Down With New Atheism!

"I don’t want good causes like secularism and scepticism to die because they’re infested with people who see issues of equality as mission drift. I want Deep Rifts. I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people.

Now it’s time for a third wave – a wave that isn’t just a bunch of “middle-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men” patting themselves on the back for debunking homeopathy for the 983258th time or thinking up yet another great zinger to use against Young Earth Creationists.

by Jen McCreight

 

I can't remember the exact time I realised I never believed in god. I went to church with the rest of my school as a child, and never really enjoyed it. But at the same time, I never really thought about the existence of god until I was a teenager. At that point, being vaguely sceptical about the whole thing, I bought a copy of Dawkin's The God Delusion*. And I lapped that shit up. I bought Dawkins book at exactly the right time for it to have a positive effect on me - I was an inquisitive teenager exploring a belief system which often comes in-built with smugness, and here was a book which explained complex scientific matters to me in a way which I understood, thus making me think I understood them because I was intelligent, and not because they'd probably been simplified for a mass audience composed mainly of people like me.

So I read The God Delusion, and for probably about a year of my life I attempted to immerse myself as much as possible in the world of Dawkins. I think I re-read the book a couple more times as well, just for good measure. I was at that point, officially, an atheist. I still am. But now I hate atheism.

You see, that quote from Jen McCreight about is just a quick stop off in the unsavoury world of New Atheism. For a movement that prides itself on forward, progressive thinking, many of the figureheads (deitys?) of the New Atheism movement display attitudes which stretch beyond the usual realm of smug superiority and into, as McCreight lists above, misogany, racism, homophobia etc. I'm not going to trawl throught the examples, just pluck a select few to display:

Elevatorgate: Rebecca Watson is proposition by a man at an atheist conferance in a lift. She complains about this online, giving the context that she a) doesn't expect this type of Laddish behaviour at an intellectual gathering and b) she had just given a talk about feminism at said intellectual gathering. Of course, the online vitriol followed (as is to sadly be expected) by Richard Dawkins also got involved, saying she should 'stop whining' and related a (fictional) story of a woman who was beaten and genitally mutilated by her Muslim husband, so being propositioned in a lift isn't that bad after all.

Ah, that old 'you-aren't-in the-worst-situation-in-the-world-so-stop-complaining' trope.

Moving on, the entire career of Christopher Hitchens could be responsible for McCreight's list. He famously wrote an article for Vanity Fair about how woman aren't as funny as men. He supported British wars in the Falklands and the countrys recent excursions to the Middle East. This, he claims, was due to his anti-authoritarianism, so he neatly avoided the issue of authoritarianism implicit in the imperialistic attiudes displayed by Britain in both these wars.

Oh, and here's a good blog illustrating the less-than-savoury attitudes of Bill Maher.

(And, oh fuck, that's not even mentioning the subhuman waste of skin and webcam that is vlogger The Amazing Atheist).

For longer than I've been sceptical about religion I've been left wing to some degree, and perhaps because of that I used to believe that atheism and left-wing politics were meant to be together. I used to mis-appropriate Marx's 'opiate of the people' criticism of organised religion, before I found out that actually, he called it 'the heart of a heartless world', and referred more to opium's use to mask pain you acknowledged than hide from the truth. This article from M-L-M Mayhem! explains it better, but capitalism and religion are not one and same, not always intertwinned.

The reason that New Atheists are unable to chime with some of the Left (like myself) is that they see the world through a fixed lense, where religion is the only, or at least main, problem. Marxists could well be accused of seeing the world entirely throught the class conflict - that is our main reference - but anyone who wants to consider themselves part of the 21st century Left must realise that racial inequality, misogany etc are all intertwinned with the class system.

The New Atheism movement lacks this sort of thinking - as I said, it is concerned only with the effect of religion, a debate largely removed from the political sphere. Hitchens won many fans on the Left by proclaiming himself a Marxist, and stating that Lenin and Trotsky were great men, but his support for Lenin stemmed largely from his admiration of Lenin's fight against religious Orthadoxy in the USSR. His support for the wars in the Middle East him hoping to wage a holy war against Islam. If the Crusades weren't ordered by the Pope he'd probably have used them as a blueprint.

Quite why the New Atheists have chosen religion as their only societal battleground, that I don't know. I suspect it reinforces their intelligence if it seems like they only ever talk about things that they know a lot about. It's easier to 'debunk homeopathy for the 983258th time' than have a go at racial inequality, for sure.

So I'm backing McCreight's call for a Third Wave of Atheism. New Atheism has got comfortable, appointed itself some backwards-thinking figureheads and settled in for the book deals. Compared to other movements, atheism is still relatively recent to the public eye. It still has to evolve, and this time we cannot let it be run by a small group of bigots, comanding a larger army of internet troll who just sneer at anyone who goes to church.

Hitchens, a fan of Trotsky, would no doubt appreciated this wish for a permanent revolution within the atheist community.

*Thinking about my reasons for choosing this particular book, considering it came as part of a wave of anti-theism publications, I just realised how much The God Delusion seems like the type of book specifically designed to shift copies. It's got a provocative and slightly enigmatic title, and the cover has an explosion of red on it. It looks like a novel you'd see in Tesco, and I wonder if it was designed to look related in some way to The Da Vinci Code.