Atheism Has Fundamentalists Too
The rift between traditional and "new" atheists show all the signs of a church schism.
Oct 19th, 2009 | By Skye Jethani | Category: Culture, Faith, FeaturesPopular “New Atheists” like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and proving to be controversial reformers among faithful atheists. In a rift that seems more reminiscent of a church schism, traditional atheists are increasingly uncomfortable with the flame-throwing rhetoric of the new atheists.
For example, Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the book God Is Not Great, told a capacity crowd at the University of Toronto, “I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.” His words were greeted with hoots of approval.
Religion is “sinister, dangerous and ridiculous,” Hitchens tells NPR, because it can prompt people to fly airplanes into buildings, and it promotes ignorance. Hitchens sees no reason to sugarcoat his position.
“If I said to a Protestant or Quaker or Muslim, ‘Hey, at least I respect your belief,’ I would be telling a lie,” Hitchens says.
A full report on the rift among atheists can be read on NPR’s website. The story recounts how the new atheists are no longer content with a live-and-let-live approach to those adhering to religious beliefs. Instead, they are on the march to demean and destroy the religious faith of others.
Last month, atheists marked Blasphemy Day at gatherings around the world, and celebrated the freedom to denigrate and insult religion.
Some offered to trade pornography for Bibles. Others de-baptized people with hair dryers. And in Washington, D.C., an art exhibit opened that shows, among other paintings, one entitled Divine Wine, where Jesus, on the cross, has blood flowing from his wound into a wine bottle.
Another, Jesus Paints His Nails, shows an effeminate Jesus after the crucifixion, applying polish to the nails that attach his hands to the cross.
Paul Kurtz, a more traditional athiest, does not agree with this militant approach. He worries the nastiness of Hitchens, Dawkins, and others will actually set the atheist movement back:
“I consider them atheist fundamentalists,” he says. “They’re anti-religious, and they’re mean-spirited, unfortunately. Now, they’re very good atheists and very dedicated people who do not believe in God. But you have this aggressive and militant phase of atheism, and that does more damage than good.”
You can’t help but see the irony in this. The new atheists are becoming the very thing that hate about religion–intolerate, militant, dogmatic, and aggressive. This only shows that anything can become a religion, even anti-religion, and twisted. The problem isn’t religion, but the broken human beings who practice it–including Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
As an atheist, I don’t find it very surprising that we have personalities that lie outside the bell curve just as religious communities do. The question, however, is one of proportion: are people like Hitchens representative of the average atheist? I argue that he does not. If anything, the rise of radical atheism would appear to be a reactionary phenomenon– a movement born out of the revival of American dispensationalism ushered in after 9/11. Most atheists have very little discourse with each other, as their fundamental mistrust of herd mentality extends to other atheists as much as it does to religious believers. For this reason, it makes little sense to talk about a “community of non-believers”. Atheists tend to roll solo, with only a few bucking the trend and donning anti-religious bumper stickers and attending rallies.
American Christians, on the other hand, have behaved like a monolithic entity for some time– especially in politics. A sizeable potion of American Christians were represented by George W. Bush and his cronies over the past 10 years as evidenced by their near lockstep voting records in 2000 and 2004. The fact that we are finally seeing some splintering of the conservative Christian framework with the election of Barack Obama is reassuring.
Sagar,
You make an interesting observation that atheists “tend to roll solo” due to their “fundamental mistrust of the herd mentality.” The handful of atheists I’ve known over the years seem to fit this description, holding the work of Dawkins, Hitchens et al. at arm’s length as not to ally themselves with their ideology’s popularizers.
Could it be that atheist discomfort with the brashness of these bestselling authors is akin to my discomfort with the politically-framed stereotype of evangelicals epitomized by George Bush, James Dobson and Pat Robertson?
If so, are there any atheist equivalents of J.I. Packer, John Stott and Billy Graham?
Noam Chomsky? Bill Maher? Steven Soderbergh? Michael Shermer? Are we witnessing a growing “atheism movement” or is this an oxymoron due to their “fundamental mistrust of the herd mentality”?
[…] Skye Jethani: Atheists have fundamentalists, too. […]
[…] One of the blogs I have begun to enjoy and follow is by Skye Jethani. […]
[…] week I wrote a post about atheism having its own form of fundamentalism. It was based on a report by NPR. Well, for the sake of fairness and balance, I think it’s […]
[…] Skye Jethani: Atheists have fundamentalists, too. […]