Francis Spufford, who I am not familiar with, has recently had
an excerpt of his book, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, published on Salon. You will probably not be shocked to discover PZ Myers
hated what he read there. He especially objected to this long paragraph, listing what his daughter was going to hear about what it means to be a Christian:
It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishize pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die. That we’re bleeding hearts who don’t understand the wealth-creating powers of the market. That we’re too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we uphold the nuclear family, with all its micro-tyrannies and imprisoning stereotypes. That we’re the hairshirted enemies of the ordinary family pleasures of parenthood, shopping, sex and car ownership. That we’re savagely judgmental. That we’d free murderers to kill again. That we think everyone who disagrees with us is going to roast for all eternity. That we’re as bad as Muslims. That we’re worse than Muslims, because Muslims are primitives who can’t be expected to know any better. That we’re better than Muslims, but only because we’ve lost the courage of our convictions. That we’re infantile and can’t do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in your minds. That we oppose freedom, human rights, gay rights, individual moral autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, stem cell research, the use of condoms in fighting AIDS, the teaching of evolutionary biology. Modernity. Progress. That we think everyone should be cowering before authority. That we sanctify the idea of hierarchy. That we get all snooty and yuck-no-thanks about transsexuals, but think it’s perfectly normal for middle-aged men to wear purple dresses. That we cover up child abuse, because we care more about power than justice. That we’re the villains in history, on the wrong side of every struggle for human liberty. That if we sometimes seem to have been on the right side of one of said struggles, we weren’t really; or the struggle wasn’t about what it appeared to be about; or we didn’t really do the right thing for the reasons we said we did. That we’ve provided pious cover stories for racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, slavery, exploitation. That we’ve manufactured imaginary causes for real people to kill each other. That we’re stuck in the past. That we destroy tribal cultures. That we think the world’s going to end. That we want to help the world to end. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend; that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourselves before a god who has the reality status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, law to mercy, primary colors to shades, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.
Where, oh where, oh where, could Spufford have gotten that list of specimen anti-Christian invective from, you are almost certainly not asking yourself unless you happened to dodge the past decades tsunami of anti-Christian invective, especially that issuing from blogs such as PZ's Pharyngula as a putative "Scienceblog" and now found under the even more ironic heading as a "Freethought blog". For example, the second comment on PZ's post reads:
Wait, how are those misconceptions? Of course, all Christians don’t do or embody all the things on that list, but good luck finding even a single Christian who doesn’t live up to at least a few of them.
to be frankly seconded as soon as comment 5
A. Noyd has it. There are indeed some lovely, compassionate christians who don’t personally hate gay people or women at all … but how does that excuse or redeem the appalling record of the christian churches? And how does that make a mythological supernatural being real? No amount of kind-hearted and ethically minded individuals can make christianity itself any more factually true than it is – i.e. not at all.
And the vast majority do live up to far too many of the items on that list.
As anyone who is familiar with the PZnut gallery will know, those are two of the milder confirmations of exactly the list of anti-Christian invective that abounds on atheist blogs and in atheist books and as found on most non-atheist comment threads on even non-religious themed blogs these days. And if you need more proof, here is what Myers said about it:
"Jesus fucking Christ, man, get down off that giant cross you’ve erected! You’re going to hurt yourself!"
Convincing and rational rebuttal to Spufford's point, no? [Private message to Mr Myers: Uh, PZ, for a self-anointed figure of rational discourse to confirm something in your rebuttal of it is sort of, as we say, stupid.]
And it has been thus on PZ's blogs as can be seen on his archives. For example, from September 17
I am quite able to agree that you Christians are mostly harmless. But when you look objectively at the goofball ideas that you consider to be essential core beliefs of your religious philosophy, it’s a fair cop to say that you also look like freakin’ idiots.
And that's mighty mild Myers, if you know what I mean.
You would be far harder put to find examples of atheists online who don't parrot exactly those lines Spufford lists even as they whine about the surveys that show Christians and other religious believers quite often say they'd probably not vote for an atheist for president. I'd love it if PZ would ask his cult if they'd vote for a candidate who says the same kinds of things about atheists that he regularly lets loose.
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Being a gay man, a rather small minority group which it has only very recently become unfashionable to target for hate speech, in a limited number of places, one of the stupider things I ever heard from other gay folk is that we could, somehow, obtain our civil rights without the support of the majority, straight, population. It was a stupid idea that was especially prevalent in the late 1970s when it became fashionable among some dolts to, as one guy I knew put it, just sit there and hate straight people." Within a few years that stupid pose would be abandoned in the circles during the AIDS crisis. It became obvious that everything about our civil rights depended on the support of allies who were not gay. No minority group anywhere, at any time has not needed allies in the majority population. Numbers matter in a democracy.
Atheists have had a fuller range of civil rights protections far longer than GLBT folks have today. I'm unaware of any time when atheists were, for example, denied the right to marry. White, straight, atheist men like Myers have had rights under the constitution from the beginning that women, African-Americans, and a host of others have not had during the longest part of the life of our country and today they have the full range of rights protected by law. Their atheism was no impediment to their practice of those rights.
Let me clue you in on something, atheists, GLBT folks, any minority group, can exercise their rights only with the support of the majority. Even women, a truly, suppressed and oppressed majority of the population, needed the support of men in order to exercise their rights. It was only when the minority of white men in the Congress and state legislatures were convinced to amend the Constitution that women could exercise the more basic political rights of full citizens. You don't change the constitution or make law to extend the protection of the exercise of rights unless you convince the majority of those with power to change them.
Atheists were included in those classes protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act passed and signed into law by people who were, overwhelmingly, Christians. That act conferred the full range of protection to those classes covered in it and those of us not covered do not yet have protection of those rights for ourselves. That protection for the covered groups is sustained in a country in which the overwhelming majority of voters are Christians. The separation of church and state and the disestablishment clauses of the Constitution have stood on the basis of the non-opposition of the majority of Christians.
If Christians wanted to, I expect they could amend the constitution to remove those protections of equality and freedom of thought. It certainly could have been done in an earlier period when the separation of church and state didn't enjoy the iconic status that it has had in the post-WWII period. That hasn't been done in the more than two centuries that the Constitution has been in place and it was, obviously, not the tiny faction of atheists that sustained them all these years. Most often, when atheists complain of their "rights" being violated, it isn't more than a matter of anger that the majority of people are free to express their religion in ways that atheists want to complain about. The ridiculous assertion that people have an obligation to vote for an atheist if they would rather not, the annoyance that religious people talk about their religion in pubic and express their political choices in terms of religious morality, atheists don't have a right to the majority of people suppressing their thoughts in those areas anymore than gay men have to straight men expressing their gender preference. It would be an extremely stupid gay man who insisted that he did have that right. There would be nothing to gain from it anymore than calling straight folks "breeders" brought.
To Myers and the PZites I say:
