Self-abasing atheist at the Guardian calls atheism a “leap of faith”

When I read “Comment is free” (CiF) at the Guardian, I always wonder whether the name of that site is a double-entendre, meaning not only that people can write freely, but that (like HuffPo), they don’t get paid for it, either. (I’m not sure about that.) At any rate, one reason I wonder about such remuneration is because CiF pieces are often so lame and unthoughtful that it’s hard to believe the authors would be paid.

One of these pieces, which meshes conveniently with the Guardian’s continuing dislike of atheism (think Andrew Brown), is Saturday’s short aricle by Ijeoam Oluo, “My atheism does not make me superior to believers. It’s a leap of faith too.” Oluo is described as “a Seattle based writer and internet yeller. Her work on feminism and social justice has been featured in TIME, NY Magazine, Huffington Post, Jezebel, XOJane, SheKnows and many other places.”

You can tell from the title alone that this piece is going to be problematic. After all, by what lights can you see atheism as a “leap of faith”? What is the “faith” there? Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It’s not “faith” when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there’s no evidence.

In general I agree with Oluo’s thesis that atheism usually jibes with a liberal outlook. Many conservative political views derive at bottom from religion. And there’s a lot of evidence that religion is often an outgrowth of social injustice: the heart of a heartless world. Ergo, if you’re an antitheist and want to work towards the abolition of faith, one way to do that is to improve the lives of the impoverished and dispossessed.

But not all atheists are antitheists, and not all of them accept the connection between social well-being and nonbelief. Atheism is simply the refusal to accept supernatural deities, and there are plenty of conservative atheists. The view that this life is all we have, and that we should help our fellow creatures, is not atheism but humanism.

But Oluo does more than argue that atheists should work more diligently for the welfare of humanity. She also wants to argue that atheists are just as bad as believers, for, she claims, our nonbelief motivates actions just as odious as those motivated by faith. This misguided trope seems to be spreading from some dark corners of the internet, based largely on the killings committed by two apparent atheists in North Carolina and Oregon. But there’s scant evidence that either of those killings was a result of nonbelief (see here and here), and it’s appalling how quick some atheists are to use these tragedies as evidence of an endemic rot in atheism.

Let’s face it: atheists may constitute up to 10% of Americans—or even more. That means that of them will be deranged, many will simply be bad people, and, yes, some may even target religious people for their crimes. But even one or two such crimes doesn’t indicate a serious problem with atheism itself—only that some atheists lack decency and civility. When you think of the vastly larger number of murders committed with at least a partly religious motivation, the statement of Steven Weinberg comes to mind:

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.”

I’d modify that to add “thoughtless ideology” to “religion”. But in general I think that well-meaning people can be influenced by religious indoctrination to do horrible things. Absent Islam, I doubt that most of the murderers of ISIS would be doing what they’re doing. But is a similar degree of brutality motivated by a disbelief in gods? I doubt it.

Oluo, who would like to believe in God, nevertheless can’t. That’s surely because she has no evidence for God, but she describes her nonbelief instead a religious-like “leap of faith”:

But my conviction that there is no God is nonetheless a leap of faith. Just as we have been unable to prove there is a God, we have also been unable to prove that there isn’t one. The feeling that I have in my being that there is no God is what I go by, but I’m not deluded into thinking that feeling is in any way more factual than the deep conviction by theists that God exists.

That’s just dead wrong. Oluo’s “feeling” must surely come from her observation that “we’ve been unable to prove that there’s a God,” i.e., a lack of evidence. It’s not a “feeling” like the one believers get when they sense God, but rather a conclusion based on the absence of evidence. That is, unless Oluo had some spiritual “revelation” that there’s no God. But that’s not the way most atheists come to nonbelief: it’s either that they were former believers who finally realized that their faith was nonsensical, or they dispassionately examined the evidence for God and found none. It amazes me that people still get away with equating atheism to the faith of religionists.

Oluo goes farther, though, seeing atheists as just a bunch of religionists whose nonbelief leads to all kinds of horrible things:

I keep this fact in mind – that my atheism is a leap of faith – because otherwise it’s easy to get cocky. It’s easy to look at acts of terror committed in the names of different gods, debates about the role of women in various churches, unfamiliar and elaborate religious rules and rituals and think, look at these foolish religious folk. It’s easy to view religion as the root of society’s ills.

