i'm deeply catholic and a socialist lesbian (so hardly representative of anybody i suppose) but it truly doesn't bother me when atheists state unequivocally that god is not real and my beliefs are delusional. i appreciate them keeping it 100 with me. from my perspective, though, it feels like a person with tritanopia is telling me i'm delusional for believing in the color yellow. like i totally understand their point of view and respect where they're coming from intellectually, and they certainly don't have to take my word for it, but, it's real, so definitely real that there's absolutely no reason for me to get upset or try to argue with someone otherwise, so real that it would be hard to even come up with an argument for it
I think this is something most difficult for unbelievers to take seriously.
I don't consider myself an atheist for a few reasons, but I didn't come to disbelieve god through some long study or argumentation. I just realized that I don't believe and never have believed and, possibly, am just incapable of believing in god or any number of gods.
But I think this has also allowed me to be more sympathetic towards people who do believe in something. Belief, to me, is a bit like love (probably a good reason why they're so often associated!), in that we don't choose who we love.
I see this among Progressive Christians, too (I should know, I was one): the respect for other people's/religion's beliefs. If you are a Christian and consider Hinduism an equally valid belief system, then are you even really believing in Christianity? I don't mean to insult the many Christians I still know and love. I think they don't really believe the tenets that make it exclusionary, but they don't want to face the logical outcome of what that means, and they're not ready to give up the structure and comfort of long-held rituals.
As a progressive Christian, I have a certain amount of humility about how God operates. The Bible tells us Jesus said "Nobody comes to the Father but through me," but he didn't give any details. What if God reveals in different ways at different times, and in different cultures? Makes sense to me that the divine is understood in a cultural context--that doesn't make it any less powerful or divine. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, seems logical that God would be able to show up in a way that resonates with a particular group of people, and in a very different way with another group.
Of the three monotheistic faiths that emerged in western Asia/northern Africa, Christianity is the most internally inconsistent. There is only one God, but Jesus is God, and so is the Holy Ghost. What? How can you have it both ways? So if God can also be Jesus who is a man, and a will-o-the-wisp, why can't God be Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu?
Sure, it’s possible. I just don’t believe any of that anymore. More likely to me that the universe is indeed mysterious in origin and miraculous in its unfolding (our existence is statistically outrageous; our bodies a marvel, a mini universe). And since we developed consciousness, and culture, our incredible brains have come up with stories to deal with it. I’m not a person who thinks there’s anything inherently bad about religious faith.
But! I think they actually have a strong case for this. Much of the modern Progressive Christianity is about deconstructing their own faith and understanding it as something constructed and held together more by people than by god. I've even heard some progressive Christians who don't consider Jesus' status as god to be absolutely true or even necessary.
It reminds me a bit of Mormonism - some amount of Mormons believe John Smith made it all up, yet they remain Mormon anyway. This may seem absurd to many, but I don't think it's any less absurd than being a Twin fan or Viking fan.
I mean on the one hand, religions need certainty in order function with any kind of legitimacy. On the other, tolerance of other religions is almost a necessity of modern peaceful civilization. If one believes their own religion is the right one (which they should be if they are a true believer), then by definition they have to believe every other religion is wrong.
Right out of the gate there we have a recipe for eternal conflict. And I just don't see how that strife can ever be solved when the bedrock principle of every religion is basically "we are right, they are wrong."
I think a lot of people are more comfortable, now, saying that they don't know if their religion is the True one. They just believe that it is.
It comes from a stance of humility wherein people who believe in god also believe that they do not fully know god and never will. And so they're more willing to say that Muslims or Buddhists may have the right of it, because no one has a special communication line to god.
I don't necessarily think it's the certainty that's a big problem; it's the evangelism and proselytizing. You can think you're right and everyone is wrong and that's fine, but when you feel the need to "convince" (or force) everyone else to think "rightly," that's the recipe for conflict.
It's not just the "certainty" conflict between two religions, but also the "certainty" conflict within each religion that causes just as much, if not more, strife than say the clash between Islam and Christianity.
My local Koreatown was possible only after a massive brawl between the Koreans and the local black population in an empty parking lot. According to local legend about a hundred combatants from each side showed up, armed with knives, bats, clubs, etc. The Koreans won, the blacks were driven off the field of battle and that kicked off a process where Koreans took over the neighborhood while the blacks moved out.
I think human beings are just hard wired for competition if not outright conflict and the parameters of that competition are communal/tribal. Race, ethnicity, sports teams: obviously religion can be a sufficient condition but it's just one of many.
I agree innate tribal competition is a core part of the equation. It's both interesting and disconcerting that the thing that got us to the top of the earthly food chain, our incredible ability to innovate, adapt, and out-compete our predators/environment/each other, is the very thing that is makes it so hard for us to live in harmony.
Our brains are still very hard-wired to win. And it's hard not to have losers with winners.
I've been saying for a long time that it's miraculous that human beings, who evolved in tiny little hunter gatherer bands of less than a hundred people, cam somehow transplant those tribal loyalties onto larger groups that can number in the millions.
I guess when you look at the whole timeline of homo sapiens (and maybe earlier) it's maybe not that surprising. We were succeeding at being tribal for like 99% of our existence, should we be surprised it's hard not to now?
That's one perspective. But that cooperation was largely necessary because those tiny little tribes often came into conflict/warfare with other tiny little tribes. By some estimates 1/3 of all humans in prehistory would meet their demise at the hands of another human being.
I think the central tension is more or less as follows:
1. It's a human universal norm to need traditions such as holidays which bind people and cultures together.
2. If you're the sort of person who can recognize that objectively you also likely recognize the particular traditions/holidays that you grew up with are a farce which (fundamentally) are interchangeable with those practiced by anyone else. You're also quite probably a weird alienated outsider to your own traditions anyway, and might not even be neurotypical. You might not be an outright atheist, but you recognize that it's all playacting, more or less.
