Friday, May 16, 2014
Why Would These Be Provocative Questions?
Is a tee-shirt that says, "So many Christians, never enough Lions," morally different from one that would say, "So many Jews, never enough Zyklon-B"? Why? And why is the first one acceptable whereas the unacceptability of the second one obvious? It isn't because recent history has not produced the murders of many Christians because it has.
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I've been puzzling over this: why the overt hostility to Christianity (which is usually presented as "religion"), and based on such ignorance of Christianity?
ReplyDeleteRussell wrote why he was not a Christian, but he explained it in terms of Christianity, not in terms of a cartoon caricature where faith is "believing what you know isn't true." Nietzsche was a harsh critic of Christianity, but he knew a great deal about it, being one of the world's leading philologists (i.e., a world class scholar, as close to a Renaissance man as possible in the 19th century).
Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins and their acolytes, by contrast, are proud of their ignorance.
I got shouted down at Salon when I said that Texas is not teaching creationism to the exclusion of evolution. I've lived here almost all my life, and sent my now 22 year old daughter to Texas public schools. I know what I'm talking about. But I was wrong, because my opponents KNEW it was true and Texas taught only sheer nonsense. Whence comes this insistence that the world they most fear, exists?
I can understand it when it comes to "fear of a brown planet." But where did this cartoon version of Xianity come from? I think part of it is simply the decline in Xianity. I have been teaching high school students for a decade now, in a private school (so it's not a representative sample). Few of them know anything about Xianity, which means they don't attend any church regularly. In a post-Xian world, I'd expect all manner of ignorance about what Xianity actually is.
But why the animosity?
As I said before, it's common and even easy to attribute homophobia to latent homosexula desires (and sometimes that's spectacularly true). Could it be a latent desire to believe drives the resistance to believe?
I was watching "Hannah and her Sisters" yesterday, and even an atheist like Woody Allen, 28 years ago, was actually quite respectful toward religion. There is a subplot where Allen's character considers becoming a Catholic because he wants life to have meaning. Max von Sydow's famous quote about Jesus coming back and throwing up at what's being done in his name is aimed at the TV evangelists shilling for money, not at general religious hypocrisy. Today's atheists would probably find Allen a "squish" for such ideas.
Yet 28 years later, they seem not shocking, but respectful; at least in contrast.
I understand the animosity of racism, as I say; that fear of the other is driven by the fear that "other" will seek retribution for wrongs done for so many centuries. But what drives the atheist to be so venal, to so identify with being "not-Christian"?
That one I don't yet understand.
It is in line with the English language literature of atheist invective, a lot of which goes back to Joseph McCabe, a British ex-Catholic priest who was sort of a combo of his time's Richard Dawkins-Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the first professional atheist. He was especially hateful of the Catholic church, which endeared him to many in the British establishment but he was also widely distributed here through those famous-infamous "Little Blue Books". Many of those are online, through Infidels.org. I suspect a lot of his anti-Catholic diatribes could have influenced the old-line Protestant anti-Catholic invective in America. The few I've bothered with read pretty much like the junk you see online, though, perhaps due to his Catholic education, he was literate. The generalization of his kind of hate-talk, applied to all Christians, now, by atheists isn't that great a stretch.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in college, my composition teacher, who was Jewish but who grew up in Chicago, once told me that she'd never heard anti-Catholic invective of the kind that was common among Jews in the New York City area. I don't know if that's just her experience or if it's something peculiar to the culture of "The City". It's certainly not because there was a lack of antisemitism in Chicago to react to. What it says that applies to this, I don't know. I do know that I've had angry responses to me pointing out that Yad Vashem has singled out Catholics in Poland as Righteous Among the Nations for protecting Jews from the Nazis in larger numbers than any other country, and I mean really angry denials that Pols were anything but crypto-Nazi antisemites. If that has anything to do with what she said about Chicago, who knows? I once asked her if there was an alphabetical line to get into heaven what she'd do since her last name began in a Z. She said she'd just go with all her friends to the other place where she was sure they'd all be going. I really miss her, she was a great teacher.
How an expression of approval for mass murder became acceptable on what passes as the left is an important question. I think it has a lot to do with how the left swept the mass murders of atheist regimes under the carpet, damaging the left politically but also morally. I can't imagine any but the most fringe of Christian groups that would tolerate that kind of talk within it, certainly not main-line denominations, these days.
I take your point about mass murders under atheist regimes seriously, but I find most atheists today are so ignorant of history there's no point in detailing that 20th century history to them.
ReplyDeleteThey all "know" that all serious conflicts of the past 2000 years were religiously based, that religion is the cause of all conflict, that religious belief all centers on virgin births and miracles and a god who revels in smiting people.
It's absolutely mindless; the kind of thing I'd expect from 19th century American anti-Catholic diatribes. But those diatribes were at least based in Protestants proving they were the "real" Christians (and I still know a lot of Protestants who have that attitude toward the Roman Catholic church. They don't know much, but they know they're against "Rome").
Why are atheists so convinced they must oppose Christianity? Is it because they think the world exists in the headlines and "news" reports on their favorite websites? That's the only explanation I have for the idea that Texas, a state whose economy is still based on petroleum exploration, teaches that the world is only 6000 years old (it doesn't, but don't try to convince the holders of that "belief" that they are wrong).
So maybe it's a combination of a changing culture (where Christendom wanes, and good riddance to it) and the internet lets any damned fool with a keyboard spout any fool nonsense he/she wants, and to find an audience for it who is too soon convinced such nonsense mirrors reality.
Perhaps that's the explanation; the on-line atheists and their "leaders" (Coyne, Dawkins, et al.) are as credulous as the people who listen to Joel Osteen every week. But still: whence the animosity?
Which brings us back to the "expression of approval for mass murder" becoming acceptable. It is all of a piece, somehow.
I think a lot of it is the same thing as it says in the second Psalm, they don't like moral requirements that are inconvenient to their ends, “Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.” Someone once said it was the reason that dictators were so hostile to Judaism, that its moral absolutes required them to do justice to poor people, widows, orphans, aliens (and that could have figured in yesterday's post) at a cost to themselves. Affluent people don't welcome that requirement.
ReplyDeleteAs I've said over and over, once you recognize that people and other living beings aren't merely objects of utility, once you recognize that you have a moral obligation to treat them with respect, to not only avoid doing bad to them but to actively do good to them, you can't participate in a world of affluence and commerce as if that isn't the case. I don't think it's any accident that it's among the affluent that the new atheism is most popular and that, contrary to its being a liberal entity, atheism is quite likely to be a feature of libertarianism pretending to be liberal. It wasn't an accident that, along with Ayn Rand figuring in CPAC, O'Hair's American Atheists tried to get a table at their annual celebration of hate and affluence in DC. I'd love to ask Ehrenreich about that one.