I’ve been thinking lately about the New Atheists™—the Christopher Hitchenses and Richard Dawkinses, with their best selling books and talk show appearances. I’ve been asking myself: Why is this New Atheism™ so important to them?
The god they don’t believe in is a Tooth Fairy god, a Santa Claus god, a god of the gaps. It’s the god of fifteen-year-old fundamentalists and the earnest, recently born again.
You and I don’t believe in that god either. Yet somehow, for these few proud folks, this disbelief is profoundly important to them.
I’m trying to remember back to when I first found out Santa isn’t real. My dad told me. He was afraid that someone at school would tell me first and that I would be hurt and confused. He wanted it to come from him. And maybe he also wanted me to be the one at the lunch table who was in the know.
He also let me know it was something I could be a part of because my little brother didn’t know yet, and I could help him still believe. It was a game, this Santa thing, and a good one at that.
I get the feeling that the New Atheists™ didn’t have such a positive experience when they found out their version of god wasn’t real. Other times I feel like they’re that kid that went around telling everyone, enjoying lording their discovery over everybody, rubbing their faces in it.
This is the story I see the New Atheists™ living out. Why is it important for them to relive that moment, or to live in only that moment? What keeps them from moving to the next moment in their lives, and the moment after that?
Because Santa Claus is as real as you make him.
Chutney, what a good way to describe what I’ve been feeling myself, that somehow the New Atheists have missed the point of a power beyond human power and have confused that very limited “God” with the real thing. People do get stuck all the time in such places; how sad that they don’t want to get unstuck.
You may not believe in that type of god, but many people (too many) do.
Chutney,
Whether one calls it the “Santa Claus view of God” or “supernatural theism,” there are still plenty of folks who subscribe to that view of God.
In my NW Louisiana “Bible Belt” community, we still have plenty of supernatural theists.
Given the observed historical trend that a supernatural theist type of God has less and less to do, I’m curious about what will come next in religion. I blogged about this issue here:
Religion Without Supernatural Theism?
The big question for religion in North American is will it be moving towards a “Spong” form of Christianity or will they be moving towards an “Akinola” form of Christianity?
This is the kind of atheist that we are used to in Europe, not the American “liberal humanist” who is quite alien to us. And these are the enlightened ones: in the 1930s there were atheists who burned churches, smashed religious art to dust and opened nuns’ graves (no exaggeration, all these things actually happened in Spain during the Civil War).
While I think Dawkins can behave like a jackass on these issues, I think the reason he is so vehement is because he understands and – for whatever reason – chooses to keep at the front of his mind – how much power the tooth fairy god believers have.
I thought about all the folks back home I know who believe in the Santa Claus god. The more I thought about it, though, the less I thought they believe in him. Daniel Dennet—on of the other New Atheists™—talks about belief in belief. I’d bet that’s 90% of them; they believe they should believe in the Santa Claus god.
The reason I don’t think they believe in him is because I can’t see how that “belief” makes any difference in their day to day life—except for when they’re newly converted. It quickly fades, until they need a recharge and walk back down that aisle.
(By “you and I,” I meant folks reading this blog. I’d bet at least 99% aren’t Santa Claus theists. That was probably confusing.)
Maybe the only people who reliably believe in the Santa Claus god are those who need the money or votes of those who believe they should believe in the Santa Claus god.
I agree with you that most of these believers still choose to do whatever they want – they don’t go to their God for help in answering questions about how to live their lives in the most kind or compassionate way. But what I find frightening about tooth fairy god-ness is the desire for people to hand over their ability to think and make difficult choices to their tooth fairy god appointees.
I know of a LOT of church going folks who just blindly signed anti-gay initiatives in my state – because their pastor told them to. I talked to several of them and they don’t even CARE to know what they signed. They knew it was anti gay and they knew gay-ness was bad, and they knew their pastor urged them to stand up for Jesus, so they signed the ballots. You have people who cite as their REASON for voting for Bush that he’s a Christian. That’s all they need. Case closed, they don’t have to think about it beyond that.
It’s also very telling to me that only 37% of folks in a Gallup poll said they would vote an open atheist for President. It sounds like their belief in a god does have *some* bearing on the choices people say they would make. Even if their belief in a God doesn’t inform their moral choices, they somehow have been led to believe that it affects OTHER people’s moral choices. And perhaps they also believe there is some absolute standard for morality based on a belief in a god.
