Anarchist Steph: Secularism Equals Totalitarianism

You don't have to be a conservative evangelical Christian or a Christian apologist in order to have been taken in by various myths, misconceptions, and outright lies about atheism. This is in fact one of the important reasons for directly and strongly confronting myths and lies: because even people with no apparent motive or reason for gain can be found using them for bigoted attacks.

Steph the Anarchist Lawyer writes:

Atheism is an irrational faith based belief system because unlike agnosticism, atheism asserts that God doesn’t exist, that belief can’t be proved by evidence or rational argument, it’s a leap of faith.

I'm just linking the text above to more detailed refutations of these myths — I've addressed them all so often that it's just not worth getting into again here. Steph doesn't merely misrepresent atheism, but she misrepresents it on the most basic and fundamental level. Do you suppose it ever occurred to Steph to spend even a couple of minutes researching atheism before making such assertions? If it did, she doesn't seem to have been motivated very strongly by a desire to be sure that she was right before launching into vitriolic attacks on an entire class of people.

This would be like me having a false definition of anarchism and then launching into attacks on anarchists without ever stopping to check to be sure that I really do understand what anarchism is first. Even if I do understand anarchism correctly, that simply doesn't make sense. Ethically and intellectually, I have an obligation to check myself in such situations. This is because anyone who cares about the truth must also care about not slandering others with falsehoods.

As a faith based belief system, atheism is no more or less valid than any other, including my own: Catholicism.

This is an interesting admission because Steph seems to be stating that her own belief system, Catholicism (an interesting religion for an anarchist, given how hierarchical it is), is an "irrational faith based belief system" that "can't be proved by evidence or rational argument" and is a "leap of faith." Why would anyone admit to having such a belief system? Why would anyone consciously and in full understand of all the words actually say "my belief system is irrational and cannot be proven by evidence or rational argument"?

This strongly suggest a complete disinterest in or even disdain for truth, reason, and reality. The impression is disinterested in truth, reason, and reality is reinforced in comments where she ignorantly declares "I’m no fan of Creationism but Darwinism is also just a theory." This is like saying "I'm not fan of faith healing, but the Germ Theory of Disease is also just a theory." Even given all our imperfections, shouldn't we at least try to develop belief systems which are rational and which are based on propositions which can be supported, if not proven, though evidence and rational argument? Insofar as our beliefs or beliefs systems are irrational, we should be sorry about this and seek to overcome it rather than proclaim it proudly.

A further curious aspect of Steph's declaration of irrationality here is the idea that all "faith based belief systems" are equally irrational and thus equally valid or invalid. Steph is saying that there is no basis in evidence or reason for preferring one over any other. So apparently there is no evidence and no rational argument she thinks she can offer for being a Catholic like she is now rather than a veiled Muslim woman in a Wahhabist community. Apparently, there is no evidence or rational argument she can offer for arguing that it's better to be an atheist rather than one of many wives married as a teenager to a polygamist Mormon man in an isolated desert commune.

Frankly, I find that not just curious and bizarre, but disturbing. It sounds like the sort of postmodernist nonsense that can wielded for the oppression of minorities because it's not possible to say that any one religion, culture, or system is any "better" than any other — and thus a system based on individual freedom is not really any better than one which practices systematic oppression. Disturbing is too weak of a term, actually, because such an attitude is positively dangerous. I assume Steph doesn't apply it broadly to all ideologies, but it's more than bad enough to apply it to religion alone.

But as a political ideology, atheism has proved a good deal more nihilistic and genocidal than religion has during the 20th Century: Fascism, Nazism and Bolshevism were all secular ideologies, and far more wars have been fought over secular motives, than have ever been fought over for religious ones.

Notice the clever switch of terms from atheism to secularism. She starts by moving to falsely describe atheism as a "political ideology" just after she got done falsely describing atheism as a "faith based belief system" that is classified with religions. Do you suppose Steph is doing this deliberately, or is it possible that she actually doesn't know that atheism and secularism are completely different things? Is it possible that she really doesn't recognize that she's moving from one falsehood to a completely different one? It's incredibly dishonest if she does understand the difference because the switch allows her to portray wars fought over land, water, trade, etc., as if they were "atheist" wars simply because they had "secular" motives.

