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The failure of the atheist project

Angus McDonald ABC Religion and Ethics 26 Oct 2010
The signal failure of the atheist project stems from its evasions and its incuriosity, its sloppy arguments and its unwillingness to question its own assumptions.


The atheist critique of religion as 'irrational' discounts the fact that powerful secular agencies including government, the media and the advertising industry make irrational interventions into public life every day of the week.

We might take as an example the mining industry, which has before our eyes just destroyed an Australian prime minister and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. If the science is right, life on earth is next on the list, a concern that Dawkins as a scientist might more productively turn his attention to.

Conversely, about a fifth of the world's population already inhabits a space where the exclusion of religion from public life has been an accomplished fact for decades. That state is, of course, the People's Republic of China, whose policies are not noticeably more rational or functional than anyone else's.

These have lurched from open slather population growth to forced sterilisation and abortion; from near obliteration of Tibetan culture, to an insistence on the state's right to name the next Dalai Lama. The attitude to homosexuality may be consistent, but is not notable for its tolerance. In spite of all this, Falun Gong gained 100 million adherents almost overnight, until the government let its displeasure be known.

No doubt there are other perspectives on all of this, and I would love to hear them. The point is that if atheism is proposed as a basis for political action, its proponents owe us the courtesy of examining its historical record.

This brings us to the problem of what atheism as a political force is capable of achieving. It has been pointed out many times that some of the worst crimes in history were perpetrated by atheist leaders - Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot. To be fair, the great majority of their tens of millions of victims died due to economic mismanagement and other criminally ill conceived policies. But this still leaves a huge number who were put to death or had their lives wrecked simply because their beliefs were judged to stand in the way of dialectical materialism.

Let us have no illusions about this: these leaders deployed the rhetoric of atheism to urge legions of often teenaged acolytes to acts of murder and destruction that haunt those societies to this day.

Hitchens and Dawkins seek to sidestep this difficulty by focusing on Hitler, whose atheism is problematic. Dawkins deals with Stalin in a single offhand paragraph, while Mao Zedong, the most successful atheist of all time (years in power, number of people ruled, number of people killed) does not rate a mention by either.

Hitchens has two things to say on the subject of atheist genocide. The first is that "most nations have to go through at least one anticlerical phase," although he does concede that in Russia and China "these interludes were exceptionally brutal ones."

From Hitchens's writings here and elsewhere, we can surmise the following equation. Three thousand New Yorkers dead in two freakishly successful acts of violence - words can barely express the evil of this outrage. Millions of people of Chinese, Russian and other nationalities persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and killed with grinding determination over a period of decades - unnecessarily excessive, but necessary.

He goes on to point out that, once these regimes had eviscerated religion, they borrowed its techniques to manipulate the masses through ritual, costume and the cult of the infallible leader, effectively denying their claim to atheism.

It is ironic, then, that the atheist movement has so quickly acquired some of the troubling aspects of mainstream religion - the towering prophets, the adoring flock, the dreary self righteousness, the self-satisfied certainty of its own correctness.

Not that there's anything inherently harmful in arrogance. Many of us have enjoyed watching these gladiators impale the hypocrisies of the church and the inanities of "intelligent design," and in this they may do us a service. Much of the appeal of the atheist movement lies in its entertainment value, its mastery of the media space. But what do these atheist celebrities have to offer, beyond a capacity to debunk that is already well exercised?

Maintaining the separation between church and state is the duty of secularism, and it could certainly be doing a better job, particularly in countries like the United States. But atheism must be somehow different from secularism, or no one would be talking about it.

The difference is that secularism assumes tolerance. Political atheism defines itself against religion, casting itself as scientific fact and religion as superstitious fiction. Atheists must therefore always be right, and the religious always wrong - a formulation that sounds just a little dangerous.

Non-belief by itself can propose no ethical system, so atheist activism must borrow its positions from other codes, a process that is not always rational or even conscious.

