The recent piece she typelled (what we pixel stained wretches do these days) for Alternet was dutifully copied at Salon, where I saw it, was on the terrible accusation that atheists have anger issues. I know, shocking, isn't it.
Perhaps someone was making a funny instead of being clueless but the ungrammatical subtitle is:
The Christian right wants to paint nonbelievers as spittle-flecked rage machines. They doth protest too much
AND THE PIECE IS ILLUSTRATED BY THAT FREQUENTLY SPITTLE-FLECKED RAGE MACHINE, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS LOOKING ENRAGED AND DEMENTED IN THE PERIOD WHEN HE WAS A FULL FLEDGED MEMBER OF THE ATHEIST RIGHT.
It must count as one of the most obviously silly topics for an atheist who has the writing archive of Amanda Marcotte to deny that rage is the major mode of online atheist discourse, matched only by conceited disdain for more than 95% of the human population and dishonesty of discourse of which her piece is a quintessential example. And in it she gives a shout out to her fellow 13-year-old, Greta Christina, whose shtick is pretty much anger. The claim is made that atheists' anger is justified....
“Because anger has driven every major movement for social change in this country, and probably in the world,”
What atheists have to be angry about can mostly be summed up at one go, most people don't think like they do and
THAT'S NOT FAIR!
That is a line that atheists used to dupe the left into turning the cause for legal equality for atheists, something that was GIVEN TO THEM, half a century ago into some excuse for them to have far more than that. Atheists in the United States and elsewhere have used the fact of their self-generated unpopularity to browbeat most people into silence on the left and an insistence that the entire society be de-religionized because they don't like the way most people think. Well, if they don't like that, it's just too bad. The past forty years have shown that while they can use the wall of separation to ensure the formal government is not in the business of promoting a specific religion, they can't use it to turn atheism into the state religion by default.
There is a level of government which has never, will never and cannot be de-religionized, that is the roots and trunk of democracy, The People and the only source of legitimacy for any government, The Voters.
You can't erect a wall of separation keeping people from consulting their religious beliefs when they vote the way they do, you can't keep that from being a politically effective fact of politics and even one that politicians have to take into account. Republicans, mostly not having bought the stupid atheist analysis of that have benefited from the force of religious belief among conservatives, it is liberals who have been forced to do the tightrope act of trying to please both the anti-religious splinter and, so, not having access to an even greater force of belief for liberalism. Liberals were, in large numbers, suckered into going along with the atheists because of the misuse of the idea of the separation of church and the formal activities of government. Liberals gave up their most potent and effective political weapon when they bought the atheists' line.
The wall of separation wasn't raised against religion by skeptics it is a wall raised BY RELIGIOUS BELIEVERS TO PROTECT THEIR PRIVATE BELIEFS FROM GOVERNMENT INTRUSION AND THE INTRUSION OF A STATE RELIGION, even Madison said that hoping that by there being no one state church that Christianity would benefit and flourish and become generally effective. And his concept of Christianity was a lot closer to that of the religious right than it is modern religious liberals of today who have gone far past where the "founders" generation was willing to go in such matters.
No, anger isn't what has fueled every major social movement for change, the religious belief that people are created equal in both rights and moral obligations has, something which has no materialistic basis. You can have a revolution through anger, it will be a revolution which, as the large majority of those have been, was only a prelude to continuing oppression and violence. The American Revolution is illustrative, it freed rich men from a king and a foreign parliament, it retained most of the oppressive features of what preceded it, slavery, oppression of women, inequality of even free white men, originally even at the ballot box. In every case the major force for changing that was thoroughly informed by the Christian religion of those who fought for change. And anger was never the most effective part of that. The idiocy of various cults of outrage and anger in the later 1960s weakened and derailed the progress that religion and self-discipline had won in the preceding decade, it set up a backlash far more potent for the spectacle of the anger which was an effective tool for the right. They both scared and angered people who were the target of that would-be righteous anger. But you had to grow up to understand that, no matter how good it felt to be angry and act out, it was stupid politics.
Anger is great; and then it's spent. What did the anger in Ferguson accomplish? Not as much as the election of new public officials will. Even then people will be angry because those new officials don't do whatever someone thinks they should. And then what will anger do?
ReplyDeleteNot that much, actually.
As for Marcotte, I noted at the Salon posting of that article, in the comments, that she was angry at those who described atheists as angry, which meant people describing her as angry made her angry!
It was a very silly solipsistic loop. Nobody disagreed with me. They just ranted about stuff being shoved down their throats (the most widespread cliche on the intertoobs now; I long to see it banned as a cliche). They reacted to the topic, "religion," with anger, in other words.
It was too funny, especially they're complete lack of self-awareness. 13 year olds is about right. I've come to regard them as children, children who need desperately to mature. They put so much faith in Dawkins and Maher, it's downright sad. Dawkins and Maher are in it for the fame and fortune; it's a shtick. If people stopped paying attention to them tomorrow, Dawkins and Maher would retire rich and happy, their faithful minions left leaderless and without a champion.
Children, as I say. And so determined to believe they are victims, somehow; that none of this is their fault, that even their anger is because of somebody else. 13 year olds, as you say. Too immature to take on reality, which would first mean looking at themselves.
Not a lesson they are ever going to learn from Dawkins or Maher.