Remove the Indulgence Against Criticism Atheists Granted Themselves

The other day, in a blog brawl at Religion Dispatches, I suddenly realized that atheism is a religion that is in very serious need of both external and internal criticism.   Well, it was "Humanism" that was under discussion as I came to that conclusion, not atheism, in general.

By pretending that "Humanism" is not a religion, it has escaped the kind of scrutiny that religion gets in the media and in academia.   It has such an oversized aura of piety and sanctity about it, at times quite cloying, that you would think its practices and holdings are ripe for  hypocrisy checks.   I've noted in the past that it gave its "Humanist of the Year" and other awards to such as the advocate of child rape, Vern Bullough, not to mention its main sugar daddy, Corliss Lamont who was promoting Stalin in the West well after he knew the murders attributable to him numbered well into the millions.  If nothing else "The Corliss Lamont Chapter of the American Humanist Association"  perhaps the mother church of the religion,  is begging for the exposure of the man it's named after.   He was, for all intents and purposes, the Mary Baker Eddy of post-war "Humanism", the period in which he bought out the old "Humanists" even as he was a pied piper of  Stalinism.

Atheists practice the odd moral gamesmanship of declaring any moral evaluation of atheism and atheists irrelevant because of the claim that atheism is amoral, taking no moral positions, asserting no moral positions as being true, they do this while making a vicious, often myth based, moral critique of religion, especially Christianity.  I've pointed out before that in order to do that they have to swipe moral positions, generally from Christianity, to even call the evil things done in the name of Christianity evil.  It has to, by their own claims atheism doesn't identify those acts as evil.  By their own claims, made for their own ends, atheism is deficient, it is an inadequate ideology as it is proven by human observation, by human experience that human life in the absence of morality is intolerable, worse and, in many cases in the past, impossible.   And, today, in the world provided to us by science with its enormous magnification of the potential power of  human beings, life will be extinguished by an intellectual regime which rejects the reality of morality.  Atheism may have been a tolerable eccentricity of a small denomination in the past, today it is a major contributor in a plausible scenario of total disaster.  There is no small irony in that the "end times" prophesies that the atheists inserted into the brawl hinge on a loss of faith, not only in the Christian scriptures but in other traditions, monotheistic, polytheistic and non-theistic (Buddhist)  as well.

And if they reject external criticism, they certainly are not big on internal criticism of their religion. It is one of their criticisms of religion that it doesn't practice internal criticism, which only proves they have never read either the literature of religion or even the scriptures.  The prophets in the First Testament are some of the most exigent internal critics in the history of that genre of thought.  Isaiah is nothing if not an exigent critic of the cult of the Temple, the very heart of his religion.   As Marilynne Robinson pointed out, every crime which atheists and others lodge against the Jewish tradition, the slaughter of the Cannanites and other named groups, the enslavement of the women they didn't kill, etc. ARE DOCUMENTED BY THEM.  There is no internal moral criticism I've ever seen that is more extensive, more detailed, more exquisitely exacting than that found in the Jewish tradition.   We could all learn a lot more from them than we have, atheists have everything to learn from them instead of rejecting their example.

And the self-criticism within Christianity and even within denominations of Christianity is massive and a religious duty of Christians.  Jesus, a Jew informed by the culture which I just talked about, told would-be moralizers that they had better take a good look at themselves before they believed themselves qualified to judge others.  "Do not judge lest you be judged",  take the beam out of your eye before you try to take the speck out of someone else's eye,  etc.

But, that said,  I don't think there is anything wrong with holding those most reflexive of moral judges to the same standard they insist on practicing, though their gift for misstating, exaggerating, and just making up stuff to hold religious people responsible for is a bad idea.   Lying is out, holding them to the same standard in every other way they practice it is certainly not either unreasonable or wrong.  It's high time people on the left began to make an honest critique of them due to their out-sized influence.