Why I Hate the Baby Jesus, pt. 3

Some jerkoff stole the Baby Jesus from a Nativity display on Independence Mall. No, I didn't do it.

I argue that the real problem in this situation is that the Nativity scene is on public property at all. But if someone nicked JC from the display as a protest, I don't see what they think they're going to achieve. Insofar as there is an atheist "cause," that cause isn't being advanced by vandalizing other people's religious pageants.

Atheists, of course, aren't a group in the vein of the Ancient Order of Hibernians of the Knights of Columbus, the two organizations behind the creche display. There is a secular movement which opposes this kind of tableau, and their effort to end the practice is the closest thing to a unified atheist cause. That cause is not served by publicly disprespecting sacred religious imagery, no matter how gag-inducing a blond-haired, blue-eyed Baby Jesus is to any intelligent person. That only encourages Catholics and other Christians rally around their curiously Aryan-looking Savior. If we believe in the First Amendment, we have to give these people the respect they deserve.

That respect consists of allowing them to observe their holidays unmolested on private property. This Christ heist makes the issue seem personal, which can only turn public opinion against the small, secular minority. We look petty. We look mean. We don't look like a mature and rational group of people with the Constitution on our side.

All of that having been said, there is precisely zero evidence that this vandalism was perpetrated by an angry atheist. It might have been an enraged Protestant evangelical on some kind of anti-Catholic jag. It could have been a Jew, angry about being libeled for all those centuries. It might have been a Republican- they wander the streets at night looking for mischief, you know. It could have been a junkie looking for something to sell to support his drug habit. Hell, maybe it was a stoner who thought it would be awesome to have an Aryan Jesus in his room. We have no way of knowing.

None of those is particularly likely, but how many atheists are there, really? If we were the majority, things would already be set up our way, wouldn't they?

Why I Hate the Baby Jesus, pt. 2

Eager not to disappoint, the Christian right has graced us with more cries of discrimination against the majority. Michael Reagan (son of Saint Ronnie) published an article on Friday whining about how the Evil Atheist Conspiracy is intimidating the poor, sad Christians out of their sacred birthday celebration.

Christians, 90% of the country in his reckoning, are being strangled by a wicked minority of bigots and haters. How dare businesses refuse to pay obeisance to our beliefs, he fumes. We're the majority! Our freedom of speech is being trampled!

I'm baffled to think of where Reagan learned what freedom of speech is. It has nothing to do with what others tell you. It has nothing to do with courtesy, and it doesn't entail a right not to be offended. The notion that businesses owe Christians a mention of their holiday is warped. If you're a cashier at a retail store, your responsibility is to ring up the goods customers bring you. They decide what they want to buy, you take their payment and give them a receipt. "Merry Christmas" doesn't show up in there. No "Hare Krishna," no "Assalam Alaikum," no "May the Force be With You." It has nothing to do with the transaction. Again, I'm astounded at how weak and defensive these people are in their faith. They need constant validation otherwise they think there's some kind of conspiracy against them.

Reagan concludes by calling for Christians to do some intimidation of their own, as if the concept was alien to them. The Religious Right has done nothing but intimidate people for the last 40 years. These people are bullies, and like all bullies they are whiny and pitifully insecure. Is that what Christmas is about? Intimidation? Is that what Jesus would do?

Why I Hate the Baby Jesus, pt. 1

It's that time again, folks. The calendar has rolled its way past Thanksgiving, that quintessentially American holiday, with the heaviest driving day of the year, a day of compulsory gluttony, and a rabid festival of consumerism coming one after the another, and on toward the happiest season of all: the War on Christmas.

There's a lot to be learned from how we as a country handle Thanksgiving, but for my money the supposed secularist effort to banish the Baby Jesus and the Christian reaction to same constitute the most insipid display in the tawdry pageant that is American public life. In recent years secularists have mounted efforts to remove references to God and other religious symbols from government property, and religious conservatives have reacted with cries of discrimination. The secularist argument is that setting up nativity scenes outside town halls, displaying the Ten Commandments in courthouses, and printing "In God We Trust" on our money all constitute endorsement of the Christian religion by the government in violation of the First Amendment. Conservatives assert that there is a strong tradition of public endorsement of religion in this country and that barring such displays violates their right to free speech.

That argument is incoherent. How does a lack of state endorsement impinge on a private citizen's freedom of belief? Does their brand of Christianity depend on affirmation from the state? Where is that in the bible? These folks can set up their creches on private property, no questions asked.

If these folks need Uncle Sam's stamp of approval on their beliefs, theirs is a very weak faith indeed. In part the First Amendment is intended to prevent churches from becoming dependent on the state. City hall doesn't force these people to wave the flag in their church or say the national anthem. They can't even force people to do those things in public, at least not since 1943. That's what it's all about: the state doesn't meddle with your beliefs, and it doesn't use its resources to promote your beliefs over anybody else's.

I have no problem with Christians doing their Christmas thing in their churches or their homes. More power to them. I don't even have a problem with public space being rented or otherwise reserved for Christmas-related functions. As long as any other group has the same opportunity to use the space for their purposes, public places are fair game. But we have to draw the line at the government itself setting up Christian imagery and overseeing specifically religious observances. That's just not what the government does.

Why I am not fundamentalist

Over the past week I have witnessed a series of flame wars in the Religion and Theology forum at Democratic Underground, where I wasted an exceptional amount of time last month. For five or six successive days, people who don't know each other traded insults and fallacious arguments, diagnosed each other with various neuroses, and squabbled over who was the bigger crybaby. The protracted flamefest started over the suggestion, not unknown in those parts and rarely well-received, that atheism is a religion. Two posters, both themselves atheists, spent days antagonizing other atheists while proclaiming their good intentions. In all, it was an effective demonstration of one of the strongest criticisms of atheism (which nonetheless falls victim to the fallacy of suggesting that atheism is a unified movement, but I will address that shortly): many atheists have a vicious contrarian streak and need to feel superior to others. If there are no believers around, other atheists will do. I have gone through this stage at least once, so I am acutely aware of it in others.

