Kevin Sorbo, who came to public attention portraying a mythical strongman on television, has been saying things about atheists lately. He thinks he has a good bead on what makes us tick.
It began when he wondered why atheists are so angry at something we claim doesn’t exist, i.e. God. Because atheists seem to spend a lot of time talking about him/her/it and being outraged about the subject.
This is deflection. It misses the point. Atheists are not angry at god—clearly, since we do not believe god exists. We’re angry with god’s promoters and acolytes who keep shoving a nonexistent something-or-other in our faces and telling us we’re everything from “mistaken” to the cause of civilization’s collapse to…well, several other things one is shocked to hear come from the mouths of self-professed “good christians.”
Part of this seems to be standard in religious practice, the deflection of just about everything onto the god of choice. It’s god’s will, it’s in the hands of god, etc. So obviously when an atheists gets angry at the politics and social practice of devotees we can’t possibly be angry at them for the kind of activism that grinds the back teeth, we must be angry at their deity of choice. After all, they’re only doing what god wants them to do, so how can they be held to blame?
Which is a goodly part of what drives us to distraction.
I have never had a pair of atheists knock on my door to tell me the good news of the nihilistic way of life. I’ve never had an atheist tell me I got over a serious illness because they got together to use thought waves to communicate with the cells of my body and effect a cure. I’ve never had to put up with an atheist telling me a certain political situation was the way it was because of a corrupted condition endemic to being human. And I’ve never heard an atheist insist on the efficacy of magic over science.*
Insofar as the record on public action in this country goes, it is no surprise that religious thinking dominates, since it’s a matter of sheer numbers. But it would be well for people to remember what has been justified in the name of religion in this country. Slavery, the disenfranchisement of women, the eradication of native American culture, and the persistent insistence on irrational laws and punishments which have now resulted in our having the highest per capita incarceration rate of any developed country (which can only be explained by a devotion to some notion of sin that refuses to take into consideration genuine remediation, social context, or common sense).
Atheists are not angry at god, Mr. Sorbo, we’re angry at the impenetrable cluelessness of believers who let their children die rather than take them to a doctor, who continually see nothing wrong with setting aside the First Amendment to their advantage (but, in some cases, absolutely worship the Second Amendment), and who insist on relegating women to second-class status because, well, equality isn’t Biblical. Let’s not even start with the debate over alternative sexualities and the question of gay marriage.
Before you protest that these people are a minority, I will agree with you, but they are a minority which enjoys massive tacit support from a broad and often passive culture base which, while disapproving many of their tactics nevertheless approves their source of inspiration and at least some of their motives.
“Well, we’re not all like that,” comes somewhere in the same conversation as “our church is different.”
No, it’s not. In one very significant way. Religion by definition defines unbelievers as flawed, blind, somehow crippled, and in need of fixing.
That’s what makes atheists furious. It’s patronizing.
Now before atheists who read this nod sagely and come away feeling in some way virtuous about themselves, not so fast.
For our part we tend to adopt a superior attitude every bit as condescending and misdirected as the true believers we disdain. Often we refuse to acknowledge the ineffable and relegate many attributes of moral systems to what we consider superstition. At times we use our position as self-designated rationalists to pass judgments on others we deem less enlightened, and even if we tend to keep such judgments to ourselves (with notable exceptions) they nevertheless affect our behavior towards others.
That said, if anyone has a reason to be miffed…
What can be truly irritating in both camps is the aforementioned process of deflection. Atheists are not angry at a god that does not exist but at those who insist one does and take that insistence as permission to push their beliefs on us. The believers manages to not see the difference because, as they claim, they are doing god’s work, so it seems to not make sense to them that we make a distinction between the believer and the thing believed.
Believers get justifiably miffed at atheists who judge them and conflate that judgment with the philosophical position that seems to allow such judgment. Atheists think themselves acting out of reason and fail to understand that they’re being boors, which is not justified by rationalism. Rationalism in this case is just an excuse to be an ass.
Hence both sides engage in the time honored sport of talking past each other.
Not all believers act like Mr. Sorbo or those who think their god has given them permission to disregard all other philosophical positions and forget—stridently—what pluralism means. Not all atheists are judgmental louts who treat believers like unenlightened primitives in need of education (which can lead directly to the kind of proselytization the atheist is bitching about in the first place).
But they seem to be the loudest ones in the room.
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* I’ve heard a lot of non-christians do and say these sorts of things, but that’s another problem, which is the conflation of all alternative beliefs into the “atheist” camp. For the record, pagans are not by definition atheists. Nor are Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, or any other non-western faith.