I think the two are increasingly merging into a third who believes something like: Most cultures fail and are pretty terrible for the people who live in them. Despite not believing in God, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to gleefully dismiss the traditions of the cultures that are thriving.
You can call this belief in belief, but I think of it more as an iterative positive sum game plus Chesterton's Fence argument
Perhaps there's a fundamental difference between what one might call "atheistic optimism" (the idea that there are opportunities for great material improvements, which atheism can open up to everyone; Marx is the obvious example) and "atheistic pessimism" (the idea that the civilizational order is fragile and can easily get much worse, and that atheism could lead to dangerous transformations even if it is true; Lovecraft and Ligotti are over here).
That "pessimistic" attitude is what Russell Kirk and others identify as the underlying temperament of conservatism, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Freddie doesn't have it. :)
I work in tech and there are very clearly defined rules for promoting new code to production. After the developers finish it goes to test. Then it usually goes back to the developers for bug fixes. A bunch of times. Eventually it goes to QA/UAT where more bugs will probably be found. And so on.
Anybody who's ever worked in development has had the experience of trying to make a change in, for example, the format for names of log files and ended up breaking authentication/authorization. (I'm exaggerating, but not by much.) Big code bases contain millions of lines of code and making a change without extensive testing is tantamount to career suicide.
As complicated as that sounds the number of variables in something like a national economy probably orders of magnitude greater. And yet people want to "pass the bill to see what's in it".
As someone who was raised Catholic and has no connection to religion at this point, it’s still true that the New Testament (as one example) has a lot of good stuff! For myself and many others, there is inspiration provided by those principles, and the world would be a much better place if they were actually followed. The TLDR for those principles for me is “care about people in need.”
It’s important to remember that the people in charge of religions are the ones screwing then up, not always the teachings themselves.
My sense is that the New New Atheists know this all too well and are insecure about it. They look around at our “crisis of meaning,” at the explosion of deaths of despair, and they feel guilty. They think their own worldview is partly to blame for the misery. They feel have little to offer, and that religion has plenty. So they wind up trying to suck the marrow from the bones of a carcass that they believe is rightly dead
It’s more so desperation than condescension - they want so badly to be good, but they’re scared the truth is at odds with goodness
In a world where institutions are collapsing right and left (pun retroactively intended), this atheist is at listening to the idea that at least religions provided SOMETHING.
But also note that my wife is quite religious and that I have never quite been able to summon the disdain for religion given my inability to dismiss others’ claims of personal experiences of God.
I think the feeling that you must disdain other people's beliefs (even if you think they're irrational) is a very childish one.
I know people who believe in god. I know people who believe the moon landing was fake. I know people who think vaccines cause autism.
I don't particularly like that they believe these things, but most of these people are also pretty normal and just do normal people things every day. Occasionally some madness bursts from their mouths, but this is easy enough to ignore. And even if I engage, no minds get changed.
The unfashionable truth is that almost everything everyone believes is driven by emotion first, and emotions don't respond to being argued into or out of existence.
Excellent points all. Freedom of religion includes the freedom to exclude religion from your life. Ideally, each individual, whether subscribing to a religion or adopting a secular atheism, adopts a set of principles and values that accord with maintaining a functional and polite society. Observing the “golden rule,” for example.
As important is embracing the notion of tolerance. Not compulsory acceptance or celebration, some societal mandate to embrace perspectives with which you disagree. Tolerance. An ability to agree to disagree, and to move forward with mutual acknowledgement that agreement is sufficient.
Finally, those who disagree do so in good faith. Indulging in baseless ad hominem attacks, and collapsing whole groups of people into monoliths to extrapolate base characteristics to all, deprives them of individuality, agency, and individual sovereignty. That is as outrageous as it is disgraceful, and it would be better, in my opinion, to keep an open mind and engage in argumentation with humility.
And that is what is most palpably absent in many of rhetorical exchanges today: humility. The certitude, moral and otherwise, demonstrated by people on all sides of many arguments is confounding to me. The lack of self-awareness, introspection, and curiosity about most subjects is disheartening, to say the least, and all would be well served to remember most of us know far less than we do and undoubtedly live in glass houses.
Thoughtful article and thank you for sharing it, Mr. deBoer. You often provoke my own thoughts and I am better for it!
The main point of Tim O'Neill's project, according to him anyway, is to stop the cacophony of the crowd who keep shouting "FACTS and LOGIC!" from the rooftops from embarrassing themselves by getting the facts wrong, over and over again. In a sense, it really doesn't matter where Christmas comes from—proving every last Christmas tradition is 100% pagan in origin would still say nothing about whether one Jesus Christ was the Son of God—but having an avalanche of online atheists use these allegations as ammunition every year absolutely undermines the project of presenting atheism as a more fact-based alternative to religion.
The other irony is having gone to a few family Christmases where family Jesuit priest joked about taking over the pagan holiday and adding a bunch of Saints to the roster.
I agree with this, and I should also point out that O'Neill, as a historian, wants to defend his discipline against amateurish nonsense from people who should know better. He's pointed out a few times that many well-known atheists or rationalists have a science background, and while they are good at doing and explaining science, their knowledge of how history is made is weak. For example, his (long) series on Jesus mythicism repeatedly makes the point that while we cannot "prove" that the Jesus stories are based on an actual historical Jesus to a level that reaches that of scientific "proof", it is still the most parsimonious reading of the evidence, while mythicism requires making unsupported assumptions. So in a sense, there is in his project a large part of defending the humanities against the scientists who either don't see their value, or think that their science background means that they could do better than actual historians. This is also a point that's being made by another internet historian Bret Devereaux, who isn't an atheist.
