Bitching about atheists makes my brain box hurt

I’ll go for a while and have nothing that really sets me off, which is kind of a problem in the blogging world; without anything to arouse my ire, I end up with little to write about and things turn stale. I pop up a lazy article once or twice a day harping on nothing amazing and my motivation flies out the window.

So I’d like to thank Charlotte Allen, whose monumentally asinine article pissing and moaning about how mean and petty atheists are made me angry enough to go after it nearly paragraph by paragraph.

Her premise is a simple one: atheists are mean, they’re trying to prove the unprovable, and she’s got her head somewhere in her large intestine. Take this opener, for example.

My problem with atheists is their tiresome — and way old — insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What — did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?

Ignoring the comical irony of someone defending Christianity by calling an argument against it “way old” (I guess as opposed to those brand new Biblical verses), I have no idea how anyone can claim that nonbelievers are unaffected by the believers. Abortion laws, stem cell laws, gay marriage legislation, government-backed holy wars, funding for abstinence-only education, prostitution laws, do I need to go on? The American lawbooks are full to the damn brim with laws that have no support other than religious inclinations.

After some BS about how few people describe themselves as atheists vs those who call themselves unaffiliated religiously (the term “atheist” is, after all, jam packed with negative connotations), she continues to prove that she doesn’t actually read things before criticizing them.

In his online “Atheist Manifesto,” Harris writes that “no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that … God exists.” The evidence? Antique clauses in the constitutions of six — count ‘em — states barring atheists from office.

Actually, no. That’s not the “evidence”, that was one bit of reinforcement concerning how many backwards laws some states have. If you want the “evidence”, pull out your TiVo and go back to the Democratic primary debates when candidates were asked what their favorite Bible verse is. Should that be inadequate, here’s a list of every single atheist in Congress. Ready?

1. Pete Stark (D-CA)

Boy, Allen’s right. There’s totally no basis to the claim that it’s nigh-impossible to get elected without claiming to believe in God. I apologize.

Moving on. After a fair criticism of those who call religious believers “stupid” (which has happened but is far from a tenet of “neo-atheism”), we move on to more specific, and themselves rather stupid, arguments.

Another topic that atheists beat like the hammer on the anvil in the old Anacin commercials is Darwinism versus creationism. Maybe Darwin-o-mania stems from the fact that this year marks the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809, but haven’t atheists heard that many religious people (including the late Pope John Paul II) don’t have a problem with evolution but, rather, regard it as God’s way of letting his living creation unfold? Furthermore, even if human nature as we know it is a matter of lucky adaptations, how exactly does that disprove the existence of God?

Right off the bat, by using the term “Darwinism” we know Allen is coming from a fundamentally flawed angle. There is no “Darwinism” and more than mechanics is called “Newtonism” or atomic theory is “Daltonism”. Darwin isn’t revered as being infallible, he proposed the theory which is being expanded into “evolution”.

Regardless, it doesn’t “disprove” god. Nothing “disproves” god. What it does is remove another bit of support for the god hypothesis. When you start to get people seeing that the Bible is either metaphorical or entirely fictional, then that starts the drift, ya dig? And I guess Allen forgets the Intelligent Design hullabaloo, because if there was no controversy surrounding evolution, atheists wouldn’t talk about it, but when a Gallup poll suggests only 39% of Americans believe in evolution, we’re in trouble.

Next?

And then there’s the question of why atheists are so intent on trying to prove that God not only doesn’t exist but is evil to boot. Dawkins, writing in “The God Delusion,” accuses the deity of being a “petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak” as well as a “misogynistic, homophobic, racist … bully.” If there is no God — and you’d be way beyond stupid to think differently — why does it matter whether he’s good or evil?

This one’s just absurd. One of the biggest arguments that comes down the pike is “what’s the harm in letting people believe in God?” Simply taking the objective tack and arguing against God’s existence hits a big-ass wall after a while when people say they don’t care because they’d rather stick with the illusion. Yes, I’ve run into it myself. There are many who cling to their belief not due to their confidence in the story’s veracity, but because they just like it.

