FreeThought
Are “new” atheists hurting other atheists’ agendas?
An article from the Nashua Telegraph is pitting atheist against atheist. It’s painting “new” atheists as detrimental to the causes (whatever those may be) of other less vocal or moderate atheists. Here’s my response to the article (still awaiting moderation):
The only thing new about “new” atheists is that we are tired of tolerating religious intolerance and we are willing to voice our opinions in the public sphere with force of reason.
There is no compromise with Christian or Muslim fundamentalists and fanatics and everybody knows it. Their ridiculous superstitions, enforced with federal law if permitted, contain no room for argument or disagreement and their beliefs are hurting our societies dramatically. Their beliefs deserve to be rebuked and ridiculed for the absurdities they are.
It’s time for religious moderates and liberals to stop fence-sitting. You are enabling the progressive decay of our societies from superstitious, absolutist dogmas and hatred.
I dare say the only difference between new atheists/atheist fundamentalists and all others, whether humanists or brights or whatever, is that new atheists have figured out it is time to make our voices heard loud and proud, and that we begin to heal our societies from religious decay. The first thing to do is call it as we see it. We aren’t doing this to upset people. That is unavoidable because of religious sentimentality and the sanctity afforded to absurd beliefs. In all other spheres of our lives we subject our beliefs to rigorous scrutiny and debate. Why should religion, an obviously HUGE problem, receive a free pass any longer?
Disclaimer: The views expressed by an individual contributor to this blog are not necessarily shared by all members of FreeThought Fort Wayne. That is what makes this organization so interesting. Commenters on the FreeThought Fort Wayne blog are expected to abide by our comment policy. About the author: To change this standard text, you have to enter some information about your self in the Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile box. Read more from this author
The Are “new” atheists hurting other atheists’ agendas? by Jake Doelling, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Discussion
3 comments for “Are “new” atheists hurting other atheists’ agendas?”
Post a comment
Categories
Our Readers
I didn’t notice the article was from April of ‘07. I thought it was just posted. Oh well…
Jake,
That’s a good response. Even though the article you referenced was written last year it’s still an ongoing conversation.
It’s an issue that every social movement faces. How hard does one push to advance one’s agenda? Push too hard and you actually lose ground by alienating potential supporters; don’t push hard enough and you unnecessarily prolong the injustice/misery that you are hoping to change.
An obvious example is the civil rights movement. There was tremendous internal conflict about how to get our society to stop treating blacks like second class citizens. A dramatic illustration of that was the Black Panther party and the ‘by any means necessary’ rhetoric of Malcom X verses the non-violent civil disobedience of MLK Jr. and others.
Anyone familiar with the civil rights movement, surely, knows that there were admonitions from various quarters to ‘not make waves’ for one reason or another. The problem was that in many places in our country, any black person who didn’t ‘know his place’ and had the audacity to demand equal treatment under the law was labeled an ‘uppity nigger’ and was lynched. It is fortunate that atheists do not find themselves in such a severe position.
I don’t worry too much about whether some atheists disagree with how other atheists chose to voice their opposition. I do worry about the U.S. turning into a theocracy and then being labeled an ‘uppity atheist’ for demanding equal treatment under the law. If atheists have to get loud and proud in order to prevent that, then I’ll join them.
[off-topic soapbox]
Personally, I think the rise of atheist ‘activism’ is largely a reaction against the overtly theocratic leadership of Bush, Jr. If he, and the Religious
RightWrong that support him, had kept their religious beliefs to themselves (i.e. if they did what some are requesting of the New Atheists) there would be little to react against. Instead, he (Bush) pushed ignorance into science class, appointed people to posts based on religious ideology, ran foreign policy based on voices from god and advocated ‘faith based’ initiatives as public policy. Leadership like that should not be tolerated, thus the rise of atheist activists.[/off-topic soapbox]
Sorry this was so long.
Oops, ‘verses’ should have been ‘versus’.