The evil atheists do is interred with their bones, the good lives on

I received an e-mail invitation the other day to attend a forthcoming seminar on the danger of radical Islam to our society. It came from some Christian church organization and I have no idea how I got on its mailing list. In the message portion the organizers pointed out that radical Islam was an even greater danger to western civilization than “secular atheism”.

Hmmm. Should I be pleased that I am ranked second only to the likes of Osama bin Laden as a threat to western civilization?

A short while later a headline in an on-line conservative newspaper caught my eye. The writer was expanding on the theme that we are being targeted by a conspiracy of liberal leftists, Islamists and atheists. I read the piece and the writer was quite clear in connecting the dots between the intellectual leftists and the Islamists.

This is not new. Other writers have pointed out how the intellectual leftists, who despise capitalism and the power establishments in the west, sought common cause with the Russian communist regime of Stalin. They became, in Lenin’s apt phrase, a legion of “useful idiots” for communist propaganda. With the disgrace of the Stalinist regime and the exposure of its crimes against humanity the left became muted.

Until the Islamists came along and gave them heart: “Now here’s a bunch of guys we can support because they hate all the same things we hate.”

But other than using McCarthy-style “naming” the writer made no attempt to show how atheists fit into this. I suppose the unarticulated code is that they are evil people and would somehow be behind other evil people. Lost on the writer is the fact that Islam calls for the death penalty for atheists.

There was a national poll carried out some time ago in the United States. I think it was by the Pew Research organization. People were asked who they trusted and who they would be prepared to vote into the office of the President. Atheists came dead last. Parents said they would rather see their children marry a person of another faith than an atheist.

It reminded me of an apocryphal story. A religious mother is berating her young son who has come home from college but is not attending church. He finally admits to her that he no longer believes in God. After catching her breath, his mother says she can accept that as long as he doesn’t become an atheist.

And people ask, “Why are these New Atheists, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris so strident?” Gee, I wonder.

Dawkins says that atheists are in the position that homosexuals were 25 years ago and that they should learn some lessons from the “coming out” and “demand for respect” that has advanced the gay community’s stature. Harris says that is a good idea, but he doesn’t think the Atheist Pride Parade will be nearly as colourful as the Gay Pride Parade.

I wish some of these religious people would wake up and realize that our present western civilization would not be as liberal and free as they now enjoy it if atheist thinkers had not had a seminal role in the creation of our modern society.

The list of names of secular humanists and atheists who have contributed something on the path to reason over superstition and magical thinking is a long and honourable one. It includes: the Budda, Confucius, Lucretius, Omar Khayyam, Copernicus, Montaigne, David Hume, Harriet Martineau, Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, John Dewey, Albert Schweitzer, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Camus, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and many, many others.

The New Atheists

American journalist/author Chris Hedges has written a book entitled, “Why I don’t believe in atheists.” He is currently on a book tour and has been interviewed in the local media several times. This book is an attempt to rebut the jarring messages of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others, and to defend religion. Hedges’ last book was “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He is a self-described moderate Christian liberal.

I read that book and would recommend it to anyone. I haven’t read his anti-atheist book, although I intend to do so. I have, however, read the opinion of the religion and ethics editor in the Toronto Star on his work and I have viewed both interviews and debates with Hedges on U-Tube.

His simple message is that God resides in each of us and that we all have the capacity to do ill or good. Evil or goodness is an inherent quality in humans, not an external force to be harvested or constrained. His objection to the atheists is that they are committing the same sort of fallacy that fundamentalist Christians do, externalizing evil as if it is a force in the universe. While Christians believe in the gospel of the devil, atheists believe in the evil of religion. In fact, he refers to these robust atheistic writers as fundamentalist atheists.

I may change my mind after I read his book, and, if I do, I will blog further on this subject, but at first blush I would say that Hedges is off base and employing inappropriate language. It makes sense to speak of fundamentalist Christians to differentiate them from moderate or nuanced Christians. Fundamentalists believe the Bible to be the literal word of God.

But there can be no fundamentalist atheist. An atheist, in its modern usage, simply means a person who does not believe in the existence of a supremely governing deity (irrespective of religious dogmas of one stripe or another). What would a moderate atheist be? Consider an agnostic – a person who cannot decide one way or the other whether they believe in the existence of gods, a perfectly defensible and moderate view. Atheists have made that decision, so agnostics can’t be atheists.

But it is a far cry from simply being an atheist (I don’t believe) to considering religion to be a source of evil. And it is also far cry from maintaining that the mythical Devil caused some calamity (the external form of evil) to pointing to the evils of the Spanish Inquisition which were real and carried out with church blessing. In what respect would people doing harm in the name of their religious doctrines and under divinely sanctioned authority not be reasonable evidence of the inherent danger and risk of evil-doing that religions pose for humanity? The same could be said for the practice of slavery which really only got its moral force from the Catholic and Protestant church leaders.

President George Bush believes he is divinely guided in waging his war in Iraq. Is he evil? I don’t think so, but I do believe he is misguided. And it is his faith-based reasoning that is causing harm, not an inherent human quality of a black heart.

Were there good-hearted Nazis, or were there just good-hearted Germans who became evil because they subscribed to an evil ideology? It seems to me the human heart can inform ideology in equal measure to ideology informing the human heart. I don't think you can say that evil strictly resides in the human heart -- especially when it is the head giving way to emotion, fired by ideological propaganda. Indeed, religions can be evil.