some religious folk and some atheists/agnostics have common goals. There are a lot of religious folk who are concerned about poverty issues, freedom to marry, middle-of-the-line reproductive freedom as exemplified by the Roe trimester framework, racism, etc. The religious population is not entirely conservative and selfish and judgemental and Dominionist.
Atheists, be civil to those religionists who enter political debate with secular arguments about utility of policies and about values, and who affirm the value of separation of church and state for both the health of the state and the health of the church. Religionists, be civil to the atheists who aren’t being bitchy about religionists being a lower form of life. Ignore strict libertarians and strict capitalists who advocate against any public services or private responsibility to the community beyond a military force – they aren’t worth your energy..
Some atheists do make their atheism into a sort of religion. They try to convert others. They disrespect theists. They refuse to admit that they might possibly be wrong, an obnoxious trait found in some atheists and many religionists.
NancyP – obviously we should all try to be civil. But the loudest voices in public debate and policy-making at this point in time belong to extremist right-wing fundamentalist Christians, who have absolutely no intentions of being civil or adhering to the rules of debate. Perhaps the atheists are bitchy because there is a widespread movement to deny them any semblance of rights or integrity.
Also, I’ve never had atheists come to my door to try and “convert” me (which is an incorrect term in this case).
Be nice if the author followed it, instead of making up strawatheists who buttonhole people at parties and defining “secular extremist” so broadly that it encompasses any atheist.
well actually, you can make unicorns from goats which is more than you can do with gods.
“They try to convert others. They disrespect theists. They refuse to admit that they might possibly be wrong, an obnoxious trait found in some atheists and many religionists.”
They they they. Give one concrete example of an atheistic “conversion” movement.
Unicorn scat?
*giggle*
My father used to say you could tell a lot about people by how they introduced their opinions. Most people say “I think…,” Catholics say “I believe…,” and people who’ve been through therapy say “I feel….”
This whole controversy started from an unprovoked attack on atheists in a post on Raw Story. Your admonishment is unfair, not to mention patronizing.
Cite a real example. You may be confusing someone who is doing nothing more than presenting support for his non-belief as someone who is proselytizing. I, for example, when pressed, will argue my reasons for not believing. I don’t do so to convert anyone.
Greg,
Atheists do indeed have emotions. Atheists do not have faith. The former is not evidence of the latter. The claim that “atheists have emotions therefore they have faith,” is a non sequitur.
You are, by analogy, mischaracterizing atheism. Show me an atheist who claims “there is no evidence of God today, therefore there will never be evidence of God.” That’s a strawman. The basic atheist position is that there is no evidence for God, therefore there is no reason to believe God exists. Some atheists might further assert that there will never be such evidence, but atheism is not defined by such assertions.
If you don’t believe unicorns exist because there is no evidence for unicorns, you are indeed an “a-unicornist.”