When you combine that with the above problems concerning legislation and roadblocks in education/science, then people who won’t listen to the more mundane “here is objective evidence” arguments need something more. Thus we get the Dawkins types who seek to prove that aside from being false, the god hypothesis is harmful. It’s sorta how one reinforces their argument.

After all, why does god need to be good, either? If god is real, it doesn’t matter if he’s callous and cruel just like Dawkins says. He’s real, so we’d have to deal with his pettiness and whatnot no matter how unpleasant he was.

What primarily seems to motivate atheists isn’t rationalism but anger — anger that the world isn’t perfect, that someone forced them to go to church as children, that the Bible contains apparent contradictions, that human beings can be hypocrites and commit crimes in the name of faith. The vitriol is extraordinary. Hitchens thinks that “religion spoils everything.” Dawkins contends that raising one’s offspring in one’s religion constitutes child abuse. Harris argues that it “may be ethical to kill people” on the basis of their beliefs.

I’m struck with Dawkins’ words from The God Delusion.

I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice toward religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement. But my interlocutor usually doesn’t leave it at that. He may go on to say something like this: “Doesn’t your hostility mark you out as a fundamentalist atheist, just as fundamentalist in your own way as the wingnuts of the Bible Belt in theirs?” I need to dispose of this accusation of fundamentalism, for it is distressingly common.

The worst you can say about angry atheists, it is always limited to words and a desire to see things different. I’ve been threatened with damnation, had people tell me they reveled in the idea of my burning in hell, and on one occasion was threatened with physical violence and the desire to see the Bible placed in the lawbooks so heretics like me could be executed. I’ve never in my life seen a single atheist express a desire to see anyone put to death just for their beliefs. If you can find some I’d like to see it. Really, I’m willing to concede that it happens sometimes, but it’s far from as common.

Side note. I find it hilarious that I can deal with evangelists telling me I’m going to hell and that’s just dandy, but Hitchens saying believers are “stupid” is somehow beyond the pale.

In the end, Allen is just one of another in a line of what I’m going to start calling the “anti-atheists”. Christians (and they’re almost always Christians, to match the Christian-centric nature of Western atheism) who do not have a clue how to deal with someone passionately fighting against them and instantly claim them to be mean, ignorant, fundamentalist, radical, childish, whatever else.

Believe me, I would love to sit and talk with religious believers calmly and respectfully. It would be fabulous to simply have a roundtable and discuss the existence of god with the same kind of attitude that one might discuss the legend of Atlantis or just how the moon formed, but it never works out that way. People take it very, very personally when you shake the foundations of their faith, no matter how respectfully you try to do it. It’s incredibly difficult to say “oh that thing you’ve spent your whole life believing in is wrong” without making someone pretty mad.

Think of it like a revolution of the mind. Iraq has fallen into disarray largely because of the idea that a revolution cannot be forced. An external army cannot charge in and simply tear down the government and expect the people to rebuild and put everything perfectly in line. They need to be ready to do it themselves and be the ones to yank down the statues. Indeed, come across as too abrasive and you turn into an aggressor who will be rejected regardless of the validity of your claims.

That’s why (unlike many of our religious friends) no atheists want to criminalize religion or ban Bibles. What we want to do, though, is put all of our beliefs out there and hope to spark an internal revolution. That’s why Dawkins doesn’t do debates; he writes and lets people read what they want, and if they come along for the ride, fantastic. I never spark a religious argument myself for similar reasons: it’s very unpleasant.

I sometimes feel like the playing field is horridly uneven in this whole thing. If you believe in god, there are no limits to how you can proselytize. Me? Somehow I have to walk on eggshells and wear the kid gloves, or the Charlotte Allens of the world throw a temper tantrum. Frankly, when she does it with such horridly flawed arguments it doesn’t help her claim that atheists are mean for calling people like her ignorant and immature.