Light Fiction

Lee Siegel from the LA Times doesn’t understand what the “latest rash” of atheists are doing. Despite that, he has written a piece in the LA Times in which he questions our techniques, language, and most importantly goals. I’m not just saying that he doesn’t understand us to be trite, or to cast facile  aspersions upon him: there is nothing in this article (via samharris.org) to suggest that he knows what we are doing.  It does not contain any positive statements about the social programme this new wave of acerbic reasonable people have said or are trying to achieve. Instead it is filled with questions that lead somewhere that no atheist i have read or met would even suggest. It is filled with so many of the misunderstandings of atheism that occur in the liberal left, the kinds of misunderstandings that people whom i like have. So it seems like an excellent opportunity to join some others in knocking some holes in common misconceptions. In a future post i’ll tackle his absurd views on secular philosophy in some detail.

[No one could] know from reading the latest rash of anti-God books that promiscuous sex and polymorphous sexuality are taken for granted in modern-day America (let’s see a conservative Supreme Court try to roll that back); that the separation of church and state is inscribed in our Constitution; that no priest, minister or rabbi holds any top position in the federal government; and that even the state board of education in Kansas recently forbade the teaching of creationism.

The first four phrases of that paragraph are concerned with showing how secular, perhaps how irreligious, our culture is. But that fourth phrase is telling: “even the state board of education in Kansas recently forbade the teaching of creationism.” The fact that even this well-known bastion of religiosity Kansas–they outlawed barney, remember–is legislating a secular worldview means “OMG look how progressive we are!” First of all, this is 2007. Evolution has been well-established scientific fact for well over 100 years. There is no excuse for any person responsible for educating children not understanding how important evolution is, period. And second of all it was a close decision that has a good chance of being reversed next time there is a school board election in Kansas–it’s happened several times before and Kansas is not alone in having a populace that wants to deceive its children.

The other three phrases of that sentence are even more misleading, if not quite so self-contradictory: “promiscuous sex and polymorphous sexuality are taken for granted in modern-day america”? Has he ever known a conservative, let alone a conservative christian? And what’s that crack about the supreme court, is he joking about the potentially imminent reversal of fundamental liberties in this country, and all the suffering that would engender? Next he points out that “the separation of church and state is inscribed in our constitution”, but doesn’t bother to mention the sustained efforts of a vocal minority to overthrow that and turn this country into a theocracy. Let’s not forget his last point: “that no priest, minister or rabbi holds any top position in the federal government”. OK, yeah, nobody in any government HR department is dealing with them, but there is the funny story of Ted Haggard, (good name) a man who claimed weekly meetings with the president. It apparently doesn’t strike Siegel as contradictory to his purpose to mention this, “the religious right’s enormous influence on president bush” explicitly in his next paragraph. Perhaps he’s hung up on material legalities of the law, instead of its spirit.

I’ve established that Lee (i hope he doesn’t mind me calling him that) doesn’t understand the state of religion in America. I hope that is what i’ve demonstrated, because the only other option is that he understands it and decided to mislead his readership. Religion may be weaker in America than it has ever been anywhere else in the world–though i’m certainly not making that claim–but we are also the country with nukes and 1/3 of global military spending. (there’s a pie chart about 1/5 of the way down that page) Even a small force in such a huge machine has dramatic effects.

Now i want to just point out that he doesn’t know what we’re saying or who we’re saying it to. This shouldn’t be controversial, he says it himself:

Who is the ideal reader of these attacks on belief in God? … It’s hard to imagine anyone abandoning his faith after reading Harris’ condescending polemic, or the science of Dawkins and Dennett, or Hitchens’ vitriol.

And he’s right, except for all the ways he’s wrong. He’s right in the sense that essentially all of the people we’re railing against pride themselves on their irrationality, and are just about the last people i would expect to ever go out of their way to understand the kinds of arguments we present, let alone be persuaded by them. So then who is our audience? The quiet ones who thought they were alone or insane, the smart ones who were raised with an odd default perspective, the men and women who have never really thought about it. Most importantly our audience is society’s discourse with itself.

That discourse has been taking on more and more of the character of that one guy hogging all the champagne at his cousin’s wedding. Yes atheists are strident, acerbic, and at times bombastic. But for pete’s sake the guy just jumped up and down in the cake. It’s well past time for the best man to stand up, get some friends together, and make sure that the drunk guy doesn’t run off with the wife screaming and slung over his shoulder. These new voices are the best men asking for our friends to stand up and help get the situation under control.

Next!

The attacks in the books often don’t make much sense either. For instance, Bush and his gang preach Christian values while lying us into a slaughterhouse overseas, ransacking our public coffers and ignoring social inequities and iniquities at home—and so our heroic anti-religionists attack . . . Christian values.

OK, this is just equivocation plain and simple. And i really don’t know how to talk about this without implying that Siegel is being deceitful. The thing is, “Christian Values” is a broad term that means different things in different situations, and here Lee uses two different meanings without changing the words. The first “christian values” obviously refers to such things as empathy, valuing life, caring for your neighbor, truth, goodwill. The values that, no matter who you are or who you’re talking about, you praise people for. These are human values.

The second use of “christian values” is the pernicious meme that atheists don’t value all those good things. Ironically and unfortunately, the only reason this idea can spread is because of how strongly humanists believe in them. So strongly that it forces us to reject so many other religious values: ridiculous surety in our own correctness, war against everything that does not support our correctness, valuing our beliefs over the lives of others, belief in a coming apocalypse, belief in an all powerful war god. Notice that these are all the kinds of things that strongly religious people praise when they agree with what is being said and consider evil when it is other beliefs that are being said.

Both groups of beliefs are espoused by the bible and by the religions of the world. It is terrible that the second kind of value always overrides the first, leading to war and pain. However, atheists praise the human values and universally criticize the religious values. We are consistent, not changing what we value just because someone who disagrees with us said it. Perhaps a religious reader would read this and say “that’s not true: they have ridiculous surety about the lack of a god, don’t they? Isn’t that what this is about?” Well, no. You can’t prove a negative, and atheists don’t claim to. If you ask any of us, we quickly and easily admit to being technically agnostic. But we don’t believe.

The saddest part about Siegel’s argument that we are throwing out all of christian values just because some of them are bad–which as i just said we don’t do–is that he relies on the philosophic notion of a ‘category mistake’, and that his equivocating is a wonderful example of one. The second time that he makes the mistake he is accusing us of making.

There’s a lot more in that article, as usual with critiques of atheism all of it has been said before though. And it’s late, and this is already pretty long. I’m planning on going on to the second half and criticizing his ‘unique’ take on the value of absurdity, and definitely attacking his misunderstanding of the value of imagination in a secular society. So, stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: atheism, siegel, LA Times