Bless atheists, because it pisses them off

Bless atheists, because it pisses them off

This is a response to an article by Emma Teitel, which discusses Peter Boghossian’s new book, A Manual for Creating Atheists. The article is highly irksome, and the writer seems unfamiliar with the issues around the new atheism and religion. Teitel also does some interesting things with language, i.e. abuses it.

She begins: The door-to-door religious proselytizer is, like his secular cousin the Cutco knife peddler, a harmless irritant of modern North American life.

My response: Religion is not harmless. And by extension, neither are religious proselytizers. To begin an article about a book which contends that faith based claims are harmful, with a mere assertion to the contrary, is to fail to address the issue substantively. It would be trivial to point out how religion is harmful. The Christian right’s regressive stance on many social issues, such as abortion, science education and homosexuality, is something that needs to be addressed by anyone claiming religion is harmless. “Religion is harmless” is a strong claim which many apologists would not even make.

Teitel continues: If you don’t care for his wares, you say no thanks, shut the door and sometimes roll your eyes. But you rarely, if ever, engage.

Portland University philosophy professor and proud atheist Peter Boghossian not only advocates engaging religious fundamentalists in debate, he has written the manual on how to do so.

My response: It is actually a very good book. But I have no idea why Teitel thinks people should refrain from engaging religious people. Instead of rolling your eyes at someone like a sulky teenager, perhaps it is better to talk to them. Actually, Teitel’s disinterest in rational discourse seems to be something of a theme here.

Teitel: His new book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, could be called the bible of deconversion. 

The “de” in “deconversion” is italicized. I think this is supposed to be a witticism. It seems as if every person criticizing atheist writers feels the need to do this. If you are such a person, trust me, it’s not nearly as clever as you think it is.

Statements like “atheism is a religion”, “science requires faith” and “atheist fundamentalist”, do not show an inescapable symmetry between believers and atheists. What they show is an inability to think in fundamentally different terms on the part of the person playing these word games. 

Teitel: Boghossian has a mission: to rid the world of religion through what he calls “street epistemology”—the act of literally talking someone out of his or her faith. Street epistemologists are essentially evangelists of reason, set on shepherding religious people away from the darkness of supernatural dogma and into the light of logic. Sound familiar? Boghossian has taken one of organized religion’s most invasive and possibly problematic practices—proselytization—and turned it on its head.

My response: First of all, how is this statement…

“Boghossian has taken one of organized religion’s most invasive and possibly problematic practices—proselytization—and turned it on its head.”

Reconcilable with this?

“The door-to-door religious proselytizer is, like his secular cousin the Cutco knife peddler, a harmless irritant of modern North American life.”

But passing over the trivial issue of logical consistency, atheism and atheists is not above critique. But there are better ways around it than “you’re just like the religious”.

The language employed in the above passage is contorted at best. Boghossian’s book recommends the exact opposite of shepherding. It advocates the Socratic Method. If you call this shepherding if you want. One could certainly argue that the Socratic Method has its limitations. But granting this, it would be a very different kind of shepherding, and so far removed that it’s not correct to say that Boghossian has turned religious proselytization on its head. It is Teitel who has turned a religious narrative on its head in her analysis. For every word which is supposed to denote a similarity between atheists and fundamentalists, one can point to a relevant difference and show the supposed resemblance to be without substance. The problem with Teitel’s article is that it skips over the relevant details entirely.

While it is true that there are theists and atheists each trying to persuade the other that their position is wrong, there are dissimilarities in the merits of these positions and in the methods of persuasion each side employs. For instance, a fundamentalist may use the threat of eternal torment, while an atheist is most likely to make an appeal to theoretical parsimony. Opposing the former with the latter is not simply the same thing in the other direction. Obviously, this is not always the case. The point is that there are possible cases where there is an obvious dissimilarity. Teitel acts as if no such cases exist.                                                                                                                                  

Proselytization, if it means to simply persuade someone to abandon their view and accept yours, is not a problem. The marketplace of ideas is filled with people who want you to accept their views. What matters are the merits of the ideas in question, and the methods of spreading them.

Teitel continues, quoting Boghossian: “Five per cent of the U.S. population does not believe in God,” he writes. “We have a standing ‘army’ of more than half a million potential street epistemologists ready to let loose to separate people from their faith . . . to deliver millions of micro-inoculations (of reason) to the populace on a daily basis.” A Manual for Creating Atheists is, in a way, an atheist’s attempt at Old Testament-style eye-for-an-eye revenge.

My response: “In a way”. In what way is trying to help people correct their beliefs an attempt to exact revenge? Teitel is distorting language to get her point across. Although I suspect she doesn’t entirely believe what she says. Saying it’s revenge “in a way” is a nice way to affirm the distortion, without affirming it. She is qualifying it away as she says it. When the statement is presented, and then almost negated, it is still there. And yet it is hard to hold someone accountable when they indicate that they don’t mean it in a literal sense. But the problem is that the statement remains there, and it continues to have a functional role in the article.

This is also present in scripture. A certain barbaric injunction is delivered, which over time is negated by apologists and theologians. But the statement is never discarded altogether, and neither are its toxic effects.

Teitel continues: At worst, Boghossian’s approach might appear tongue-in-cheek and harmless, or, if you’re an atheist, noble and necessary. But it points to an unnerving new trend in the world of the non-believing—one that doesn’t merely personally reject religion with a “No thanks, I’ll pass” attitude, but globally opposes it, with the addendum, “And not for you, either, if I have anything to say about it.”