Even ignoring that, Steph still engages in some of the common falsehoods used by Christian apologists. Nazism, for example, is difficult to portray as a "secular ideology" when one of the original parts of its platform was a declaration and call for Christianity. Once in power, the Nazis suppressed atheist organizations as contrary to moral and public order and Hitler was unambiguous in his opposition to secular schools. Do you suppose Steph even realizes any of this or is all her information on Nazi ideology derived from old World War II movies?

Secularism by defintion is in opposition to free speech, freedom of conscience, freedom to worship.  

Isn't it strange that Steph doesn't actually give a definition of secularism? If you are going to say that "X is, by definition, Y," shouldn't you spend at least a little bit of time exploring and explaining how X is defined? To be fair, Steph does seem to try state what she thinks secularism is, but if she thinks she is giving a real definition of secularism then it's clear that she's as woefully ignorant of secularism as she is of atheism and biology:

Secularism is tyrannical, repressive and fundamentalist - it’s hardly enlightened, democratic or tolerant to ban religion and religious observance from all spheres from public life, even though the majority of the population ascribe to some form of religious belief. ...There is no room for compromise in secularism - religion is bad - so must be obliterated from all spheres of public life; children must be force fed an areligious eduction based on the lie it is rational and desirable to believe that God doesn’t exists; and those who adhere to religious beliefs prohibited and punished from observing the tenets of their faith.

To be fair, there is nothing about a secular political system which requires it to be enlightened, democratic, or tolerant of religion. Had Steph said this in an article that was arguing how secularism alone cannot guarantee liberty, she'd be quite right — but we shouldn't spend much time lamenting over what might have been because it's clear that Steph never intended to write anything like that. I doubt she could because even under the most generous reading of her post, there is no way she knows enough about secularism to write anything like that.

While it's true that secularism cannot guarantee democracy or liberty, it's false to equate secularism with tyranny, repression, and fundamentalism. Although the concept of "secularism" can be used in several different ways, none of them are the way Steph is using it. The term secularism was created in 1846 by George Jacob Holyoake in order to describe "a form of opinion which concerns itself only with questions, the issues of which can be tested by the experience of this life," and that has nothing to do with tyranny.

As a social or personal philosophy, secularism is about treating the improvement of the human condition as a material question, not spiritual, and achieving it through human efforts rather than supplications before deities or other supernatural beings. As a political movement, secularism is about establishing an autonomous political and social sphere which is naturalistic and materialistic, as opposed to a religious realm where the supernatural and faith take precedence.

Political secularism and secularization can be achieved in ways that are more or less intolerant of religion, but there is nothing which requires intolerance of religion. Contrary to Steph's misrepresentations, the American Constitution is a good example of how it is possible to respect religious observance and belief through a separation of church and state precisely because when you separate church from state, then the state cannot be religious. What is the opposite of religious? Secular. The American government is secular. The American Constitution is secular. American law is secular. People in America may be religious, but the political system is necessarily and by definition secular.

Put simply: secularism equals totalitarianism.

Actually, I think that it can be put even more simply: people who are completely ignorant of the basics of a topic should refrain from writing screeds on that topic. Unfortunately, this is complicated by the fact that the people who know the least about certain topics are unable to recognize this. So what can be done? A good rule of thumb is that if you cannot provide references to neutral, objective, and/or standard resources regarding some of the basics of the topic which you are discussing, then there is a strong chance that you may know a whole lot less than you think you do.

In the case of Steph here, we can see that at every point there were opportunities to offer citations, references, and quotes. She's a lawyer, so I think it's fair that she must have spent a lot of time learning and practicing how to write carefully constructed arguments which include numerous citations and references — which means she already knows how to do what she needed to do. A blog post isn't a legal brief, obviously, but we're looking at a complete absence of anything remotely like what a good argument should look like, not merely an argument that could be tightened up or better sourced.

This isn't merely an academic or esoteric issue because the consequence of not even trying to get any of the basics correct suggests very strongly a lack of any concern with the truth. That, combined with what is little more than vitriolic attacks on secularists and atheists, renders the post nothing more or less than a bigoted attempt to smear secularists and atheists with falsehoods. Accusing secularism and atheism of being responsible for or the same as Nazism is on par with accusing Jews of being part of a worldwide banking conspiracy and the ultimate goal is also very similar: to encourage animus, distrust, and even hatred of those people as a threat to liberty and security.