I recently received an email from a friend who, having read my articles on Science vs Religion and Atheism vs. Agnosticism, took issue with my position — not because he believes in God, but because he disagrees with my characterization of epistemology and my definition of agnosticism. On the one hand, his letter has led to a mentally stimulating exchange of ideas which I’ve been delighted to be a part of. On the other hand, it’s forced into the front of my brain the realization of just how misunderstood atheism is in America.
A Canadian paper has just published an Op-Ed on this subject. Here is a notable excerpt:
I’d like to add to his statement and suggest that many atheists don’t understand what atheism is. Certainly, my friend understands clearly why he doesn’t believe in God, and I feel like we’ve worked out our differences as semantics, but the exchange has reminded me of how many atheists I’ve met over the years who didn’t even know they were atheists. (As a matter of fact, another friend and I spent approximately two years discussing atheism before he became convinced that he, too, is an atheist, and has been for years!)
Part of the problem of understanding atheism — particularly in America — is that by the time most children have grown enough to make a rational decision about atheism and theism, they’ve been indoctrinated into the belief that atheists are bad people. Most of my readers are aware of the studies, but we really don’t need studies to know that we are villified. We are the most distrusted group in America. We notice.
The thing is, the most distrusted group in America isn’t really atheists. It’s people who call themselves atheists. All atheists are not equally distrusted. I believe that for every outspoken atheist in America, there are probably three or four people who don’t believe in God, don’t go to church, don’t buy into any of the bullshit, and have never bothered to openly tell anybody about it. They just go about their lives, quietly, contentedly, not rocking the boat. If you ask them where they go to church, they will say, “I don’t really go in for religion.” If you ask them if they believe in God, they’ll say, “I don’t know. I never really gave it much thought.”
Theists, in particular, are happy to let these folks go on with their lives. They’re irrelevant to theists and theism because they don’t cause any trouble. Big Bad Atheists, on the other hand, are a real bother. We blog. We go to meetings. We write books and buy ads on buses. We go to school board meetings and demand scientific proof of Creationism. We sue the Boy Scouts. We demand evidence.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? I’d guess that 95% of “Big Bad Atheists” would be happy if theism was removed completely from the government, if theists didn’t get special tax consideration when they went to meetings, and if theism was something practiced privately and not mentioned publicly.
And who is it that theists wouldn’t vote for? It’s not really atheists. There are atheists in Congress now. There are atheists in positions of leadership all over the country, but they have one thing in common — They’ve never admitted it publicly.
Theists don’t fear and distrust atheists. They fear and distrust the ones who won’t keep it to themselves. They want us to be the silent minority. They don’t want us meddling with their power, questioning their tax-exempt churches, their blue laws, their legalized discrimination, their bans on scientific research, their indoctrination of children, and their outrage at wardrobe malfunctions.
I feel a little like there’s a “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy in America. If you have to be an atheist, just keep it to yourself and don’t mess with the system. It’s damn inconvenient to have to deal with all the good arguments atheists make, and more inconvenient still to accomodate them under the law when they demand equality and justice.
This is why I believe the key to breaking the power of theism in America is in communication with the silent atheists. Many of them don’t even know they’re atheists, and wouldn’t want to be called one in any case. We’re good people. We’re moral, we love, we hurt, we have compassion. We try to make our friends and loved ones happy. We want things to be better for everybody. Yet, for no good reason, we are distrusted and vilified — so much so that many of us don’t even realize we belong to the group.
As I write these words, I use a pen-name. I must, for I would risk public censor, boycott, and financial ruin if my words were properly attributed. As I call for openness from atheists, I remain anonymous. It’s still nasty territory to be an atheist. Part of me feels anger towards those atheists who have chosen not to rock the boat. Part of me understands completely. For my entire life, my words are google-able. There will never be any doubt that I am an atheist and that I disapprove of theism. If someone like McCarthy ever comes to power again and America descends into theocracy, I could be in real trouble.
Perhaps — just perhaps — there’s a chance that reasonable heads will prevail while a moderate sits in the White House. I sometimes despair that I will live another fifty years and never see a non-theist in power. (I’m comforted by the fact that another fifty years would be quite a stretch.) I worry that so long as Christians control the media and the government, we atheists will always be misunderstood — on purpose.
I hope I’m wrong.
I can’t agree with this. Theists do indeed fear atheists, or rather their straw man version of them. They will assume that who they are voting for is one of them, a theist, till they out themselves. After that, their view of the candidate would switch to their straw man. Very irrational, but then whoever said humans are rational? But then, theists need to vilify us. Otherwise, what good would believing in a god be if those that didn’t acted just as ethically? Indeed, I think we act more ethically since we do not try to apply a 2000 year old moral code relevant only to a barbaric sheepherding society to a modern moral zeitgeist.
