"Let's See If You Can Spot A Pattern"

Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
https://t.co/YtmRG9TkMP

— Raw Story (@RawStory) June 8, 2021

 I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?

The beam in your eye, the splinter in your brother's eye:

Let's see if you can spot a pattern: 

Hang on to that quote; it's going to be an important one.*

(When Harris believes he's right about something, it becomes virtually impossible to talk him out of it, no matter how many good arguments, expert opinions or hard data are presented to him. Like Donald Trump, he's pretty much unteachable.) 

I dare say even a child can see the problem there; and the contradiction.  Not with Harris' thinking (only), but with the argument of this article.

But be careful: Shermer has also acknowledged, in writing, that he's fantasized about murdering people. "Or, if not actually killing the particular bastard," he reports, "at the very least I imagine dislocating his jaw with a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich that sent him reeling to the pavement." This comes from his book "The Moral Arc," which received an extended, glowing blurb from Steven Pinker.

Let me connect that to this:

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

What moral clarity is there in an adolescent fantasy about violence, one that reveals the dreamer knows "a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich" only from pulp viction or action movies?  What did happen to the "moral clarity" of "New Atheism?

Let's ask that question again, with the example of Lawrence Krause and the "she looked 16!" defense of child rape:

[Krause] was dismissed from his job as director of the Origins Project after an investigation found that he had violated the sexual harassment policy of the university "by groping a woman's breast while on an ASU-funded trip in late 2016." He has also repeatedly and vigorously defended his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker, who "donated $250,000 to the Origins Project over a seven-year span." According to a 2011 Daily Beast article, Krauss claimed, "I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it," adding that he didn't believe the "beautiful women and young women" surrounding Epstein were underage. 

Not much moral clarity there.

The best comes (almost) last:

Richard Dawkins: Once a heavyweight within the world of evolutionary biology, Dawkins energized atheists the world over with his book "The God Delusion."

No, sorry; Dawkins is a zoologist who wrote a book about genetics, a subject he knows nothing about, which wowed non-scientists who thought he must be writing about "evolutionary biology" (a subject I doubt any of his fans could define any better than a random GOP politician can define Critical Race Theory today).  Dawkins was a "heavyweight" among people who thought he sounded clever; people who knew no more about the field of genetics than Dawkins did, in other words.  The same ignorance and appeal to the credulous was true of his “God Delusion” 

Over time, though, it became increasingly clear that he's neither an adult-in-the-room nor a particularly nice guy. For some bizarre reason, he obsessively targeted a Muslim teenager in Texas, who was arrested after a homemade clock he brought to school was wrongly thought to be a bomb. He also flipped out over what came to be called "Elevatorgate," which began with Rebecca Watson calmly asking men to be thoughtful and considerate about how they make women feel at conferences — for example, in the enclosed space of an elevator. This resulted in a flood of rape and death threats directed toward Watson, while Dawkins mocked the situation by writing a shocking letter addressed "Dear Muslima," in which the first line was "Stop whining, will you." More recently, he's made it clear that he isn't bothered by the allegations against Krauss, and posted seemingly anti-trans comments on Twitter. When asked why Twitter has caused him so much trouble, he claimed: "I love truth too much." (For Dawkins' troubling views on aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome, see this.)

I had forgotten Dawkins' catalogue of sins.  And attacking a Muslim,again; imagine that. But Dawkins was never the adult in the room; that was his British accent and Oxonian attitude of superiority.  Nor was he ever a “nice guy.” This tweet, by the way, is still up:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

Classic British snobbery and condescension. Not much insight, though.  The pattern cotinues here:

James Lindsay: Once a promising young atheist, Lindsay published "Everybody Is Wrong About God" in 2015 and, three years later, "How to Have Impossible Conversations," co-authored with Peter Boghossian (below). Referring to himself as "apolitical" but boasting a profile page on the right-wing, anti-free-speech organization Turning Point USA, he is now one of the most unhinged crusaders against "critical race theory" (CRT), an idea about which he seems to have very little actual knowledge. (This is unsurprising, given that Lindsay has literally argued that he doesn't need to understand "gender studies" to call for the entire field to be canceled. See #10 here.) 

