A Stitch in Haste

So says a bruised soul:

What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote — both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.
...
For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence. They write as if they were the first to discover that biblical miracles are improbable, that Parson Weems was a fabulist, that religion is full of superstition.

Sounds about right.

Put aside for a moment the approach of the piece, which can be summarized as "I'm rubber, you're glue..." or "How dare you say 'How dare you'..." All atheists are the same, the author would have you believe (on faith, apparently), with some sprinkled anecdotes (e.g., Richard Dawkins) as definitive proof of the stereotype. Very sloppy reasoning.

Also put aside the pesky little detail that modern atheists have modern science to buttress our impatience with creationists and other religious dogmatists. We do not have to grapple with the great cosmological "mysteries" (I prefer "wonders") of life, the universe and everything the way atheists of centuries past had to. Ignoring Galileo was one thing — who can seriously ignore all the physicists, biologists, astronomers and other scientists who have come since? Willful ignorance is simply not an option in the Twenty-First Century the way it was in the Seventeenth.

But the real flaw in the argument, in my opinion, is that most atheists, from my experience, actually have little problem with "believers," faith, or for that matter with God. It's the leaders and the insitutions of such people, especially the theocrats, who earn our wrath.

I have better things to do than to go around mocking people who say things like "I don't go to any church, but I do believe in some 'higher power,'" or "I believe in the teachings of Jesus, but not the Pope." Such people are usually harmless and occasionally even benevolent. I get along fine with them.

But if you try to defend organized religions, whose sole purpose (other than self-perpetuation) is typically the denial of reason, freedom and human happiness on earth, then yes you are contemptible — and dangerous — and I will mock you with all the righteous indignation I can muster.

Let's review the current, not historical, record of organized religion:

--The ongoing Roman Catholic boy-rape scandal.

--The AIDS crisis in Africa, proximately caused and perpetuated by the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches.

--The subjugation of women by all of Islam, most of Christianity and significant swaths of Judaism.

--The dogmatic homicide of gays by Islam and their persecution by many sects of Christianity and Judaism.

--A near-universal contempt by all organized religions for prosperity, individuality and diversity.

These are not "anecdotes," they are the general state of the world, thanks almost entirely to organized religion.

And atheists owe no apologies for despising these conditions, the religions that brought it about or those who defend them — whether through the sickening bromides that "the Church does good works" or that faith "engaged the great minds of Western history" (the author's words). That does not atone for even a single molested boy, lynched gay or infected African.

If you say I'm mean, then I say: If this be meanness, make the most of it.

More thoughts at Minimal State.