My heart goes out to you. To have to walk on eggshells like that would send my blood pressure through the roof whenever religion came up in the conversation. I take pleasure in rocking the boat, having been involved in one of those infamous bus ad campaigns.
Here in the Great White North there are some fundie Christians (our Prime Minister and several of his Cabinet are among them), but typically no one cares that I’m an atheist, and I’m very open about it. Even in our politics talk of any candidate’s religious views are considered quite gauche and the news media respects this. I firmly believe that a candidate’s religious views are out-of-bounds excepting that they interfere with his/her ability to carry out the duties of their office. In this way I am very concerned that our Prime Minister’s fundamentalist views do indeed strongly color public policy in this country and I think there is strong evidence to suggest that this is so. Unfortunately, this respect of religious privacy goes too far and no one is willing to discuss the matter.
Posted by Shamelessly Atheist | July 13, 2009, 1:34 pm“The thing is, the most distrusted group in America isn’t really atheists. It’s people who call themselves atheists. All atheists are not equally distrusted. ”
This is the crux of my point. It may seem like a pointless distinction, but I don’t believe it is. Until and unless I say I’m an atheist, theists don’t fear and distrust me. Since there are a lot of atheists who don’t make their beliefs public, what I said is true: Theists don’t fear and distrust all atheists. They fear and distrust the atheists they’re aware of. True, they would fear the unknown ones if they knew, but that’s the whole point!
Their fear is based on false beliefs about what we are — strawmen. They live among atheists every day, and never come to any harm at their hands. They like them, hang out with them at the bar, buy them lunch, and introduce them to their wives. They prove their own strawmen false. They only hate us when they learn of our lack of god-belief. Until then, they think we’re good people.
But their distrust is also based on a very legitimate fear. We have the political numbers to make their lives much less comfortable. We could, if we got together on the subject, make a huge stink about tax exempt status for churches. We could demand the end of faith based initiatives, and we have the numbers to make any political party take notice.
Posted by hambydammit | July 13, 2009, 2:28 pmDo you have a link to that Op-Ed? (You may have intended to link the paragraph you quoted, but if so the link html isn’t coded properly.) I’m really curious to see the whole thing, because the quoted bit sounds a helluvalot like my own “Come Out, Come Out!” essay (formerly published at thenewhumanist.com, before the site became defunct).
Posted by G Felis | July 13, 2009, 6:00 pmhttp://news.guelphmercury.com/Life/article/507525
I’ll also try to properly embed it in the article itself. Do you have any links to your article? Is it still online anywhere?
Posted by hambydammit | July 13, 2009, 6:48 pmThanks for the link! And there’s no link I can make to my essay: The New Humanist website is no more – and it’s not even available on the Wayback Machine (archive.org). Eventually I suppose I’ll edit and post those articles somewhere else, but I have better things to do than start a blog these days – like trying to get a scholarly pub or two on my CV.
Posted by G Felis | July 13, 2009, 7:12 pmCorrelation does not causation prove.
The first excerpted paragraph from the article that you link to implies that because atheists are less likely to be criminals, this lower probability is because they are atheists. The next point, that “Countries with lots of atheists are strongly correlated with low murder rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, low illiteracy rates, high per capita income and high levels of gender equality”, has an even more tenuous connection to causation. Schizophrenia recovery rates are higher in certain believing countries (specifically central African) while rates of obesity are lower there than in most well-off, ‘atheist’ countries – are we to assume that religion promotes mental and spiritual health? Of course not, at least not based on this data.
“The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist.” I’m certain this is true, but as convincing as it looks, it does not mean that atheism therefore has more justification than theism, or that theism leads to greater intelligence or education. It might, it might not. This is again just correlation, not logical proof of any sort of link.
Common causes, external factors, the gap between the rhetoric of belief and non-belief and the sociological ‘facts on the ground’ (I don’t mean simple church attendence, either); all of these must be considered and accounted for. What’s more, one needs to be able to discount, for example, the idea that atheism might be an unfortunate side affect of modern education (as Max Weber argued), and that while an educated atheist is better-behaved than an uneducated theist, a society which could synthesise theism with education would in fact be the more functional. This cannot, if we are truly to enquire aas either (social) scientists or philosophers, be discounted out of hand, or waved away based on faulty logical connections between an observed coincidence and some putative causality.