"We come to atheism in sorrow. The lack of a god destroys the possibility of transcendent meaning."
I see people often mention this kind of thing, but I don't see a reason for it.
Not all who disbelieve in god grieve that loss. Not all who lack a god have lost the transcendent.
To me, the lack of god or even some kind of fixed meaning for life and the universe seems like something worth celebrating! We are not tainted by some ancient sin, nor are we hopelessly wandering through a symbolic desert where we must accept that the goal of life is to improve ourselves or our species, lest we suffer some punishment (whether eternal or recurrent).
Life is not suffering. Life simply is. Sometimes it's hard and bleak, but it's often quite beautiful. And when you look at the grandeur of nature, when you consider the majesty of the construction of the universe, you can still be overwhelmed by awe. And, to me, an awe all the more beautiful because no hand constructed it for us.
For me, this would all be fine except for the problem of death. If you grow up believing your deceased loved ones are in heaven, and you'll be with them again someday -- and then you realize, "actually, I don't believe in God or the afterlife which means death is just death." -- it's a tremendous loss.
Atheists say various things to make it okay, like "Isn't it lucky we get to live at all." But for most people, it's not much comfort.
I had a friend whose young daughter passed away from cancer. I think it was his wife that told me that he prayed every day for God to take the cancer from his daughter's body and put in his own.
I am an atheist but it would never occur to me to tell him something like "There's no God, what you're doing is futile, blah blah blah." And if one of my atheist friends had said such a thing I think I would have broken their nose.
Heaven always seemed so remote to me when I was growing up that I guess I never thought anyone but actual saints made it there, so I never felt its loss because I never expected anyone I knew to get there.
To me, I found comfort in believing that life is not a test, let alone one we are designed to fail. And then there is just my own strangeness in that I have always found the concept of death to be a great comfort. I find the concept of nothingness, of non-being, to be incredibly beautiful. Which, again, is likely something most people don't share!
But I can understand how the loss of heaven would lead to great sorrow.
If you’re sad about the no-heaven, watch Fantastic Fungi on Netflix. It really makes a case for the beauty of decomposition, physical and probably otherwise. Whatever your soul is.
I think this is the big driving force behind religion. We have our parents and grandparents die, usually far away and out of sight. Most of us are fortunate enough to not suffer the death of our children. Until a little over a hundred years ago, a family experienced the death of children, over and over.
Why is it worse to lose a child than a parent? I'm not sure, but the thought of losing one of my kids is much worse than my parents who lived long full lives and were becoming more and more debilitated, on their way down rather than on their way up. (my mother recently died)
People need/ needed the comfort of seeing their babies and children in heaven., like Eric Clapton's song, If I saw you in heaven.
Until I reached my mid to late forties I didn't like the idea that when we died we simply decomposed. What lives on is memory and learned behaviors such as how you raise your children. I liked reincarnation. Heaven didn't sound like much fun.
In my sixties and much closer to death, I'm comfortable with disintegration into smaller and smaller molecules.
But many people want to live forever. Should you even want to?
I wonder if this would still be the case in a less theistic world. The removal of the hope of heaven may be worse than if we simply never bothered with the idea in the first place. My household wasn't religious and I never believed in heaven any more earnestly than I believed in Santa Claus. Death is sad, but I don't think the lack of heaven makes it sadder for me.
I was thinking that the concept of heaven/reincarnation came about with people who constantly experienced death. They also knew nothing about the microbial world or anatomy/physiology. For many of us, myself included, science has replaced that part of religion. We don't experience death as often or as personally as we used to, so most of us don't need that "comfort".
I can't believe in heaven/hell/ almighty God the man in white robes any more than Santa Claus either. I wasn't raised with those stories. But I can imagine a need for comfort so powerful that I might be tempted.
I did go to church for a year about twenty years ago and it was very nice. They accepted that I believed in the teachings of Jesus but not the surrounding mythologies. It was a nice community and was very outward looking.
I also experienced going to a friend's church with her and had the most enlightening experience. It is a conservative Baptist church, but they had decided to confront racism head on. They brought in a black pastor. He was there for four years and was moving on. He talked about his experience there and I've never heard anything dealing with race that was better. They made significant changes in people's perceptions.
We must be careful in portraying all religious groups as evil.
I'm curious how long you've been able to hold onto this existential positivity for. I could have written this post 20 years ago as a newly minted atheist. But over time it's just ... worn off... and I don't feel it at all anymore. I wish I still did. I'm not exactly sure why that happened.
I stopped believing in god when I was a young child so I guess I've held onto it my whole life. Though I'm also not an especially old person, so who knows.
But I also don't attach much meaning to god or the lack of god. I honestly never even think about it. To me, it's a question that simply doesn't matter.
I wouldn't describe myself as an especially happy or positive person, but I do find great beauty in life. I am often awestruck by simple things, which may sound trite or fanciful, but I'm a pretty simple person.
I was definitely more "New Atheist" as a teenager but I think that was most justly due to my age, and being bitter about being raised Catholic.
I have certainly mellowed out and my feelings now are similar to yours. My life experiences to this point have lead me to believe that organized religion is a net negative on the world and whether God exists does not matter.
I would say that it is more neutral than negative, but I understand where Freddie is coming from in regards to religion's overall impact.
I think you are underestimating the fear that people have of freedom. Being autotelic is terrifying for many, and religion certainly fills the need for an external story.
I think I sort of fall into the view you are criticizing here. I've been an atheist and/or agnostic since I was a kid, and my first foyer into arguing on the internet c. 2000 was strongly focused on arguing the atheist position. At the same time, I've generally appreciated the right kind of church, to the point of attending a UCC church for a few years c. 2005. I probably would do so now, if it wouldn't freak out my wife.
