So you want to be a new atheist
by: Charles Gelman on November 20th, 2009 | 4 Comments »
This week at The Immanent Frame, Professor Kathryn Lofton comments on the millennial masculinism of the new atheists:
If you want to be a New Atheist, you are worried a lot. You are worried about the Bible and the Koran, about Talibans and new Inquisitions, about Jerry Falwell and, even more insidiously, Mother Teresa. You’re worried about the candy-covered comforts of hegemony dressed as salvation and you’re worried about mystical communion alone on a countryside ramble. You are worried about belief and practice and leadership and laity. “From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity,” a New Yorker review of Hitchens explained, and “those who would apologize for any of its forms [...] are helping to sustain the whole.” But the form that worries the New Atheists most isn’t the makings of religion, but what it in turn makes. If you want to be a New Atheist, you have to be worried about the progeny.
Like antebellum Protestants staring at the high walls of a hilltop convent school or homophobes advocating Prop 8, your worry is that Those People Have Your Children. Textbooks and curriculum, prayer circles and promise rings: the problem is less that adults adhere to such idiocy, but that they abduct our most precious natural resource, and then shove it back into the world reprogrammed. The problem is that we’ve abdicated our Progressive promises to fuse ethics and public education, allowing a certain pluralism to seep into our child-rearing and pedagogical philosophies. Difference is for hippies, the New Atheists say; what we need now is some sensible positivism. Don’t worry about capitalism—it is. Don’t worry about nationalism or science—they will be. These totalizing discourses contribute to the New Atheist’s dream of a reasonable public sphere with ordered laboratory tactics demarcating its every policy move. If unimpeded, science and capitalism work with predictable clarity and world-resolving peace, the New Atheists say; if unimpeded, religion elects morons to the presidency. As with homophobia and nativism, New Atheist antagonism to the religious is framed positively as a protective maneuver toward the little lost lambs, the children and citizens who haven’t had the time or money to think. “Being without faith,” Maher offers in a rare moment of reflexivity, “is a luxury of people fortunate enough to have a fortunate life.” The New Atheists transpose their fortune onto you: you, too, can be freer than you are, if only you’ll relinquish the belief that restraint does you any material good.
Continue reading at The Immanent Frame.
I am an old atheist.
Atheism is not the problem, Theism is.
Atheists don’t start wars or kill for their alleged faith.
Ditto, Otto!
Neither atheism, nor theism is the problem. “Sin” or, in psychological rather than theological terminology, narcissistic egoism is the problem.
Dominated by suffering, fear of death, and insecurity, man came under the power of an instinct for SELF-protection and SELF-preservation. He began to struggle for his OWN survival, at the expense of his neighbor, even if this survival could be only temporary (and therefore illusory), since “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even upon those who did not sin as Adam did” (Rom. 5:14). –Orthodox theologian John Meyendorff
Much blood may have been spilled in the conduct of sectarian religious wars and the persecution of “heretics”; but atheistic Communism racked up a very impressive death toll, also.
Not sure that “atheistic Communism” was a legitimate binary, but I get the point.
I read the Immanence Frame link and can see glimpses of legitimate criticism of some aspects of “New Atheism” vis-a-vis Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. But by and large it’s just another anti-atheism polemic. Well written and all but very evangelical in its on right. Especially the final paragraph, wow. Quite a frail conclusion.
There’s entirely too much absolutism going on and the binaristic thing is not helping.
When I was in religions I saw the same things I see now, but then I saw them as if through a fog and dense cloud cover. Now I see them clearly under a calm sky. I stopped god-calling and started calling-myself-out. I see a lot of that same honesty in spiritual progressives and other religion-invested people. The minor difference is I no longer have a need for a religion to define my identity or a higher power and others seem to need to even if they don’t actually use either. All fine with me so long as I get some space too; I see you but do you see me?