A Quick But Closer Look At Claims From The Atheist Equivalent of Chick Publications

The Atheist version of Chick Publications, Prometheus Books, has published a book by Avi Tuschman called Our Political Nature, The Evolutionary Origin of What Divides Us.   Being a Prometheus book, it has to include a percentage of anti-religious content, that being the basis of everything that Paul Kurtz founded and had a hand in.   Everything that comes out of Prometheus has that as a goal, the degree of directness the only variation.  And, now that popular atheism has turned from the unfashionable Behaviorist ideology it used to use to construct plausible seeming explanations from to the ultra-adapataionist, evo-psy style, you could predict that would be what such a Prometheus Book these days would push as well.

I haven't read the book but I've read an excerpt by Tuschman,  "Why Racist People Tend To Be Conservative."  In outline, Tuschman claims

In relation to the political spectrum, tribalism breaks down into three components: (1) ethnocentricity, (2) religiosity, and (3) sexual (in)tolerance. High measures of ethnocentricity, religiosity, are commonly associated with one another. Individuals with this cluster of traits tend to have political views on the right. On the other end of the spectrum, attraction to out-groups (xenophilia), secularism, and higher sexual tolerance are well correlated with one another and with political views on the left. 

The excerpt develops something like a case, which I found only seemingly plausible in places, clearly nonsensical in others, based largely on Just-so story telling which is rather racist in its assumptions of non-progress in "primitive" cultures* and entirely clueless about atheistic racism, the history of which is quite floridly extensive and developed. Among the more clearly ahistorical and absurd statements is this:

What is the logic between these three components of tribalism? The more ethnocentric, religious, and sexually intolerant people are, the more likely they are to reproduce with a mate from their own in-group.

Which apparently doesn't take into account such things as the rape of African American slaves by their thorougly racist, ethnocentric, hetero-centric, conventionally religious etc. white masters, producing many offspring known by everyone to be the products of such "mating".   The instances of those who believed themselves to fully believe that their own "in-group" was superior refraining from raping or having sex with members of other groups would have to count as remarkable in their rarity.  Of course taking such things into account would mess up the Just-so story but there is no denying that it has been common to the human species.

But in order to assert the things Tuschman does, he has to deny much, much more than that, including the history of evolutionary biology, the ideological character of exactly the ultra-adaptationist school in that history, its endemic racism, its associated political, social and philosophical results in combination with icons of the "liberal" culture he believes himself to be complimenting.

For example, there is the rabid racism and concurrent advocacy of genocide in Ernst Haeckel - someone who I've read and studied at length as well as many of those who admired and promoted his materialist monism.  It was extremely popular with atheists and, apparently, still is in diluted form.  That materialistic monism is intrinsic to Haeckel's racism and advocacy of murder and it is inescapable to anyone who has read Haeckle because it pervades his writing.  Apart from those in the circle of Charles Darwin who promoted Haeckel's writing of that kind,  Lankester, Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin, himself,  Haeckel was also advocated by Joseph McCabe.   McCabe was probably the first person to make atheism a profession in Britain and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.   McCabe is the subject of a hagiographic "biography" published by Tuschman's publisher and, in fact,  Prometheus republished some of McCabe's translation of Haeckel.   McCabe translated Haeckel into English well after there was any question about his extreme racism, his advocacy for the murder of those he designated as "unfit" and any number of other depravities relevant to Tuschman's thesis.  Since those are present in Haeckel's writing from the beginning of it, any uncritical promotion of him would have to include it.   And McCabe's advocacy of Haeckel was nothing like fluke. You can see that in such publications as the  "Little Blue Book" number 579, Ernst Haeckel Evolutionist, number 598,  Ernst Haeckel - Philosopher-Naturalist and 599, Haeckel's Monistic Philosophy.   The Little Blue Books and their publisher E. Haldeman-Julius could serve as the template for Prometheus and Paul Kurtz and the modern atheism industry.

To see some of the result of that,  among others inspired by the atheist propaganda that came from McCabe and through the "Little Blue Books" and related atheist literature, was the pretty repellent, thoroughly racist and antisemitic James Hervy Johnson**,  the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism who is being given a new life on such atheist web resources as "Positive (sic) Atheism", they also promote McCabe as well.

That is just a tiny bit of the atheist promotion of  "scientific" as well as "historical" racism, antisemitism (a lot of atheist diatribe is inevitably antisemitic) and bigotry.   I would, however, deny that it has anything to do with any real progressive, liberal or leftist political identity, though in its time and today, atheists did and still assert that such materialist depravity is liberal.  If you think I'm agreeing with Tuschman due to that, I don't think it has anything to do with genetic heritage.   That's just the current pseudo-scientific framing of a malignant ideological assertion.  If it were done forty years ago, it would have been Behaviorism based.   People whose genes don't change can change their hearts and minds, for the better as well as for the worse.   Materialism doesn't do much to improve people.

I'd go a lot farther than that if I had the time, though whenever I dip into those notes, the next thing that happens is a series.  I don't have time for it just now.

* Any human culture that can be looked at in the history of anthropology or through the lore of literature is not reliably related to any presumed culture in the pre-historic past.  The idea that the people in such "primitive" cultures don't go through cultural change, cultural development, periods of greater and lesser depravity must as "advanced" cultures is pretty racist, in itself.   You have to wonder how they could get by the idea that the cultures that began the presumed climb from a "primitive" state to "advancement" weren't genetically superior to such "primitive" cultures which they presume didn't develop in the past few tens of thousands of years.   There is no culture that is know of today which isn't materially advanced from the handfuls of material evidence we have from the ancient past.  Assuming their culture hasn't undergone change is a hallmark of scientific racism.

**  The war between Johnson and Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her outrageous attempt to grab hold of his large estate is quite interesting reading.   There is as much insight to be gained from a good long look at the underside of the atheist ideology as there is any other.   Atheists are as unwilling to take that look as any other group I'm aware of, though there are religious traditions which at least advocate looking at their sins and confessing them.   I'm unaware of any moral holding of atheism that promotes that practice.