I tend to agree with Haidt that, even if religion has problems, many of which the Religious Right likes to highlight, it has benefits too, and we've sort of thrown the baby out with the bathwater with a plan to replace those benefits.
For me, it's less of a "god-shaped hole" and more of a "Sunday morning-shaped hole." Church service the purpose of providing semi-mandatory social mixing of members of the community (although obviously not all) who otherwise wouldn't interact with each other. When we got rid of it, we didn't really replace it with anything (the closest comparison I've seen is children's birthday parties, where you are forced to socialize with the parents of whomever else happens to be in your kids class). I tend to think that the loss of this sort of socializing has contributed to both the loneliness epidemic/bowling alone, as many people now lack a way to meet people with whom to make friends. I also think that it has contributed to polarization, as without this sort of social mixing, you are less likely to wind up being friends with people who different life experiences than you. Lamenting this loss of community building isn't "praying to the god shaped hole."
I also think that there is some merit to the "god-shaped hole" argument, although in a slightly different way that you describe. I don't think everyone has a "god-shaped hole," I am pretty sure I don't. However, it does appear that there are a lot of people who do. This takes the form of both needing some sort of meaning for life, the universe and everything and wanting some sort of righteous cause to follow. As people have given up traditional religions, I think you've seen them take up replacements. Some of this is taking up non-traditional spirituality, e.g. wicca. Some of it is buying into grand conspiracies, e.g. QAnon, and some of it is going hard into new moral systems, e.g. "Woke" politics. This, however, is more of an observation than a lament. I don't think that we need to worry about filling the god-shaped hole, because I think people who need to, will find a way to do it. At most, you have to be concerned about what they are filling it with, and, while I'd prefer people get into a main-line Christianity than QAnon, I don't know that, on average, people are filling their god-shaped hole with something worse than they once were.
I think that 'god-shaped hole' some people think they need to fill is just our human ego masquerading as divinity. Some people just need to feel special, and religion has a way of supercharging that need. It's like the ultimate old-school snowflake construct.
My belief system begins with three tenants:
1) I'm not special
2) human beings are not special
3) Earth (and our solar system) is not special
When your philosophical point of view begins from a position of abject humility, I find basic existence to be much easier to tolerate and appreciate.
Yeah, I think the "god-shaped hole" is something most people actually don't feel.
It may be worth considering cultures that are predominantly non-religious. When I lived in South Korea, people weren't desperately trying to explain to everyone why they don't believe in god or why they don't need god. They just...went around living their life feeling the way most people feel.
It's not like every Christian and Muslim walk around all day thinking about god or feeling god's love.
Interesting, I also lived in South Korea for a little while and my guess is that while Koreans are among the least religious in the world, there is still plenty of cultural weight to Buddhism, confucianism, and protestant Christianity. The confucianism in particular might explain why they didn't seem to be (at least to my observation, and yours too it seems) trying to fill a God shaped hole in that most of the people I encountered had strong traditional family norms and involvement in their community. The positives of religiosity remain - the rituals, sense of meaning, traditions, ties to family and connection to community- but less of the dogmatic belief that leads people into dark places. This is probably an over generalized perspective, but a society in which children run around at night with no fear and virtually no street crime is doing something right.
I mean, we can just add any kind of meaning to whatever "god-shaped hole" is and use that to justify the existence of the phrase, but I think it's more a comforting term for people than anything else.
Reading Freddie talk about atheism does feel like someone who bemoans their own beliefs. And maybe that's not how he actually feels but is him reflecting a sentiment he sees in many atheists, but I don't think most people are sad or glad about the existence or non-existence of god(s). I think the idea of this hole is a defensive measure rooted more in projection than in reality.
The "God-shaped hole" is the need to feel loved and that you're cared for, protected, and part of a community. It's nearly impossible to feel that way all the time with actual flawed humans, so some (many) people fill the gap by pretending the universe itself loves them.
The idea that wokeism is a replacement religion is something that John McWhorter and Glen Loury have talked about a lot.
Is it worse than Christianity? I would argue yes, because unlike say radical Islam modern Christianity has largely abandoned its crusader phase. Wokeism on the other hand...
I think you are giving Christianity too much credit on this front. There are a lot of branches of Christianity and some are crusading than others. However, there has consistently been a strain of conservative Christianity in the US that has been deeply political and trying to push their views on society. They no longer raise armies to invade the Holy Land (but see certain Christian's support for the Iraq War), but neither do "woke" people.
I think the key difference is that conservative Christians have long focused on political lobbying (look at the success they've had with Supreme Court justices) while the woke have focused on an inchoate, vigilante approach that often singles out individuals rather than organizations for mob style justice.
I think its a matter of what tools are available. Look how a lot of conservative Christians talk about David French (hardly a liberal squish). Along those lines, David French recently had an article (which I am failing to find) talking about a practice in conservative Christian churches where you can basically get ex-communicated for refusing to abandon a friend who is being ex-communicated, which sounds like the height of "cancel culture" mob style justice.
It seems pretty clear that it is just that the sort of conservative Christians who have a desire to do this sort of thing do not have the power to do so in any institution that people on the left-of-center care about. They do, however, have access to governmental power, which is why you see them push for this through government power.
Government power is real power though. As Mr. deBoer has pointed out time and time again the left of center crowd doesn't really have anything like real power and the frustration is what makes them bugfuck insane.
Plus look at the Supreme Court. Religious conservatives have been content to just work slowly and steadily across decades to get that win. The left of center crowd is "Revolution Now!" and about as reasonable as you would expect given that slogan.
I think there are two main types of Atheists. Some, like me, never had any religious feelings or beliefs in the first place. To us, religion just seems a bit odd and we wonder if people ever really believed or have just been playing along for social reasons (or hedging their bets, a la Decarte's wager). Then there are those who once had religion in their youth but were disillusioned when they realized it was a scam. These people often seem bitter and angry at God for not existing. Dawkins seems to fall into this camp. They tend to be the strident anti-religion evangelists.
