New atheists, old bottles

Until a few years ago I had nothing but respect for Richard Dawkins. Today, having witnessed his transubstantiation from popular scientist to TV personality, I am not so sure.

The certainties handed-down by Dawkins are transformed by his followers into a deterministic and, at best poorly argued, at worst anti-human, worldview. Let’s say it here and now: religion is not responsible for all human misery and adopting the tactics of the daftest believers, such as, say, paying for insulting advertisements on the side of busses, is childish and will do nothing to further the aims of humanists.

This is not a charter for learning to live with religion. Far from it. Although I dislike the idea of laughing at people’s beliefs, humanists and atheists should be up for a straight fight. Frankly, anglophone-style secularism doesn’t go far enough. Ireland could do with a dose of French-inspired laïcité. Having an antagonistic relationship with religion and all of its works is a good idea – why are Irish pro-choice campaigners so timid, for example?

The problem is that ‘new atheism’, by attempting to lay the blame for all ills at the feet of ‘organised’ religion, not only invalidates religion’s very many contributions to human society, particularly in the arts, it also allows all manner of other self-indulgent cod-spiritual nonsense to flower. Christopher Hitchens, author of ‘God is Not Great’, is the worst offender. Hitchens regularly issues broadsides against god-botherers that are lapped-up by atheists who know how to fight but not how to argue.

Hitchens is first and foremost a journalist – he wants readers and knows which buttons to press in order to get them. There is no problem with this in and of itself. I myself am no stranger to whipping-up a bit of controversy, having recently penned articles headlined ‘Let’s demolish Dublin’ and ‘I slept with Brian Cowen and Enda Kenny’. And yet Hitchens’ provocative musings are treated like serious contributions to scholarship. They’re not.

As Brendan O’Neill recently wrote in forth, Mother Teresa is a particular target for the bile of the rocket-eating set: “Today’s screechy anti-God squad is more interested in hectoring the religious – those stupid believers in anything they are told – than it is in creating an Enlightened culture that might give people something else, something more profound, to think about and contribute to.”(1)

Picking one’s battles is all very well, but why attack just one pile of prejudices?

Here are a few other sacred cows in dire need of being transformed into burgers and shoes:

The Dali Lama’s trendy ‘Free Tibet’ campaign ignores the fact that what the Tibetan exiles object to is not the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarianism (Tibet’s priest class are a dab hand at that themselves) but its habit of building roads, railways and schools, and yet little is said about this – or the murder and mistreatment of worshippers of Buddhist deity Dorje Shugde by the Dali Lama’s followers.

Environmentalism, too, is busily transforming itself from a secular religion into an actual belief system, complete with the thinly-disguised concepts of sin-eating, indulgences and divinity and a host of anointed sacerdotalists ready and willing to tell us we’ll burn as a result of our behavior. No-one wants to see widespread pollution but where are the demands to put humanity at the top of the pyramid of beliefs?

The pope is regularly crucified for assisting ‘genocide’ in Africa by forbidding the use of prophylactic contraception, thus encouraging the spread of Aids. Two key points are usually missed by middle-class anti-Catholics: most African countries are not Catholic and, more importantly, since when did Catholics pay any attention to papal bull?

Meanwhile Catholic and Anglican leaders are regularly criticised by people who have eaten one too many editions of the Irish Times for their expressions of ‘homophobia’. Why? Christian anti-gay sentiment should be celebrated as an honest expression of their beliefs. The fact that these beliefs are stupid is not the point – why should atheists support attempts by a minority of liberal churchgoers to drag their institutions into the modern era? Surely we should prefer if they were left festering where they belong? I say, “Hooray for bigots – let’s hear their nonsense”.

The Catholic Church in Ireland is being slapped-about for clerical sex abuse but no-one blames the state for failing to live up to its responsibilities and educate children without the assistance of religious organisations or the fact that it spent decades criminalising working class children.

Homeopathic ‘medicine’ is now taken seriously, therapy and counselling are remaking people into passive victims, gender studies and multiculturalism promote difference rather than equality… the list of contemporary prejudices that are left unchallenged is as endless as the Guardian’s public sector recruitment pages.

Today’s media-friendly atheism knows how to get attention but it doesn’t know how to win an argument. Spouting sneery, bourgeois dinner-party prejudice is no substitute for putting forward a serious argument for human-centred morality and, more importantly, policy.

I’m all for throwing stones but forgive me if a few sanctimonious atheists get their windows broken in the crossfire.

Jason Walsh is a journalist, the editor of forth — and an atheist.

(1) Mugging Mother Teresa, Brendan O’Neill, forth, October 26, 2009