The reason why this concerns me so much is because I think that religion and tooth fairy god-ness typically supports the inclination of human beings to defer responsibility for their decisions to a higher power – sometimes it’s a religious leader, and sometimes it’s an actual god. It doesn’t encourage them to ask the hard questions, it doesn’t encourage them to challenge the status quo – and certainly not to challenge authority.
I find that very, very frightening.
Chutney,
“Believing in belief” is another reason why the “New Atheists” do what they do: faith has received far too much respect in this society as a “way of knowing,” to the point where any criticism of deeply-held beliefs becomes “intolerance” and “hate.” But beliefs, no matter how deeply held, are just ideas, and I agree with John Stuart Mill in that one of the foundations of democracy is a free and open marketplace of ideas. “Religion” is too often used as protectionism for ideas that would be torn down in an instant if criticism wasn’t anathema because some people hitch their identities to them.
The “New Atheists” are peforming a valuable service for society in attempting to dispell that unearned respect, and open up religious ideas to competition from more than just other religious ideas.
Alright, Citizen, you’ve lost me. The New Atheists™ are every bit as much “faithers” as the people they scorn and deride. (And Hitchens and Dawkins, in particular, do scorn and deride.)
You hitch your identity to your beliefs too.
Since when is there not an open marketplace of ideas? I don’t see any “protectionism” going on, aside from the occasional silly attempts to keep evolution out of public schools, attempts which ultimately collapse in on themselves.
The New Atheists™ are not heroes. They have risked nothing and they suffer nothing. (Except maybe hurt feelings, which they have nursed for years.) But they do sell books.
Hafidha, I can’t really take issue with much of what you’ve said. But I think that sort of outsourced decision making happens all across the board. Folks are fond of different vocabularies—and thus different candidates—when they do it, but the MO is the same.
There are more of them than there are of us, though, and that does concern me. But I’m encouraged that they numbers of the liberal religious and irreligious seem to be picking up and the number of religious righters gradually dropping off. Demographics are on our side now.
Chutney, I really do not understand what is so wrong that you find in self-described atheists (I strongly disagree with your TM thing, unless you start using TM for the UUA, for example, which is much more of a trademark than these individuals). They have every right to speak against religion and against God. If they deride people who believe in God, well, we UUs also deride Evangelical Christians and right-wing politicians, so what’s the problem? Are we in any sense better than them? I don’t think so, and people will agree or disagree but they are perfectly entitled to their criticisms (which, IMO, in more than 90% they are well founded).
Jaume, I never said that they can’t say what they’re saying. I said that they’re wrong to do so. I don’t know how it got to a matter of their right to say it.
I’m not talking about atheists in general. The New Atheists™—Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens—have been labeled that by the media. I’ve just added the trademark. I add it because they don’t get to speak for all atheists everywhere, and because I think their brand of atheism isn’t new at all.
Chutney,
I agree with you that “New Atheism” isn’t new at all (hence the quotation marks). But neither is the “but atheists have faith TOO!” meme. I’m not clear on what it is you think atheists have faith in.
Since when has criticism of atheists been taboo? Whether atheists hitch their identities to beliefs or not, that hasn’t stopped a President of the United States from saying that he didn’t think that atheists ought to be considered as citizens or patriots (George H.W. Bush). Meanwhile, embracing the idea that one ought not to believe claims in the absence of evidence earns atheists the coveted title of America’s least trusted minority. Christianity is the de facto religion of the President of the United States. The first open non-theist in Congress just came out this year.
Theism has the establishment on its side, whether because they are believers, or because they are paternalists who don’t believe themselves but think that religion is good for society, so they shouldn’t say anything, lest the populace start looting and pillaging or something. Or maybe they are simply afraid of losing social standing themselves.
I didn’t say that the “New Atheists” were heroes, I said they were performing a valuable public service, by selling their books, and popularizing atheism, and showing and convincing people that public questioning and criticism of supernatural ideas can and should be done.
If this keeps up, it will make a very different culture from “so long as you believe in something, that’s what counts” or “we can’t answer that question, we just have to have faith” being taken as useful or serious answers to long-asked questions.
You cannot convince me that someone does not have faith. I’ll start with that. To be human is to have faith. I gather that you and I are working from completely different definitions of faith.
American atheists suffer no real oppression. How many cases a year are there of atheists being oppressed? Unless you’re talking about social stigma and hurt feelings, there will be few to none.
I’m not saying you said they’re heroes. I’m saying they portray themselves as heroes. Because it’s oh so brave to say things that were controversial 50+ years ago from the protection of a tenured faculty position.
I can’t see that anything new is going to come of this conversation, so I’m going to close this thread.