The second camp are definitely the loudest atheists.
I often find them annoying for the same reason I find evangelizing Christians annoying. It's the convert's problem, wherein they changed their life over something so they think everyone else should too.
I fall into the latter camp, but also still don't consider myself a full-on atheist. I convinced myself I was deeply religious in my adolescence. I had a lot of shit going on at home, and I was figuring out (and admitting) that I was gay in a very oppressive and emotionally violent environment, so I was definitely Searching for Something. It wasn't my sexuality that ultimately killed faith for me, though. It was the concept of hell. I couldn't square the idea with an all-loving and forgiving god, and from that crack it all fell apart. I later admitted to myself that I never "felt" my faith like some people do - it was something I performed in a feverish quest to actually experience, and it never really panned out.
I still think religious people are pretty delusional. I know a lot of very lovely religious folks, including some good friends, and one close friend who is actually a priest! So I don't think they are all bad, but I do think it is a very deliberate choice people make, even if they don't see it as being such. I don't consider myself atheist because I think there probably is some kind of metaphysical spiritual realm out there "bigger than we are" but I don't purport or claim to have any idea what it is. I certainly don't think it's Jesus or whatever. Their certainty is probably what drives me most crazy about religious people, and some of the most truly faithful people I have ever know have admitted they doubt their faith all the time, and to me, that is the sign of someone who takes it seriously.
A previous poster mentioned holding people to account for their behaviors rather than beliefs, and I can relate to that. Some people I know use their faith in amazing, positive, and transformative ways, others use it for evil. I think the vast majority of religious people don't think much about it one way or another, just consider it a thing they do. I do, frankly, wish fewer people were religious, and I don't know what kind of effect a mass loss of faith would have on a society. I suspect we're seeing it now, even among the "faithful." Nobody tries that hard to control other people when they are comfortable in their beliefs. So no, I don't particularly respect religion or other people's faith. But I respect and love a lot people who claim to have faith, and as long as they are not being terrible people, and acting in concert with values I deem to be good and socially redeeming, I have no problem with it.
While I generally agree with the thrust of this article (or at least, I agree with it insofar as I can, while being a believing Christian) that it's probably better for an atheist to be clear-headed and forthright in their considered rejection of religion rather than to get mixed up in a vague post-modern "you do you" muddle, I think that there is room among the various strains of atheistic thought for differences in the degree of favorability toward religion.
I don't think that the core of atheism -- believing that there is in fact no god -- necessarily has to entail a highly critical posture toward religion. Though it certainly often does, and it's probably the most intuitive sociological position toward which to proceed from atheism, I don't think it's actually an inherent consequence of an atheistic starting principle.
As there are a wide variety of both religions-in-general and specific practices within religions, I think it makes sense for an atheist to be more critical of some religions and less critical of others.
One might, for example, be more negatively disposed toward the Christianity that motivated American slave owners but more positively disposed toward the Christianity that motivated abolitionists, while still retaining the viewpoint that both were wrong to derive their principles from the illusion of Christianity.
In a more contemporary example, one might be more friendly toward the Christians that staff refugee service charities than one is toward those that staff the Heritage Foundation, while again still criticizing the motivating beliefs of both.
As religion is not an undifferentiated monolith, neither does an atheistic perspective on religion need to be a singular response.
I don't see a point in being offensive about someone's beliefs...until they try to either shunt them onto me, make rules about how I must behave based on their religious beliefs, or are otherwise critical of non-believers (such as those who claim it's impossible to be moral without belief in god).
So up until those points, I'm perfectly happy to say "I believe it is incredibly unlikely that your religion has found 'the Truth,' but I'm glad you've found something meaningful in your life that gives you rituals and a community which bring you joy and comfort when you need it." I'm being entirely honest. Is that really more condescending than bluntness? Why is that more condescending or less authentic?
Lolol I thought this was going to be, "Who cares where the holidays come from, they're fun! Eggnog! Presents!" instead FdB is like, "GOD IS DEAD." Cheers!
The point of this post is not to disparage the religious, much less the holidays. The point is that we have to take religion seriously on its own terms, to respect its truth claims by evaluating them.
Feels like many people do this and it doesn't really lead anywhere. Most religious people don't respect the truth claims of the religion they believe in!
Why should everyone else?
Seems like the correct tactic is just to go after people's behavior. Seems more productive and successful, anyway.
Evaluating the truth claims is increasingly silly as those claims have evolved into non-falsifiable beliefs about God - which cannot be proven false. False beliefs, like "The Earth is the Center" have been proven false, and ejected from the canon of belief.
"God Loves You". Is this True, False, or meaningless? Did God give us "Free Will", or not?
"God helped me stop being an alcoholic". More alcoholics, and drug addicts, have stopped their destructive lifestyle choices thru gaining belief in Jesus than thru any atheist program. More, but not all, nor even most.
In evaluating what beliefs help those most in need of help, Christianity would be evaluated as better than atheism.
The killing done by Communist atheists in the last 100 years compares as worse than Christians.
But I am not sure that is what you said. You clearly said that religion results in a lot more harm than atheism. That seems disparaging to me. The headline and the article don't quite support one another.
This thoughtful essay puts me in mind of those folks who insist that the Bible doesn't *actually* ban same-sex unions, or who can "prove" that there is no biblical basis for opposing abortion choice, blah blah. My response is always, "We shouldn't base the rules of a free and open society on a religious book, so I don't care what the Bible says."
So while I appreciate Dan Savage debating Brian Brown on what's Christian (or what isn't) about same-sex marriage, I think it's a futile exercise.
You believe in persuasion, I'd imagine. Taking someone's beliefs seriously and then arguing to them from those beliefs is a pretty powerful tool for persuasion.
