Problem with Public Atheism: It Dares to Criticize Religion

There are a lot of people who dislike atheism and atheists; unfortunately, few of these people are very good at explaining what's so awful about atheism and atheists. They may make lots of claims, but when you look closely you won't find much support for those claims. A particular problem is that often people seem to be most upset that atheists are so critical of religion, but this isn't stated openly as a criticism.

Summerisle writes in his blog Left Thought:

It's extremely interesting that on the one side you have people like Jacoby who think that atheism is excluded from public life in all its manifestations, and that on the other you have conservatives pissed off by the rising tide of secularism in American society.

Why should anyone find this to be curious? Atheism isn't the same as secularism; although it would be unusual for an atheist not to be a secularist, there are plenty of religious theists who are secularists. Indeed, many of the foremost proponents of secularism have been religious theists.

I don't believe that either side is completely wrong but I do believe that atheists aren't being honest with themselves when they bemoan the reasons why they frequently aren't included in debates. Religious prejudice, sure, but rhetorically the atheists are one of the most rabid, intolerant, groups out there.

This is a pretty strong claim, and not an unusual one — lots of people claim that atheists are intolerant. Like all the others, Summerisle also manages to leave out any support for this claim. It's one thing to say that atheists are intolerant, but it's quite another to be able to support this by explaining what one means by "intolerant" and providing clear evidence that atheists generally meet this definition in their behavior and rhetoric.

Basically, while religious people of some stripes, and people who really aren't particularly religious in any way, which probably includes a substantial part of the U.S. population, are pretty tolerant of atheism, atheists get up there and say that belief in god isn't just wrong but stupid and that no one could have a rational reason for believing in god.

Why is it "intolerant" to say that some belief is wrong? Why is it "intolerant" to say that some belief is stupid? Let's be perfectly clear here: the "tolerance" which Summerisle says that religious theists have of atheists includes treating atheists as the most despised and distrusted minority in all of America — more people would refuse to vote for an atheist or would get upset over their child dating an atheist than with any other group, including gays, blacks, Jews, etc. The "intolerance" expressed by atheists which Summerisle decries amounts to little more than a small group of people saying "you're wrong and I think that belief is silly."

It's tolerant to not treat atheists as political and social equals, but it's intolerant to disagree with the majority. That's what I'm reading here and, I'm afraid, it's exactly the sort of attitude that lies at the heart of anti-atheist bigotry: atheist are not only inferior, but they should be denied the same privileges and entitlements as everyone else. It's OK for religious theists like Summerisle to denounce atheists, but it's intolerant for atheists to be critical of religious theism.

Atheists aren't familiar with, say, 20th century theology, particularly Protestant, people like Tillich and Reinhold Neibhur, to say nothing of liberal Catholicism, for example Liberation Theology.

As the links in the above demonstrate, nothing could be further from the truth: atheists can be quite familiar with all that and more. Just how familiar are theists with such things, though? How much does the average religious theists know about the writings of Paul Tillich? Could the average religious theist explain what Liberation Theology is?

Given how many Americans are unable to locate Iraq on a map, much less offer anything approaching an accurate answer to the age of our planet, I doubt that the average religious theist knows more on the cited topics than the average irreligious atheist. Even if they did, however, that wouldn't necessarily mean very much because you don't need to know anything about Paul Tillich or Liberation Theology in order to look around and notice that there really isn't much in the way of good reasons to believe in the existence of any gods. Sophisticated theology is meaningless unless there is a god at the center of it, so unless someone can point out any gods to have a theology about, atheists simply don't have to worry about it.

Organized atheism in this country is suspiciously associated with right wing libertarian politics, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and scientistic thought that couldn't recognize a non-literal interpretation of religion if it bit it on the a**.

Isnt' this interesting? Conservatives invest a great deal of time and effort into lambasting "godless liberalism," but here we have a leftist lambasting "godless right-wing libertarians." It's true that there exist conservative atheists and it's also true that followers of Ayn Rand are mostly atheists, but the fact is that neither atheists generally nor organized atheism are associated with libertarian politics or Ayn Rand's philosophy — at least not very broadly.

This strikes me to be more of a poor attempt to commit the Genetic Fallacy: Summerisle seems to want readers to think worse of atheists, and to dismiss what atheists have to say about theism and religion, by linking atheists with "right wing libertarian politics" and "the philosophy of Ayn Rand." The reason why this is a fallacy is because even if this association were genuine, it would have nothing whatsoever to do with atheists' criticisms of religion and theism.

In the end, then, we have no substantive rebuttals to anything atheists say about religion and theism, no evidence that atheists are guilty of anything alleged, and no arguments in defense of believing in any gods. We do have what appear to be plenty of falsehoods about atheists and atheism, though.