That many attacks on atheism are simplistic and superstitious does not justify atheists using similarly poor logic; that many silly, unwise, and uneducated people are theists should not even be a factor when considering the validity of theism. When rejecting a view, if our rejection is to be scientific, we should enter into a dialogue with the strongest possible example of that view – only if all of the strongest contenders are eliminated can we claim to be even provisionally confident in our own position.
Posted by Will Vere | July 14, 2009, 4:06 amWhile your observations about the arguments you’ve mentioned are reasonable, I’m not sure you’re responding to the right arguments. The article I excerpted did not, I think, assert that atheism causes people to be good morally or to be more intelligent. I’ve certainly never made that claim.
Regardless of causation, however, atheists do tend to be more intelligent, divorce less, practice safe sex more, etc, and countries that are primarily atheist do tend to have less social dysfunction.
Furthermore, I’m afraid you’ve missed the boat on your final paragraph. I have never advocated rejection of theism because theists are anything at all. I don’t know of any serious atheist advocate who has. Theism is rejected on its own merits, or rather the lack of merit. It just happens that the social statistics — be they correlations or causations or both — happen to corroborate what the logic implies.
Let me try to sum up the author’s point for you again, because your reply indicates that you got it very wrong. Atheists are villified, mistrusted, and misunderstood by theists. The stats demonstrate that this villification and mistrust is misplaced. If more people understood that atheists, in general, are good people — perhaps even more moral than most theists in some ways — perhaps they wouldn’t be villified and mistrusted so much.
See? No assertion of causation. The correlations will do nicely for this argument.
Posted by hambydammit | July 14, 2009, 11:25 amNo, Mr. Vere, correlation does not prove causation. But a complete lack of correlation does argue against the claimed causal connection between atheism and immorality – and the evidence that atheists are not in fact associated with any of the social phenomena usually attached to moral failings undermines the claimed causal relationship between atheism and immorality. In logic, it helps to understand the distinction between an argument and a counter-argument. While atheists may indeed be obligated to counter the best arguments made against atheism, we are also obligated to offer counters to the arguments which actually are made – even the obviously bad arguments which are easily undermined.
Now I have a few questions about this claim by Max Weber that atheism may be an unfortunate side effect of modern education – where “modern education” apparently means education focused on critical inquiry and finding out for oneself instead of rote learning, which is the only aspect of education which can be plausibly pointed to as the cause for undermining religious belief. Does Weber in any way justify the judgment that this circumstance is “unfortunate,” or is this just another knee-jerk pro-religious sentiment? And does Weber (or anyone else) offer any plausible argument for the supposition that a model of education which was more friendly to/compatible with would in fact be more functional? Is that argument plausible enough to overcome the evidence provided by prior decades and centuries where education at all levels was entirely dominated by religion in societies where vast injustices and all other manner of poor functioning were quite prevalent?
If you are going to wax pompous about how atheists are obligated to address the strongest arguments of in favor of theism, you should actually present – or at least point to – one of those strong arguments to make the point stick. I don’t see any particularly strong pro-theism argument mentioned in your post.
Posted by G Felis | July 14, 2009, 11:40 amI concede all points, especially the one about my pompousity.
Posted by Will Vere | July 14, 2009, 4:31 pmIn which case, you win the internets for today, Will Vere! I hardly ever encounter someone willing to concede gracefully that they have erred – even in the mirror. Sure, I’m a dedicated fallibilist and always willing to admit, as a matter of principle, that I could be wrong about anything; but as a matter of practice, I can’t claim to be particularly willing or graceful about admitting it when I do turn out to be wrong about something.
Seriously. A little intellectual humility is – at the risk of self-contradiction – something to be proud of.
Posted by G Felis | July 14, 2009, 7:25 pmI confess that I still believe some of what I wrote is correct: but pompous I was, and I was not addressing the subject, and I hardly argued my point either very clearly, or very judiciously.
On the other hand, as Dante points out, false modesty is a form of pride – so I must admit to (in my defence, self-deprecatingly) snarking about my apparently pleasant retreat on my own blog.
Then some atheists came and argued with me some more, so a little justice was done, I hope.
Of all my virtues and failings, modesty was never one of them – but I could not live with a compliment, given that I have since said snarkish things about atheists. Please, if you have the time and inclination, come and beat me up where I live (not literally – on the webs).
Posted by Will Vere | July 15, 2009, 11:41 amPerhaps GFelis has time for it, but frankly, I thought the trouncing he and I gave you was sufficient. It does appear that modesty is neither a failing nor a virtue for you, and arguing over the interwebz with angry centrists who quote Dante has always seemed like a suitable version of the Third Circle of Hell. I think I’ll pass.
Posted by hambydammit | July 15, 2009, 1:58 pm