Er, perhaps more off-topic than uncouth ...
i'm deeply catholic and a socialist lesbian (so hardly representative of anybody i suppose) but it truly doesn't bother me when atheists state unequivocally that god is not real and my beliefs are delusional. i appreciate them keeping it 100 with me. from my perspective, though, it feels like a person with tritanopia is telling me i'm delusional for believing in the color yellow. like i totally understand their point of view and respect where they're coming from intellectually, and they certainly don't have to take my word for it, but, it's real, so definitely real that there's absolutely no reason for me to get upset or try to argue with someone otherwise, so real that it would be hard to even come up with an argument for it
I think this is something most difficult for unbelievers to take seriously.
I don't consider myself an atheist for a few reasons, but I didn't come to disbelieve god through some long study or argumentation. I just realized that I don't believe and never have believed and, possibly, am just incapable of believing in god or any number of gods.
But I think this has also allowed me to be more sympathetic towards people who do believe in something. Belief, to me, is a bit like love (probably a good reason why they're so often associated!), in that we don't choose who we love.
We just love them.
Ursula K. LeGuin pointed out that even if you are walking away from Rome, you're still on the Roman road.
This is the woman who famously left the pickle barrels out of The Dispossessed, even though she knew they existed on every street corner.
This is how you know Prometheus is actually Great
I see this among Progressive Christians, too (I should know, I was one): the respect for other people's/religion's beliefs. If you are a Christian and consider Hinduism an equally valid belief system, then are you even really believing in Christianity? I don't mean to insult the many Christians I still know and love. I think they don't really believe the tenets that make it exclusionary, but they don't want to face the logical outcome of what that means, and they're not ready to give up the structure and comfort of long-held rituals.
As a progressive Christian, I have a certain amount of humility about how God operates. The Bible tells us Jesus said "Nobody comes to the Father but through me," but he didn't give any details. What if God reveals in different ways at different times, and in different cultures? Makes sense to me that the divine is understood in a cultural context--that doesn't make it any less powerful or divine. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, seems logical that God would be able to show up in a way that resonates with a particular group of people, and in a very different way with another group.
Of the three monotheistic faiths that emerged in western Asia/northern Africa, Christianity is the most internally inconsistent. There is only one God, but Jesus is God, and so is the Holy Ghost. What? How can you have it both ways? So if God can also be Jesus who is a man, and a will-o-the-wisp, why can't God be Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu?
This comment demands a Crusade!
Sure, it’s possible. I just don’t believe any of that anymore. More likely to me that the universe is indeed mysterious in origin and miraculous in its unfolding (our existence is statistically outrageous; our bodies a marvel, a mini universe). And since we developed consciousness, and culture, our incredible brains have come up with stories to deal with it. I’m not a person who thinks there’s anything inherently bad about religious faith.
I always find this kind of hilarious.
But! I think they actually have a strong case for this. Much of the modern Progressive Christianity is about deconstructing their own faith and understanding it as something constructed and held together more by people than by god. I've even heard some progressive Christians who don't consider Jesus' status as god to be absolutely true or even necessary.
It reminds me a bit of Mormonism - some amount of Mormons believe John Smith made it all up, yet they remain Mormon anyway. This may seem absurd to many, but I don't think it's any less absurd than being a Twin fan or Viking fan.
"Man creates God in his own image."
I mean, this is basically true, yes?
Isn't that the crux of the problem though?
I mean on the one hand, religions need certainty in order function with any kind of legitimacy. On the other, tolerance of other religions is almost a necessity of modern peaceful civilization. If one believes their own religion is the right one (which they should be if they are a true believer), then by definition they have to believe every other religion is wrong.
Right out of the gate there we have a recipe for eternal conflict. And I just don't see how that strife can ever be solved when the bedrock principle of every religion is basically "we are right, they are wrong."
I think a lot of people are more comfortable, now, saying that they don't know if their religion is the True one. They just believe that it is.
It comes from a stance of humility wherein people who believe in god also believe that they do not fully know god and never will. And so they're more willing to say that Muslims or Buddhists may have the right of it, because no one has a special communication line to god.
I don't necessarily think it's the certainty that's a big problem; it's the evangelism and proselytizing. You can think you're right and everyone is wrong and that's fine, but when you feel the need to "convince" (or force) everyone else to think "rightly," that's the recipe for conflict.
It's not just the "certainty" conflict between two religions, but also the "certainty" conflict within each religion that causes just as much, if not more, strife than say the clash between Islam and Christianity.
The history of Christianity is famously peaceful and led to no wars over differing beliefs even once
This is the hard truth.
My local Koreatown was possible only after a massive brawl between the Koreans and the local black population in an empty parking lot. According to local legend about a hundred combatants from each side showed up, armed with knives, bats, clubs, etc. The Koreans won, the blacks were driven off the field of battle and that kicked off a process where Koreans took over the neighborhood while the blacks moved out.
I think human beings are just hard wired for competition if not outright conflict and the parameters of that competition are communal/tribal. Race, ethnicity, sports teams: obviously religion can be a sufficient condition but it's just one of many.
I agree innate tribal competition is a core part of the equation. It's both interesting and disconcerting that the thing that got us to the top of the earthly food chain, our incredible ability to innovate, adapt, and out-compete our predators/environment/each other, is the very thing that is makes it so hard for us to live in harmony.
Our brains are still very hard-wired to win. And it's hard not to have losers with winners.
I've been saying for a long time that it's miraculous that human beings, who evolved in tiny little hunter gatherer bands of less than a hundred people, cam somehow transplant those tribal loyalties onto larger groups that can number in the millions.
Indeed.
I guess when you look at the whole timeline of homo sapiens (and maybe earlier) it's maybe not that surprising. We were succeeding at being tribal for like 99% of our existence, should we be surprised it's hard not to now?
