David Cryer's Blog

response to ‘The Chapel Hill Murders should be a wake up call for atheists’ by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, New Republic, 11th Feb 2015

It’s strange for a Christian political apologist to denigrate ‘new atheism’ for having a “congregation” that adheres to a dogma. Elizabeth Breunig should welcome new atheism’s resemblance to religion. Perhaps she is really saying that unreflective adherance is a bad thing; in which case her target should be all religion.

Of course there is nothing new in calling atheism a religion. The portrayal goes something like this: Besides its dogmas, atheism has its priests (Dawkins, Hitchens etc.), its holy books (‘The Age of Reason’, ‘On Liberty’) and large congregations gather on Darwin Day like Christians at Easter. Criticism of atheism has been along these lines since at least the 19th century. So it is also not new to believe in a new atheism. Actually, as far as I have read, new atheists see nothing new in their views; they see themselves holding the same views as all the voices of atheism from the past – from Lucretius to Bertrand Russell. The label ‘New Atheist’ is more likely a political one – theists identifying a new, vocal enemy; a reaction to the decline of religion in the West in the form of attack on a “militant” Other. More on the word ‘militant’ shortly.

It is also strange – or telling – that an old doctrine like Christianity is being bolstered with the new language of racism and sexism. Breunig quotes a Pew survey of 2013 on atheism in America which reveals a portrait of the new atheist as a young, white, college-educated male as if this were proof of new atheism’s racist and sexist beliefs; clearly anything white and male means sexist and racist to Breunig. The fact that religious americans, also in the Pew poll, see atheism and islam as equally suspect is an indictment of their prejudice and says nothing about atheism at all. It is a little desperate to call out racism or sexism when religions are the great discriminators on these issues. How many examples do we know of women being excluded, segregated, by religions; how many religions have used holy books to validate their racial doctrines. But Mariam Namazie or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris are apparently the racist sexists despite saying repeatedly (It may be thousands of times in Namazie’s case) that their criticism is of religious ideology not religious people (islamism not muslims). The use of politically correct ‘offence’ is a way of deflecting from injustices within religion by claiming that people are being hurt by it, and that the use of offensive words leads to Islamophobic attacks – this is apparently what happened at Chapel Hill. There is a self-censorship here which is the most pernicious form of attack on free speech and the individual.

Interestingly Breunig betrays another of the modern roster of University orthodoxies (besides sexism and racism) when she talks of the New Atheists lacking epistemological sophistication. She accuses it of using “whatever means it already assumes legitimate” to argue against religion. Joining sexism and racism accusations we have this epistemological criticism which derives from post-structuralism and post-colonialism in the later 20^th century. In short, this stance, this criticism, is a doctrine of ‘relativism’. Breunig accuses the tweeting Dawkins, for example, of secular assumptions about morality which he shares with his twitter congregation. (By the way, to accuse anyone of a lack of epistemological sophistication on Twitter is like arraigning speed-dating for its brevity). In point of fact the arguments (away from Twitter) of secular humanism on morality are very sophisticated epistemologically, especially with natural selection as one means of understanding the evolution of our human culture and psychology. These are not assumed positions, but reasoned out; they are not relativistic or ‘revealed’ (‘revealed’ being the greatest assumption of all) but are plural. It is therefore not ‘essentialist’, as Breunig states (and which betrays her register, even more clearly, as coming from the orthodoxy of the humanities department). Only a received philosophy like religion depends on assumption and essentialism. Secular atheists will use the scientific method, polling, evidence…

When disrespect or criticism are met with murder it is obscene to call the criticism ‘militant’. It is obscene to call the criticism ‘aggressive’ when the murder of the critics is a verification of their criticism. There is a wish in islamism, for example, to impose its beliefs on individuals, thus showing the obvious difference between a critic and a fanatic. If you don’t distinguish between people and their religion then you are, by definition, distinguishing yourself from those who do: free-speakers who write words or draw cartoons. If my feelings being offended lead me to murder the offender then my belief system would be fundamentally at fault and should necessitate a self-analysis, a self-criticism. But how can this analysis or criticism be done if it is drowned by shouts of “blasphemy!” or even by a polite “don’t be disrespectful of religion”. This means siding with the murderer and making the critic responsible for their own murder.

It should also be mentioned here that Breunig actually sees new atheism as having a “persistant persecution narrative”. Every group now has this narrative, religious and non-religious. If someone is actually killed or their home or place of worship actually attacked, then their worry is justified and not paranoid. Does Breunig actually think that Salman Rushdie or Ayan Hirsi Ali are paranoid; that their fears are unjustified? Should all those critics (many of them atheists) who are killed by the state or the mob in islamic countries have stopped bleating about persecution before they were executed? Are Breunig’s muslim sisters in the islamic world ‘bringing it on themselves’? I repeat, it is obscene to equate words with execution. I am inclined to think that Breunig must be a fan of blasphemy law, though I have no evidence for it.

It shouldn’t be suprising when a theist reacts to criticism from an atheist, because the reaction has its familiar, identifiable forms of attack: First there is the claim that atheism is a religion; then the claim that atheism is an ideology. When Craig Stephen Hicks murdered his three muslim neighbours in Chapel Hill there is no atheist ideology, no atheist doctrine or holy book from which he could draw his action. If he had been a christian murdering a jewish family then we could all find the injunctions in christian history to underpin his beliefs. It should be clear to everyone that not believing in god is not an ideology, but the ‘new theists’ (as I will unfairly call them) persist in this belief. It could be seen, superficially, as a wish for fairness. “Look” says the new theist, “High Priest Dawkins has been saying for years that religion, especially islam, is an ideology of violence. Now an atheist has murdered a muslim family. So reflect, atheist, and be humble enough to see that you are just like the rest of us after all!” Breunig actually says – “no form of reasoning… has a monopoly on righteousness” and she calls for atheists to reflect. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it. She misses, not just the absense of a doctrine of violence, but also the fact that atheism actually comes from reflection, it is not blind like faith. You could almost say atheists reflect by definition, because they have had to reject the mainstream which is religious belief. They have no wish to claim righteousness either, as Breunig states, because their aim is not to replace one doctrine of submission with another (submission being the corollary of righteousness). Any such non-religious ideology would not be atheism anyway, it would be humanism, as theist apologists tend not to recognise. But I challenge anybody, however offended, however fearful or persecuted, to find violence in humanist writing. And humanists, like atheists, don’t need a moment of reflection over Craig Stephen Hicks’ atheism (as Breunig crowingly exhorts), because they have been reflecting all along.