"I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism," writes Dawkins, yet during the Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide, atheism gave licence to Mao's racism, Pol Pot's anti-intellectualism, and every other garden variety prejudice. If these were not acts of war in a technical sense (any less than 9/11 was), they were something worse - pogroms directed by governments against their own people, with victims numbered in millions.

To contend that the human mind is feeble enough to commit crimes in the name of a nonexistent god, but not enough to do so in the name of nonexistent belief, is simply specious - unless one believes one type of mind to be inherently superior to the other. Hopefully those events will never be repeated, but anyone who sees atheism as some kind of key to world peace is deluding themselves.

An instructive example from the modern day is France, which recently passed a law banning women from wearing the burqa. Overblown fear and anti-Islamic hysteria have moved this democracy to interfere in a matter no state has any business with, namely, the clothing choices of a few thousand women.

Leaving aside the canard of security, the only possible issue here is one of coercion. But if women are being forced into the veil, the problem is best tackled by education, not the sledgehammer of legislation, whose most likely effect will be to confine those women to their homes. Oh yes, and quite possibly provoke an angry backlash.

If we atheists believe so firmly that our values are rational, and therefore universal, surely we can win out through reasoned debate rather than ghettoising opinion we do not agree with. It might just take a little more time than our increasingly impatient society seems ready to invest.

Humanist ethics have formed the foundation of democratic law for centuries; are they suddenly so weak that they depend on the nonexistence of a beard in the sky for their survival?

By defining religion as bigoted and irrational, the new atheists invite it to fill exactly that description. And by singling out religion for such dedicated attention - instead of, say, the unscientific business of climate scepticism - they buy into its claim to be "special." They also betray their fear, which is only likely to encourage their opponents.

And it is not as if the world is oversupplied with schools, clinics and soup kitchens. No one denies that great evils have been perpetrated in the name of religion, just as they have been done in the name of trade (colonialism), democracy (Vietnam, Iraq), or atheism.

But religion has also made enormous contributions in terms of charity, support for education, and sponsorship of artistic genius over the millennia. Does the atheist movement have a program to address these needs?

Presumably religion will be with us for some time to come. Partly this is because religious experience is real and palpable to large numbers of people, and partly because religion weaves through the fabric of society in ways that are far less open to attack than the visible manifestations of church and doctrine.

In another striking instance of incuriosity, Dawkins and Hitchens fail to ask why religion is resurgent (if indeed it is). The question seems an obvious one. Three hundred years after the Enlightenment, 150 years after Darwin and Marx, 50 to 70 years after savagely thorough attempts to eliminate its presence from the two biggest nations on earth, with scientific knowledge expanding more rapidly than ever and bringing enormous advances, why is religion still here at all? Could it be that attacking it makes it stronger? Or could it be that the hollow promise of consumerism has left an aching hole in the lives of many?

At this moment, as we wonder what we have got ourselves into in Afghanistan and Iraq, we should ask ourselves this. Does the world really need another militancy, fuelled by the fervour of the newly converted and an overstated sense of grievance, a militancy that appears to consist mainly of affluent middle class people in powerful Western countries? Does it really?

Faith is far from exercising a monopoly on intolerance and abuse, suggesting that the problem is not really religion, which at this level is just another fallible social institution in urgent need of reform. The problem is absolutism, a position which the atheist pamphleteers flaunt as happily as any fundamentalist.

The most signal failure of the atheist project is not that it insists on analysing religion in narrowly scientific terms, or that it cherry picks history in support of its case. It is that with its evasions and its incuriosity, its sloppy arguments and its unwillingness to question its own assumptions, it debases the currency of rational inquiry that it so claims to champion.

In doing so, its exponents shoot themselves in the foot while backing the wrong horse. This might make for a diverting YouTube video, but as a basis for public debate it is as empty as the heavens above.

Angus McDonald is a widely published writer and photographer. His work has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, The South China Morning Post, The Guardian, The Observer and many other publications.

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