By the way, click on that link and see if it really says what Oluo says it does. She goes on:

But atheism as a faith is quickly catching up in its embrace of divisive and oppressive attitudes. We have websites dedicated to insulting Islam and Christianity. We have famous atheist thought-leaders spouting misogyny and calling for the profiling of Muslims. As a black atheist, I encounter just as much racism amongst other atheists as anywhere else. We have hundreds of thousands of atheists blindly following atheist leaders like Richard Dawkins, hurling insults and even threats at those who dare question them.

Look through new atheist websites and twitter feeds. You’ll see the same hatred and bigotry that theists have been spouting against other theists for millennia. But when confronted about this bigotry, we say “But I feel this way about all religion,” as if that somehow makes it better. But our belief that we are right while everyone else is wrong; our belief that our atheism is more moral; our belief that others are lost: none of it is original.

I think this is an exaggeration. Of course some atheists are jerks: they have to be, because they’re people, and some people are jerks. And yes, there will be racism and sexism in our ranks. But if you claim, as does Oluo, that it’s just as bad among nonbelievers as among religionists (“the same hatred and bigotry”), you should provide data rather than anecdotes.

Let’s look at the facts: it’s not atheists who are oppressing women in Muslim lands and cutting of the heads of those “apostates”, like Anthony Flew or Edward Feser, who were once atheists but later embraced religion. We don’t call for the death of believers—the “heretics” of atheism. And who is opposing gay rights women’s rights, and issues like universal health care in America? That’s right, it’s the believers, motivated largely by religion and a “just world” view of life (“you get what you deserve”). It’s not atheists who are refusing healthcare for their children because God will heal them. Atheists don’t call for atheism to be preached in public schools, while Christians are constantly fighting to sneak their beliefs into the classroom or football stadium.

Finally, I don’t see atheism as a “moral” stance, or that I’m “more moral” than believers. Rather, it’s a scientific stance: the rejection of gods because there’s no evidence. That doesn’t automatically make you more moral than, say, a Presbyterian.

My thesis is this. In at least one way atheists are better than believers: we are not deluded by superstitious belief in unevidenced deities. That makes us more rational than religionists, and in a very important way. No, that doesn’t necessarily make us better people than believers, but it does make us immune to bad acts based on adherence to religious morality. And it makes us right in the same way that people who don’t believe in Bigfoot or Santa Claus are right.

Oluo goes on:

If we truly want to free ourselves from the racist, sexist, classist, homophobic tendencies of society, we need to go beyond religion. Yes, religion does need to be examined and debated regularly and fervently. But we also need to examine our school systems, our medical systems, our economic systems, our environmental policies.

Agreed! But Oluo should realize that a substantial part of the ills that inflict us—and that includes a “just world” view of economics, an institutionalization of inequality for gays and women, a tolerance of environmental degradation, and the fatalistic notion that we should simply accept our afflictions on Earth because all will be set right in Heaven—does come from religion. So yes, if you’re an anti-theist, and think that faith does palpable harms, one way to fight that faith is to eliminate the conditions that promote it. (That, by the way, is what Marx says, eloquently, in the very link Oluo uses to demonstrate snarky vilification of believers.) But another way is to simply criticize religion itself, for, as has been shown many times over, such criticism has dissolved the faith of many.

Given that Oluo thinks that “religion neds to be examined and debated regularly and fervently,” I remain curious why she ends her piece with the following paragraph:

Faith is not the enemy, and words in a book are not responsible for the atrocities we commit as human beings. We need to constantly examine and expose our nature as pack animals who are constantly trying to define the other in order to feel safe through all of the systems we build in society. Only then will we be as free from dogma as we atheists claim to be.

She’s wrong. Faith is the enemy, and, as Hitchens realized, should be treated with ridicule and contempt, or at least not with praise and approbation. It’s a superstition that motivates a lot of horrible behavior. And a lot of the atrocities that we see do come from “words in a book.” Or does she know that the Qur’an has no influence on what Muslims do?

We can eliminate faith in two ways: by criticizing it directly, hoping to change the minds of believers and the undecided; or by undermining the social conditions that make faith necessary. I can see the usefulness of both strategies, though the former gives results that can be seen more immediately. Nevertheless, I urge all people, not just atheists, to work towards a better world. What I won’t agree with, though, is the claim that atheists are less motivated to build a better world than are believers. I think it’s the opposite, though I can’t prove it. And if you want to convince people to be humanists, don’t yell at them that their atheism perforce entails humanism. It doesn’t. It entails only disbelief in gods. If you want atheists to be humanists, give them reasons to be humanists.