The Bizarre Idea That Atheism Is A Liberal Entity

Doing a post about the amazing lengths to which those at the atheist themed "Freethought Blogs"* go to to debunk free will is something I've toyed with, over and over.  But it would be a lot of work.  I think they can be said to have something of a fixation on the topic, their search engine returns "22,571 search results for keyword: free will".   While I am not averse to doing some research for these blog posts, I don't have the time to read even a representative sample of those results but of those I did only one supported the idea that something resembling free will might exist, though it looked like a pretty fragile thread of an argument to me.  

As well, I think the issue is an important one because it's not possible to support the basis of human freedom if human beings are "lumbering robots" to use Richard Dawkins' phrase.  And, try as he might to get past the unattractive and inevitable conclusions that biological determinism forces,  none of the atheist attempts to do that has the power to negate the meaning of their faith.   If people aren't free, if their thoughts and actions are the mere result of physical causation then none of us determines whether we are going to be an atheist or a theist.  The self declared "free thinkers" are no more free in their thoughts than the most rigid of religious fundamentalists and, in their insistence that their own faith is different from all others, they are no less insisting on the unique special status of that atheistic faith.   As I pointed out the other day, if their belief in the material determinism of thinking were to be right, then it would have to apply to their thinking,  they wouldn't get to cut themselves an exemption from their own insisted on conditions.  

And that very determinism would also cover the action of believing something, atheism and materialism, for example.   Their conviction that the physical cosmos is all there is or all there ever will be is the mere result of physical causation, of the peculiar conditions randomly present in their brains.    They couldn't have chosen to be atheists anymore than an individual C. elegans chooses to react for the atheist neuro-sci guy who is using it to try to persuade people that they don't have free will and that their minds are controlled by chemistry.  

All of this makes the evangelical passion of these materialists a basic contradiction of their own faith.   As I said before, they remove the basis for deciding that one idea is any more the "right idea" for someone to hold as compared to any other idea.   In order for them to hold that atheism is the real right idea to hold in every brain they need to exit their faith, temporarily and in a baldly self-serving manner for that one thing.   Well, that can't be done in materialism because materialism is monistic, it doesn't allow for exceptions to its rigid determinism and, as absolute monist faiths often do, it is one that has painted itself into a corner.  Perhaps unique to those short-sided ideologies, materialist monism has the decided disadvantage that it can't even advocate its own adoption by those not already convinced without violating its own faith in the material causation of the very act of choosing necessary for adopting it.   It can't tell someone that the product of their brain chemistry isn't the right outcome of those chemical reactions.  Its assertions that those who refuse to be convinced are, somehow, to blame for that result cannot be made consistent with their own asserted mechanism of thought. 

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But my question here is where the absurd association of atheism with free thought and the host of metaphysical bases of egalitarian democracy, the absolute and non-negotiable bases that a real political left came from.   Atheism is, in every form I'm aware of, based in materialism and, almost always scientism, and those are so typically in the business of debunking free thought and denying equality, rights and moral obligation that the continued association is one of the more pervasive delusions of the left, today.  That attack on the very notion of freedom of moral obligation and rights is ascendant in the culture today.  It is not compatible with equal rights in a democracy, it will destroy them. 

First, it is necessary to face the fact that the pretense that atheism, as a cultural phenomeon, is a product of intellectual rigor, of rational thought, is a pretense.  If it has been able to ignore the problems I've brought up in the previous paragraphs there is nothing rigorous about it.  In the rare attempts to get by those, to, somehow, cut exceptions from their absolute monism, for other ideas inconsistent with their materialism, they are no more successful than most attempts to explain "the problem of evil" or how God can make a rock too big for God to pick up.   

Entire lifetimes of atheist philosophers have been spent in trying to do that.   Sometimes, as with the history of positivism, they can peddle their results to those who are predisposed and lacking in the will to rigorously investigate them, logical positivism is the quintessential example of that.  But, eventually, an outsider will press the issue and demolish the foundations.  Kurt Godel, for example.  NOT that the fact that that demolition has happened gets noticed by those predisposed to believe in it.  In an act of will that looks to me nothing like nothing so much as the most primitive form of creationism, the positivist goes right on believing in their debunked line of thought.  Indeed, a lot of people who spout the lines of logical positivism, declaring sentences they don't like to be meaningless by fiat, don't even realize that is what they are doing.  

But I'm a lot more interested in how a Katha Pollitt or a Richard Seymour can square their materialism with their clear desire to advocate things which are not only unsupported by materialism but which are, inevitably, attacked by materialists because those things can't be located within materialism.  And if they don't want to consider things at that basic level,  many, like Pollitt, care deeply about issues such as equality and justice that are as much attacked by their ideology.   Materialism of the elite sort advocated by them will always devolve into a denial of the reality of those things, if not by them than by their fellow ideologues.   What is most bizarre in their thinking is that even as materialists have attacked those things, relentlessly, as Marxists and other would-be substitutes have proven to be a moral and human disaster, racking up murder counts as horrific as the right wing dictators,  the real champions of human dignity, economic justice, and fairness even of the disestablishment of religion, have been religious.  

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This is all motivated by reading a bit from my hate-mail file - I was deleting stuff from my trash bin.   Perhaps the typical method of attack resorted to there provides the real answer.   Most typically atheists  refuse to acknowledge the existence of anything but the most vulgar and déclassé aspects of religion, generally by associating them with groups of people and people who are seen as "low class" and unfashionable.   The most typical means of refutation of what I've written isn't a rational argument, it's in making an irrational association between what I've said and someone who has cooties.   It doesn't often get more sophisticated than that.  

And, when you look at most of, though not all of, the assertion of atheism and materialism among alleged liberals, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that. It isn't, generally, an advocacy of atheism or materialism, it is an attempt to give religion the cooties by associating the blameless with the appalling, those who advocate the basis of justice and liberalism with those who deny it.   And even more cuttingly, they love to associate all of religion with the worst of it and, especially, with the most socially disreputable part of it.   Considering the vulgarity of so much of the culture of atheism, of the sleaziness of so many of its heroes,  of the willing association of so many of them with some of the world champions of oppression and murder, there would seem to be a bit of a lack or rigorous observation going on there as well.

I think the reason that so many prominent, would-be leftists push their ideology which is so destructive of the left is mainly about their own status within their class, and, in the boom in the atheist fad, cashing in on that fashion while it lasts. The money of the trust-fund Stalinist, Corliss Lamont once sustained atheism and the business and PR  management of Paul Kurtz and the show biz geek shows provided by James Randi and Penn Jillette have made it a money making opportunity that the anxious assistant professors and small journal scribblers could never imagine.  Mainstream media and publishing have multiplied that money making potential.   I think the motive behind the more respectable atheism of the would be liberal scribblers has a lot more to do with that and it makes them more than a bit willing to sell out and hollow out the heart and foundations of liberalism, of the real left in the process.

*  There are lots of other ironies in that use of the phrase "free thought" to an ideological group that is devoted to obliterating the thinking of most other people, imposing ideological permissions in what is legitimately thought and on what is legitimately said.   See my comment about logical positivism which was dedicated to making those kinds of declarations.   Then there is the expulsion of bloggers such as the odious and sexist ThunderfOOT and Greg Laden, who serve as an example of the danger of claiming free thought as your platform.