For years, I’ve described myself as ‘atheist,’ without batting an eyelid. Nowadays, however, I prefer to call myself a ‘non-theist,’ as opposed to an ‘anti-theist.’
The differences between the two are substantial. Anti-theists attribute every evil in the world to belief in the supernatural, whereas non-theists just don’t believe in any kind of deity. We don’t care if other people worship one god, a pantheon or the animistic oneness of nature, so long as they don’t try to impose their beliefs on us. The other term for non-theism is ‘weak atheism,’ highlighting the self-righteousness and grandiosity of the anti-theist camp.
Plus, anti-theists are fundamentalists. Oh, they’ll scream and scream and scream ’til they go blue in the face if you dare suggest as much, but they are.
We agree on lots of things. Church and State should be kept separate. Knowledge, especially that imparted to children in schools, should be based on falsifiable evidence rather than belief for its own sake. And yes, there are plenty of reactionary and bigoted passages in a great many sacred books.
We differ, however, on the blind assumption that religion is the cause of all evil. To an anti-theist, the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict exists purely because one crowd is Jewish and the other is Muslim, and incompatible religions have made otherwise peaceful people into mortal enemies. Difficult sociological, economic, psychological and cultural ideas such as nationalism, deindividuation, relative deprivation, the frustration-aggression hypothesis, ethnic identity and culture-bound political ideologies go out the window.
Thus, point the first: Anti-theists are guilty of exactly the same logical error that fundamentalists are – the ‘fundamental attribution error.’ This logical error assumes that when somebody from a particular group does something bad, it’s because it’s somehow ‘in their nature,’ and situational factors are discounted. Fundamentalists say that our crime rates are due to our godlessness; anti-theists say that violence on the part of believers is due to their belief in a higher power. The guy who mugged me three years ago was wearing a gold crucifix; nevertheless, I am more inclined to believe that even if he genuinely was Catholic (and that the cross wasn’t just bling), he was probably more likely to have been motivated by the money in my pocket than the voice of Mother Mary in his head.
My second objection to anti-theism is the spectre of groupthink that hangs over the whole movement (a similar kind of groupthink, if you will, to that exhibited by fundamentalist groups the world over, from Al-Qaeda to the Ku Kux Klan). Tropes and truisms are passed around, in-jokes functioning as thought-terminating clichés.
Have a quick gawk at this link to Dawkins’ website (subtitled ‘A Clear-Thinking Oasis’), wherein many of his recurring themes are helpfully summarised in poem format, there’s a photo of the famous atheist bus advert, and we see a few references to a point he made recently in his documentary, The Root of All Evil?, namely that labelling children as ‘Christian’ or ‘Muslim’ or whatever makes as much sense as labelling them as ‘Labour’ or ‘Tory’ children (I would have embedded a video clip from the documentary, but the BBC has blocked the video from Irish viewers, for some reason).
Now, have a listen to comedian Marcus Brigstocke’s standup routine on the topic of religion:
When one anti-theist says these things, it’s held to be a profound observation. When another one says it, people laugh. It must be the way you tell ‘em. As yet, I have been unable to figure out which of them made these observations first. Methinks that other anti-theist comedians will be rehashing the same points in their routines ten years from now, and the audiences that seek them out will still be laughing. I bet that twenty years from now, first-year students in college will be quoting the same philosophical points to each other (when they’re not trying to pass off the ideas of Gramsci and Althusser as their own, of course).
The joke about stereotyping children politically bleeds into my next point: Dawkins is given to making breathtakingly ignorant statements, such as, “If you raise your child to believe in God, you are committing child abuse.” He expends a lot of effort building his arguments on the rhetorical fallacy known as the appeal to emotion, the most famous form of which is ‘Think of the children.’ I wonder what his own parents would say if they could hear him make such a statement – according to Dawkins himself, he enjoyed “a normal Anglican upbringing.” Despite the ‘child abuse’ that upbringing apparently constituted, he grew up to become an atheist, just like most of the atheists in the world. Being raised by religious parents does not automatically mean that the child will grow up to be a believer. Is Dawkins trying to imply that, like Neo in the Matrx trilogy, there are certain human beings who manage to escape the world of religiosity through sheer will, while everyone else remains plugged into a parasitic social meme? Well, however he squares that cognitive dissonance within himself, it makes him look a twit; like one of those painfully smug arseholes in the pub who insist that you must be influenced by advertising, because you’re talking about it, aren’t you? I guarantee you that any man who argues that human beings are passive, mindless sponges is making allowances for himself, and when he speaks to you, be aware that he’s looking down the length of his nose.