There are other people referenced in the article, two more I've never heard of, and Stephen Pinker, whose intellectual accomplishments are on par with his apparent racism (I'll leave that evidence to the original article). We have to get back to "religion":

At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about "moral progress," but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of "free speech," they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

The metaphor highlighted there means, of course, a movement devoid of reason and based wholly on unexamined ideas which don't bear the weight of the simplest of critiques.  William James' oft-cited definition (which he rejected) that the young boy knows "faith" is "believin' what you know ain't so" is actually meant to apply here, with "religion" replacing the term "faith."  But that's too easy.  The people listed in this article know that what they think IS so, and they can't understand the benighted ones who don't see it that way.  Then again, that was the "pattern" in New Atheism:  how could anyone believe the foolish ideas they attributed to the religious, from the racist anti-Islam thought of Sam Harris (who was always that way) to the snobbery of Dawkins (ditto), to the rest? If anything, time only revealed them for what they always were: weak thinkers who fall back on vague and glittering generalities.  You can see the pattern here, too:

What ties these people together is an aggrieved sense of perpetual victimhood. Christians, of course, believe that they are relentlessly persecuted (note: they aren't). The IDWs similarly believe that they are the poor helpless victims of "CRT," "standpoint theory" and other bogeymen of woke academia. But really, if "Grievance Studies" studies anything, it should be how this group of extremely privileged white men came to believe that they are the real casualties of systemic oppression.

I've read about a lot of people who display their "Christianity" quite prominently, using it to build their personal and financial power.  They've learned, rather recently, to present themselves as victims, especially in a world where church attendance (the only measure that seems to count in the media) is not what it once was.  Big deal.  When 41% of the American population regard themselves as regular churchgoers, we'll be back where we were in 1906.  Deal with it.  I've never met a "Christian" yet who thought they were "relentlessly persecuted," so spare me the baseless generalities.  They have no more application to reality than the white supremacist rhetoric of most of the "New Atheists" the article critiques; but that's the pattern, isn't it?

To conclude, let me bring things full circle: At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are "markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian" than religious people. It's a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.

Most of Phil Zuckerman's analysis is based on work by:  Phil Zuckerman (I followed the link in the original).  He misinterprets Psalm 14, too, and cherry picks statements by philosophers whose work I am familiar with, probably taking them wholly out of context.  It'd be in keeping with most of the work of "New Atheists" who don't really know anything, but who know what they don't like.  Hmmmm....rather like Trump, eh?

New Atheism wasn't "swallowed up" by anything; it became what it started out as.  And it did it because it was never about overcoming prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, close-minded and authoritarian ideas: it espoused them.  What else was New Atheism but deeply prejudiced against anyone who didn't think as the individuals identified here did, who were dogmatic in their ignorance? None of them betrayed the least knowledge of philosophy, theology, anthropology (which includes the study of world religions), or philosophy of religion, much less compassion.  Who needs that, when you are closed-minded and authoritarian?  Ideas get in the way of righteous and ignorant rants!  Compassion is for wimps. Just ask Donald Trump!

I could end this with my own righteous screed.  But I came across these words from Pope Francis during a visit to Philadelphia in 2015, and I can't improve on them:

In this place which is symbolic of the American way, I would like to reflect with you on the right to religious freedom. It is a fundamental right which shapes the way we interact socially and personally with our neighbors whose religious views differ from our own. Religious freedom certainly means the right to worship God, individually and in community, as our consciences dictate. But religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families. Our religious traditions remind us that, as human beings, we are called to acknowledge an Other, who reveals our relational identity in the face of every effort to impose a uniformity to which the egotism of the powerful, the conformism of the weak, or the ideology of the utopian would seek to impose on us. 

I don't see even a ghost of that idea in the work of the "New Atheists," nor of the writer so disappointed that they turned out to be what they always were.  What, indeed, in atheism, was ever going to produce such a change, or "reveal[] our relational identity"?

Just asking for a friend.

*You may notice I skip blithely over the critique of Harris from the article, contenting myself with only two sentences.  Harris actually sets the rule for the New Atheists:  he’s been a rabid Islamophobe and generally an ignorant and uninformed thinker ab initio.  I wouldn’t say Harris influenced the rest of them, but they are all cut from the same bolt of cloth.