That's one perspective. But that cooperation was largely necessary because those tiny little tribes often came into conflict/warfare with other tiny little tribes. By some estimates 1/3 of all humans in prehistory would meet their demise at the hands of another human being.
I think the central tension is more or less as follows:
1. It's a human universal norm to need traditions such as holidays which bind people and cultures together.
2. If you're the sort of person who can recognize that objectively you also likely recognize the particular traditions/holidays that you grew up with are a farce which (fundamentally) are interchangeable with those practiced by anyone else. You're also quite probably a weird alienated outsider to your own traditions anyway, and might not even be neurotypical. You might not be an outright atheist, but you recognize that it's all playacting, more or less.
I think the two are increasingly merging into a third who believes something like: Most cultures fail and are pretty terrible for the people who live in them. Despite not believing in God, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to gleefully dismiss the traditions of the cultures that are thriving.
You can call this belief in belief, but I think of it more as an iterative positive sum game plus Chesterton's Fence argument
Perhaps there's a fundamental difference between what one might call "atheistic optimism" (the idea that there are opportunities for great material improvements, which atheism can open up to everyone; Marx is the obvious example) and "atheistic pessimism" (the idea that the civilizational order is fragile and can easily get much worse, and that atheism could lead to dangerous transformations even if it is true; Lovecraft and Ligotti are over here).
That "pessimistic" attitude is what Russell Kirk and others identify as the underlying temperament of conservatism, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Freddie doesn't have it. :)
I work in tech and there are very clearly defined rules for promoting new code to production. After the developers finish it goes to test. Then it usually goes back to the developers for bug fixes. A bunch of times. Eventually it goes to QA/UAT where more bugs will probably be found. And so on.
Anybody who's ever worked in development has had the experience of trying to make a change in, for example, the format for names of log files and ended up breaking authentication/authorization. (I'm exaggerating, but not by much.) Big code bases contain millions of lines of code and making a change without extensive testing is tantamount to career suicide.
As complicated as that sounds the number of variables in something like a national economy probably orders of magnitude greater. And yet people want to "pass the bill to see what's in it".
As someone who was raised Catholic and has no connection to religion at this point, it’s still true that the New Testament (as one example) has a lot of good stuff! For myself and many others, there is inspiration provided by those principles, and the world would be a much better place if they were actually followed. The TLDR for those principles for me is “care about people in need.”
It’s important to remember that the people in charge of religions are the ones screwing then up, not always the teachings themselves.
Religion is a tool. Like any tool, it can be made into a weapon. But it can also be used to build something of value.
“We come to atheism in sorrow”
My sense is that the New New Atheists know this all too well and are insecure about it. They look around at our “crisis of meaning,” at the explosion of deaths of despair, and they feel guilty. They think their own worldview is partly to blame for the misery. They feel have little to offer, and that religion has plenty. So they wind up trying to suck the marrow from the bones of a carcass that they believe is rightly dead
It’s more so desperation than condescension - they want so badly to be good, but they’re scared the truth is at odds with goodness
By “new new” atheists I mean the people Freddie is critiquing in his post, folks like Haidt, not Hitch/Harris/Dawkins
In a world where institutions are collapsing right and left (pun retroactively intended), this atheist is at listening to the idea that at least religions provided SOMETHING.
But also note that my wife is quite religious and that I have never quite been able to summon the disdain for religion given my inability to dismiss others’ claims of personal experiences of God.
I think the feeling that you must disdain other people's beliefs (even if you think they're irrational) is a very childish one.
I know people who believe in god. I know people who believe the moon landing was fake. I know people who think vaccines cause autism.
I don't particularly like that they believe these things, but most of these people are also pretty normal and just do normal people things every day. Occasionally some madness bursts from their mouths, but this is easy enough to ignore. And even if I engage, no minds get changed.
The unfashionable truth is that almost everything everyone believes is driven by emotion first, and emotions don't respond to being argued into or out of existence.
Excellent points all. Freedom of religion includes the freedom to exclude religion from your life. Ideally, each individual, whether subscribing to a religion or adopting a secular atheism, adopts a set of principles and values that accord with maintaining a functional and polite society. Observing the “golden rule,” for example.
As important is embracing the notion of tolerance. Not compulsory acceptance or celebration, some societal mandate to embrace perspectives with which you disagree. Tolerance. An ability to agree to disagree, and to move forward with mutual acknowledgement that agreement is sufficient.
Finally, those who disagree do so in good faith. Indulging in baseless ad hominem attacks, and collapsing whole groups of people into monoliths to extrapolate base characteristics to all, deprives them of individuality, agency, and individual sovereignty. That is as outrageous as it is disgraceful, and it would be better, in my opinion, to keep an open mind and engage in argumentation with humility.
And that is what is most palpably absent in many of rhetorical exchanges today: humility. The certitude, moral and otherwise, demonstrated by people on all sides of many arguments is confounding to me. The lack of self-awareness, introspection, and curiosity about most subjects is disheartening, to say the least, and all would be well served to remember most of us know far less than we do and undoubtedly live in glass houses.
Thoughtful article and thank you for sharing it, Mr. deBoer. You often provoke my own thoughts and I am better for it!
The main point of Tim O'Neill's project, according to him anyway, is to stop the cacophony of the crowd who keep shouting "FACTS and LOGIC!" from the rooftops from embarrassing themselves by getting the facts wrong, over and over again. In a sense, it really doesn't matter where Christmas comes from—proving every last Christmas tradition is 100% pagan in origin would still say nothing about whether one Jesus Christ was the Son of God—but having an avalanche of online atheists use these allegations as ammunition every year absolutely undermines the project of presenting atheism as a more fact-based alternative to religion.
