We Must Not Join Forces With Atheists We Must Not Be Duped Into That Disaster Again

At first glance, you might think that Steve Neumann's post at Salon,

Atheists’ self-defeating superiority: Why joining forces with religion is best for non-believers, 

is a step in a better direction but it's a really bad deal for the believers and for the left.   If there is one thing that the past thirteen or so years of intensive atheist propaganda online has taught me, it is that when you accept atheists as collaborators, that will be what you get.   They will insist, on the basis of "secularism" in politics and in the public forum, that atheism is to be taken as the norm, the default, the language of discourse and the ideological frame of everything.  As I have been pointing out, in example after example, in context after context, that is not only bad politically but it is destructive of the very basis of liberalism which cannot be separated from its metaphysical and moral roots and survive.  A mere form that is called "liberalism" or "the left" can be asserted, generally an inconsistent and selective promotion of libertarian objectives, but not real liberalism in the American, as opposed to the European, use of the term.

The atheists, never more than a few percentage points of the population, many of whom are conservatives who attack liberalism and the people who liberals have a moral obligation to support, will always insist on having it their way.  The history promoted as the history of "the left" in the media and the academic establishment is largely the atheist, pseudo-left.   The real left, which produced progress for real people in real life, is demoted to some kind of moderation or some kind of accommodation with the right.  That is, of course, best disproved by the viciousness with which the right attacks the very programs that were produced by that liberalism, quite often against the opposition of the pseudo-left as well as the right, before it was adopted and the pseudo-leftists pretended they provided the power to push it through when they never had the power to do anything.

My conclusion, reached in the past 12 years, is that atheism will always be destructive of liberalism because it cannot abide the moral and metaphysical truths of liberalism.   Atheism will always attack the real, true and absolute existence of free thought, consciousness, equality, rights, and, most of all a binding and effective moral obligation to respect those in even those you really don't like or when it disadvantages you and, on a basis of ideological interest, even when it's just a question of abstract consideration.  That is the history of atheists addressing the human mind, morality and life.   The reliance on a vestigial remnant of respect for those as a cultural habit of atheists acculturated in a non-atheist world is not nearly a sound guarantee to make those political reality or for them to endure in a secularized society.

Neumann's citations are rather telling, * the standard resources of current atheism.  Most tellingly for my contention that his call is primarily problematic for the left and not the right is his use of  Jonathan Haidt, one of the "9-11 made me a conservative" type that is so common in the young, relatively, atheists on the make today.   I share a lot of Chris Hedges' reservations and objections to Haidt's thinking and his superficial and dishonest assessment of liberalism, conservatism and institutions.   Here from Hedges' review of the book Neumann cites:

- Haidt, although he has a refreshing disdain for the Enlightenment dream of a rational world, fares no better than other systematizers before him. He too repeatedly departs from legitimate science, including social science, into the simplification and corruption of science and scientific terms to promote a unified theory of human behavior that has no empirical basis. He is stunningly naive about power, especially corporate power, and often exhibits a disturbing indifference to the weak and oppressed. He is, in short, a Social Darwinian in analyst’s clothing. Haidt ignores the wisdom of all the great moral and religious writings on the ethical life, from the biblical prophets to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, to the Sermon on the Mount, to the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita, which understand that moral behavior is determined by our treatment of the weakest and most vulnerable among us. It is easy to be decent to your peers and those within your tribe. It is difficult to be decent to the oppressed and those who are branded as the enemy.

Haidt, who is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is an heir of Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest” and who also attempted to use evolution to explain human behavior, sociology, politics and ethics. Haidt, like Spencer, is dismissive of those he refers to as “slackers,” “leeches,” “free riders,” “cheaters” or “anyone else who ‘drinks the water’ rather than carries it for the group.” They are parasites who should be denied social assistance in the name of fair play. The failure of liberals, Haidt writes, to embrace this elemental form of justice, which he says we are hard-wired to adopt, leaves them despised by those who are more advanced as moral human beings. He chastises liberals, whom he sees as morally underdeveloped, for going “beyond the equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system.”

You should read the entire review because Hedges shows in his analysis of this book why it is entirely incompatible with liberalism**.

The dream Neumann sees of some kind of unity between atheists and religious people has happened already, it is the history of the American left in the 20th century and today, of the atheists bullying, coercing and duping their way into dominance and the hampering and destruction of the left as a political force in the past fifty years as the atheists have dominated it.  It was a great deal for atheists and a disaster in every other sense.  The reason for that is that they never had what it took to sustain the moral force and strength of metaphysical faith that is the essential holding of the left that can't be sacrificed without destroying it.

If we follow the pleasing looking path of niceness that Steve Neumann points to, it will just prolong our stay in the political wilderness.   Atheists sometimes have mocked the story of Moses leading the children of Israel through the wilderness for forty years.  Atheists have led us into one for longer than that and counting.  The left won't survive any more time wandering around following them.


* Chris Mooney is one of them.  I like him and had hope for Mooney in the last decade as he seemed to be a reasonable atheist who was opposed to the worst excesses of neo-atheism but who has since gone back to working with such groups as Center For Inquiry and whose agenda, including the promotion of GMO the foods industry, is remarkably consonant with them.   I'm afraid that while I still respect some of his work, I don't trust that his other work won't undermine the left in other ways.   He, like Haidt and Neumann is a real sucker for pseudo-science and some really bad analysis.

** Even more illuminating is this passage in Hedges' review:

“People should reap what they sow,” he writes. “People who work hard should get to keep the fruits of their labor. People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.”

Haidt lists six primary concerns of those he considers morally whole—care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. He believes liberals, because they do not sufficiently value fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity, are morally deficient. The attributes he champions, however, when practiced among social conservatives, often mask a rapacious cruelty to the weak and oppressed. Slaveholders in the antebellum South, courteous and chivalrous to their own class, church going, fiercely loyal to the Confederacy, in short morally whole in Haidt’s thesis, created a hell on earth for African-Americans. One could say the same about many German Nazis and members of most cults. Haidt, although he acknowledges this dilemma in his moral constructions, would do well to ask himself whether there is something deeply flawed in a model of moral behavior that a slaveholder, a member of a cult or a fascist could attain.