I have a post coming up that is mostly notes from a bunch of different books, because when I didn't have time to blog, that's what I had time to do - so I'm just warning you about that.
In the meantime, a quick post that isn't really a complete blog entry, just something on my mind lately -- the phenomenon of atheists, particularly New Atheists, as Christians who have simply rejected belief.
Most atheists in the West have been raised in a predominantly Christian culture and environment, whether or not they grew up in a church-attending Christian household. One of the consequences of diminished religious literacy is that Christians don't know much about other religions (nor their own); one of the consequences of that is that ex-Christians turned atheist continue to deal with religion from a Christian framework, because although in theory they've rejected all religion, in practice and of necessity their rejection is far more narrow, much like the kid who has "given up on girls," when what he means is he has given up on Denise and that at the moment all girls are viewed through post-Denise-colored lenses.
We see this in shooting-the-shit political thought all the time and are familiar with the problems -- the college kid, or fortysomething who ought to know better, who has given up on "the whole thing" and, though insistent that "both parties are just as bad and indistinguishable from each other," has little to no knowledge of political systems or ideologies in other countries, except maybe a little internet libertarianism or fanzine anarchy. Their immediate experience of a thing was dissatisfying enough to convince them that it was more valiant to opt out than to thrust their fists against the posts.
But why does this matter, the New Atheists insist, if they chuck the whole thing out? If they throw the whole box out, does it matter if they know what's in the box? Why should they care about the variations between different flavors of make-believe?
It probably shouldn't. But there are a few reasons why it can.
One bears on the difference between the New Atheists and the atheists who came before them: the new furor and aggression, the new insistence on not just rejecting religion but characterizing it and making claims about it, despite what I've just described as a pretty comprehensive ignorance of it. Even the New Atheists' atheism is constructed from a conservative Christian point of view, given that it treats as synonymous atheism and irreligion, ignoring a long history of non-theistic Hindus and Buddhists, and the strong traditions of doubt, deism, nontheism, or agnosticism within the Abrahamic religions. The fundamentalist firebrand and the New Atheism convert both agree: those folks don't count. They're cheating somehow.
Atheists who are still culturally Christian continue to deal with religion in Christian terms. They continue to treat Christianity as the normal religion, and continue with the common Christian misconception that on some level insists that other religions are basically analogous to Christianity with different names and different lists of sins. Because the New Atheists favor the fundamentalist view of Christianity, this not only validates fundamentalism, it feeds into Islamophobia and other areas where the borders between racism, xenophobia, and religious bigotry are especially blurry. Any examination of the Granite State (the least church-attending state in the country) on Facebook makes this pretty clear, as does every damn word out of Dawkins' mouth this year.
It's the combination of these things that causes the problems. Simple rules that ought to hold true all day long hold just as true where religion is concerned: if you don't know anything about it, you probably don't need to express your opinion on it, and certainly should think three times before actually arguing about it.
This, I think, is one of the things that has been bugging me for a ... for the 21st century, I suppose, because the new converts to atheism and especially the new writers on atheism (coming from different academic backgrounds and intellectual traditions than the older writers) say such different things than I was used to hearing from the atheist side before. The aggression was easy to identify, and the misinformation had been catalogued long before Bill Maher decided to get on board and make things worse. It took the recent rise in Islamophobia for me to put my finger on some of the rest.
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