My response: Teitel, you might be able to alleviate your conceptual paralysis if instead of thinking of proselytization as exclusively a tool of religion, you thought of persuasion as a tool for spreading ideas in general. This is a tidier and also fairer way to look at it. Why should religion monopolize the advantage of spreading itself?  

Teitel: Boghossian’s militant atheism not only attacks religion’s zealous and radical manifestations, but targets its benign and secular ones, too.

My response: The distinction is questionable. At best benign and radical religion are points on a spectrum. Religious figures or institutions that are moderate about one issue can very well be regressive about another.

Teitel: When asked what harm a privately religious person could possibly do in the name of his or her saviour, he denies that such a person exists, and insists on characterizing all faiths in the same simplistic fashion—as “pretending to know something you don’t.”

My response: It is possible to have faith without making empirical claims. However, believers who do this are in the vast minority. And by this I mean there are about a dozen such people. The fact is, if religion existed only as a form of personal consolation and did not pontificate about the grand questions and indoctrinate children, it would quickly have no adherents. Most people are not in the business of observing epistemic humility, and this is a problem.

Teitel: Darker still is his tendency to refer to faith as a “virus” and an “affliction.”

Response: It is an affliction wherever it leads to empirical claims. Which is almost always does, except in the case of like one Anglican bishop who treats it as metaphor.

Teitel: Every enlightenment has a dark side. Modern atheism’s may be its creeping idolatry of reason and reality, which, in our current political circumstance, gives way to Islamophobia and sexism—things Boghossian doesn’t endorse, but that some of his contemporaries most certainly do. 

Response: Idolatry of reason and reality gives way to Islamophobia and sexism?  

First of all, why is idolatry? Why does everything have to be framed in religious terms?

And why is fear of Islam irrational?

Teitel: Richard Dawkins has lately been tweeting truisms like, “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” In April, he asked via Twitter whether the New Statesman, a U.K. magazine, ought to publish work by a Muslim journalist who believes “Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse.”

Response: I don’t think Teitel knows what a truism is. However, one of the perks of my atheism is that I don’t feel committed to the infallibility of any person. I’m quite happy to accept that Dawkins, like everyone else, occasionally puts his foot in his mouth, and I think it is misguided to suggest that Medhi Hassan or anyone else should not be allowed to publish at any magazine, given that he is qualified to do so.

There is an interesting point about the rationality of belief here though. If only one person believed Mohammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse, we would probably call that person mad. I would want to know why beliefs of the batshit crazy variety get a free pass when accepted in large numbers. However, I don’t think that was the point Dawkins was making, and I’m not interested in defending him.

Teitel: “I used to think of atheists as being more upstanding than your average theist, but it’s simply not true,” says Rebecca Watson, a feminist author of the popular blog Skepchick. Like thousands of women active in the online atheist community, Watson has experienced misogyny verging on the deranged. She is regularly called a c–t and receives death threats that cite man’s “superior evolutionary psychology.” (When you can no longer use scripture to subjugate women, why not try science?)

Response: I find it interesting that someone would use Watson as a stick to beat atheists with.

Watson was wrong to think of atheists as more upstanding in general. They are just more right, and not even in general – just about the question of theism.

But what do we do when we come across misogyny or perverted interpretations of evolutionary psychology? We resist these things. When they were more deeply entrenched in our cultures – when women could not vote for example - we resisted them with argumentation and activism.  People did not simply roll their eyes and shut the door. Nothing Teitel has said about the scores of immoral atheists is relevant to the central ideas of Boghossian’s book – that faith is a bad epistemology, and that it is good to cultivate a respect for truth.

Teitel relays the elevator incident, and then says: Boghossian would refute the notion that Dawkins has taken on a deity-like role in the atheist movement, just as he refutes the notion that his own in-your-faith atheism is wrong-headed and potentially dangerous. When I challenged him about Dawkin’s Islamaphobic tweets, he was quick to defend his hero. “There’s a difference between challenging an idea and attacking a person,” he said. “Religion isn’t an immutable characteristic of a person.” He’s right. Technically it’s not. Unfortunately, though, the Nazis didn’t care about technicalities, nor did any other non-religious power that killed on the basis of religion.

Response: I don’t see how this is a point at all. Page brought up a crucial distinction and then responded to it with “yes, but Nazis!” Perhaps Boghossian’s point about immutable characteristics may in some way be missing the point. But if it is, this isn’t how to show it.

I have tried not to give the standard list of atheist grievances against religion, because there are enough videos on that. However, Emma Teitel just doesn’t seem to have very much knowledge about this issue. I don’t know who she is, or what she normally writes about, but this article of hers is dreadfully ignorant. And she uses words extremely loosely, to score cheap points about atheism being some sort of mirror image of religion. There have been hundreds of articles like this written since 2006 calling Dawkins strident and going on about how secularism is “intolerant”, while confusing the secularization thesis with secularism. If you want to persuade atheists to be less strident, you will have to do better than rehashing bad clichés, twisting words, and doing zero research. This article is simply more trash that will not make anyone who knows what they’re talking about rethink anything.

Article in question: http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/11/15/bless-atheists-for-they-have-sinned/