I didn't see much to gain from getting involved, so abstained from the argument for the most part. One intercession that I made was to observe that there were three definitions of "fundamentalist atheism" at work. Generally speaking, a fundamentalist is a person who adheres to a strictly literal interpretation of a religious scripture. Since atheism is not itself a philosophy but merely the condition of lacking belief in a god or gods, there are no central tenets for atheists to adhere to. The term is generally applied to vocal atheists how don't feel obligated to show respect for the supernatural beliefs of others. Beyond that common thread, the term is amorphous and serves different users in different ways, shifting as necessary to apply to many thinkers and positions.

The variation of the definitions I encountered intrigued me. I delineated the them as follows:

1). A fundamentalist atheist is one who will not acknowledge that atheists such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot committed atrocities. Also,they dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that fundamentalist atheism exists.

I think the person who advanced this definition meant to say that fundamentalist atheists refuse to admit that Stalin et al. were motivated by their atheism in their atrocities, which is the usual construction of that particular meme. I don't think anyone, at least at DU, had ever claimed that Stalin's purges or the Cultural Revolution didn't happen, but I checked carefully, and that was indeed the accusation made by the poster in question.

I also like the catch-22 couched in the second half of this definition. All you have to do to be a fundie is claim that you are not a fundie. It's artful, if pedantry is considered an art (as it is on some Internet boards). The gist of this person's concept of fundamentalist atheists is that they refuse to accept any criticism of atheism and form a quasi-religious clique to reinforce their delusion. It is convenient for use against anyone who defends atheism against attack, because they seem to tacitly acknowledge that they are part of a larger movement.

2). A fundamentalist atheist stubbornly asserts that no benefit has come from religion and that religion must be eliminated, usually be violent means.

As Carl Sagan once said, "Also pretty vague, but, also pretty different." While there is some commonality between this definition and (1), namely the tendency to ignore evidence, the distinction here is that (2) treats atheism as a philosophy with a set doctrine about the destructive nature of religion, whereas (1) treats atheists as a cohesive group that defends its own members.

A major problem with (2) is that many of the people labeled "fundamentalist atheists," including Dawkins, et al., don't actually make that claim. In particular many of the atheists labeled as part of the "clique" on DU do not agree with this position. I read the claim many times that most of the atheists on that discussion board advocate putting the religious in mental institutions, but it was always unsubstantiated. One user posted a thread in that forum explaining how most atheists enjoy religious music, holidays, cathedral architecture, and so forth; the main advocate of (2) was shocked, shocked at the fact that most of the atheists on the board had positive things to say about religious culture. I'm not sure whether the incident changed his conception of "fundamentalist atheism."

There are people who can accurately be named "anti-theists," but I'm not sure Dawkins and his colleagues ascribe to that label. I would place the four so-called New Atheists on a continuum, starting with Christopher Hitchens, the most vituperative critic of religion, followed by Sam Harris, Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, the most objective and scholarly. Both Hitchens and Harris are apologists for neoconservative foreign policy, arguing that Muslim fanatics are a unique threat to Western civilization which can only be eliminated by force. Their position is perhaps the origin of the misconception that many atheists advocate violence against the religious. Dennett and Dawkins are strongly critical of American imperialism and violent coercion of any kind. Not even all of these four consider violence justified; to impute that position to a majority of atheists is an egregious exaggeration.

3). Fundamentalist atheists are those who insist that the only proper reading of a religious text is a literal reading and that all believers must adhere to such an interpretation.

This definition cemented in my mind the notion that the three posters who provided the definitions were merely drawing them around grudges and appealing to past experiences on the board to provide content for the chimera that is fundamentalist atheism. (3) happily eschews the common factor between the two preceding definitions, effectively depriving all three of any credibility. The practice of denying counter-evidence is tellingly absent from this definition; if there was any legitimate basis for the term I would expect that to be a universal component.

I understand the argument which gives rise to this definition. It was in fact instrumental in my own transition away from belief in God. When I was a child I believed everything in the bible was the literal truth, but the Cosmo Kramer that is reality inevitably imposed itself on my little bubble. The stories of the Flood and the Creation are simply contrary to fact, and when I abandoned them I couldn't settle on a liberal interpretation of Christianity. The New Testament, with all its miracles, is no less fantastic than the Old Testament. Without the story
of the Fall, the Resurrection narrative doesn't make any sense. Once the Old Testament myths are suspect, the New Testament miracles must fall under the same scrutiny. If the miracles are discounted, what is the rational distinction that can be made to assert that some parts of the New Testament are historical, while others are mythical or allegorical? Any standard that might be applied to distinguish between the two is, as far as I can see, completely arbitrary. The only cohesive readings of the bible are a literalist view (which must contend with a mountain of evidence against its veracity) and an allegorical view.

The above reasoning is either misinterpreted by a believer or misapplied by a disbeliever to create the negative interactions of the kind which lead to (3). This seems a rather personalized definition of "fundamentalist atheism," but then, all three definitions seem highly personalized. Regardless of the definition, though, I only ever see the term used as a pejorative. It is applied as a catch-all for anyone who steps out of line and expresses their ideas about religion. There is only one fundamental of atheism: not believing in God. You don't even have to make the claim that God doesn't exist; all you have to do is refrain from making the claim that He does. There is no central atheist authority, and no foundational creed to subscribe to. Out of such a non-contiguous group, the "fundamentalist" label tends to fall upon anyone whose behavior is judged impertinent.