The ‘think of the children’ theme recurs again and again in the liberal press. Because Ireland does not have a liberal press, I’m obliged to read The Guardian if I want to see journalism that reflects my political views. It tells me absolutely nothing about what’s going on in the country I live in, but I enjoy the opinion pieces so much that I buy the whole paper and end up recycling 90 per cent of it before I’ve finished my morning coffee. Nevertheless, I want to puke every time I see an artice about insidious fundamentalists trying to smuggle creationism into school curricula.
‘Creationism-Scare’ journalism pops up every now and again, and every time it appears, it seems the problem is getting worse, with hints at the existence of some kind of fundamentalist underground trying to fill kiddies’ minds with toxic superstitions. This is called a deviancy amplification spiral, and it’s the kind of moralising shit I expect from The Mirror or The Sun. The argument goes that X is ‘just the one incident we know about,’ or it’s ‘the tip of the iceberg,’ and one day the Western World will wake up to a nightmare of mediaevalism reborn, with unbelievers stoned in the streets.
Anti-theists are recognised by their combative response to religion. It is not enough to encourage debate (always a good thing), but a hard line must be taken – by attributing all the evil in the world to religious belief, they clearly imply that the eradication of religion is a just cause. You’re either with them or against them, a backward religious moron or an enlightened man/woman of science. Nobody ‘in the middle,’ so to speak - like an aunt of mine who is simultaneously a brilliant microbiologist and an extremely devout Protestant, or the many astrophysicists working in the Vatican Observatory - is worthy of consideration. To be religious, according to the anti-theist camp, is to be intolerant and morally suspect, therefore we should erase religion altogether.
This was actually accomplished on a local scale by Taliban, when they tried to erase ’idolatry’ from Afghanistan by destroying the Buddhas of Bamyan, dynamiting beautiful works of art that had stood for over a thousand years. They saw nothing in those statues except representations of something in which they did not believe, and they were incapable of suspending that disbelief to the meagre extent required to admit, “Well, they’re nice to look at, aren’t they?” I have difficulty believing that anti-theists would pursue their irreligious utopia with any more decency, humanity or intelligence.
This belligerent attitude has caused them to snap at people who actually agree with them philosophically, hence the sneering label of ‘weak atheist.’ It’s redolent of the disease of ‘orthodoxy sniffing’ within socialist groups (illustrated by George Orwell with the phrase, “Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist?”), implying that there are certain things you have to do, certain views that you have to subscribe to, before you can be considered a ‘proper’ atheist. You can’t call yourself an atheist just because you don’t believe in God; you have to prove it with Good Works and proselytising. Fundamentalist? Oh, you betcha.
At the end of the day, though, the reason why stupid shit like the fundamental attribution error, groupthink, appeals to emotion and deviancy amplification spirals still exist, after thousands of years of recorded human history, is because they’re easy to subscribe to. It’s easy to say that your neighbour is a bollocks because he’s ‘one of them’; easy to parrot received wisdom because you’re afraid to contradict it; easier to feel rather than think; and very, very easy to attribute everything you don’t like to some secretive conspiracy.
In closing, let me return to that image of the bus-banner: “Relax, There Probably Is No God.” ‘Probably’??? Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, gave his blessing (no pun intended) to an atheist shock campaign that said there probably is no God??? The man wrote a tl;dr poem about shocking the faithful with a juvenile prank, and yet the prank in question basically amounted to saying, “Well, we maintain that God doesn’t exist, but we could be wrong.”
And I’m a ‘weak’ atheist???