The other irony is having gone to a few family Christmases where family Jesuit priest joked about taking over the pagan holiday and adding a bunch of Saints to the roster.
I agree with this, and I should also point out that O'Neill, as a historian, wants to defend his discipline against amateurish nonsense from people who should know better. He's pointed out a few times that many well-known atheists or rationalists have a science background, and while they are good at doing and explaining science, their knowledge of how history is made is weak. For example, his (long) series on Jesus mythicism repeatedly makes the point that while we cannot "prove" that the Jesus stories are based on an actual historical Jesus to a level that reaches that of scientific "proof", it is still the most parsimonious reading of the evidence, while mythicism requires making unsupported assumptions. So in a sense, there is in his project a large part of defending the humanities against the scientists who either don't see their value, or think that their science background means that they could do better than actual historians. This is also a point that's being made by another internet historian Bret Devereaux, who isn't an atheist.
"We come to atheism in sorrow. The lack of a god destroys the possibility of transcendent meaning."
I see people often mention this kind of thing, but I don't see a reason for it.
Not all who disbelieve in god grieve that loss. Not all who lack a god have lost the transcendent.
To me, the lack of god or even some kind of fixed meaning for life and the universe seems like something worth celebrating! We are not tainted by some ancient sin, nor are we hopelessly wandering through a symbolic desert where we must accept that the goal of life is to improve ourselves or our species, lest we suffer some punishment (whether eternal or recurrent).
Life is not suffering. Life simply is. Sometimes it's hard and bleak, but it's often quite beautiful. And when you look at the grandeur of nature, when you consider the majesty of the construction of the universe, you can still be overwhelmed by awe. And, to me, an awe all the more beautiful because no hand constructed it for us.
For me, this would all be fine except for the problem of death. If you grow up believing your deceased loved ones are in heaven, and you'll be with them again someday -- and then you realize, "actually, I don't believe in God or the afterlife which means death is just death." -- it's a tremendous loss.
Atheists say various things to make it okay, like "Isn't it lucky we get to live at all." But for most people, it's not much comfort.
I had a friend whose young daughter passed away from cancer. I think it was his wife that told me that he prayed every day for God to take the cancer from his daughter's body and put in his own.
I am an atheist but it would never occur to me to tell him something like "There's no God, what you're doing is futile, blah blah blah." And if one of my atheist friends had said such a thing I think I would have broken their nose.
Heaven always seemed so remote to me when I was growing up that I guess I never thought anyone but actual saints made it there, so I never felt its loss because I never expected anyone I knew to get there.
To me, I found comfort in believing that life is not a test, let alone one we are designed to fail. And then there is just my own strangeness in that I have always found the concept of death to be a great comfort. I find the concept of nothingness, of non-being, to be incredibly beautiful. Which, again, is likely something most people don't share!
But I can understand how the loss of heaven would lead to great sorrow.
If you’re sad about the no-heaven, watch Fantastic Fungi on Netflix. It really makes a case for the beauty of decomposition, physical and probably otherwise. Whatever your soul is.
I think this is the big driving force behind religion. We have our parents and grandparents die, usually far away and out of sight. Most of us are fortunate enough to not suffer the death of our children. Until a little over a hundred years ago, a family experienced the death of children, over and over.
Why is it worse to lose a child than a parent? I'm not sure, but the thought of losing one of my kids is much worse than my parents who lived long full lives and were becoming more and more debilitated, on their way down rather than on their way up. (my mother recently died)
People need/ needed the comfort of seeing their babies and children in heaven., like Eric Clapton's song, If I saw you in heaven.
Until I reached my mid to late forties I didn't like the idea that when we died we simply decomposed. What lives on is memory and learned behaviors such as how you raise your children. I liked reincarnation. Heaven didn't sound like much fun.
In my sixties and much closer to death, I'm comfortable with disintegration into smaller and smaller molecules.
But many people want to live forever. Should you even want to?
I wonder if this would still be the case in a less theistic world. The removal of the hope of heaven may be worse than if we simply never bothered with the idea in the first place. My household wasn't religious and I never believed in heaven any more earnestly than I believed in Santa Claus. Death is sad, but I don't think the lack of heaven makes it sadder for me.
I was thinking that the concept of heaven/reincarnation came about with people who constantly experienced death. They also knew nothing about the microbial world or anatomy/physiology. For many of us, myself included, science has replaced that part of religion. We don't experience death as often or as personally as we used to, so most of us don't need that "comfort".
I can't believe in heaven/hell/ almighty God the man in white robes any more than Santa Claus either. I wasn't raised with those stories. But I can imagine a need for comfort so powerful that I might be tempted.
I did go to church for a year about twenty years ago and it was very nice. They accepted that I believed in the teachings of Jesus but not the surrounding mythologies. It was a nice community and was very outward looking.
I also experienced going to a friend's church with her and had the most enlightening experience. It is a conservative Baptist church, but they had decided to confront racism head on. They brought in a black pastor. He was there for four years and was moving on. He talked about his experience there and I've never heard anything dealing with race that was better. They made significant changes in people's perceptions.
We must be careful in portraying all religious groups as evil.
I'm curious how long you've been able to hold onto this existential positivity for. I could have written this post 20 years ago as a newly minted atheist. But over time it's just ... worn off... and I don't feel it at all anymore. I wish I still did. I'm not exactly sure why that happened.
I stopped believing in god when I was a young child so I guess I've held onto it my whole life. Though I'm also not an especially old person, so who knows.
But I also don't attach much meaning to god or the lack of god. I honestly never even think about it. To me, it's a question that simply doesn't matter.
I wouldn't describe myself as an especially happy or positive person, but I do find great beauty in life. I am often awestruck by simple things, which may sound trite or fanciful, but I'm a pretty simple person.
I was definitely more "New Atheist" as a teenager but I think that was most justly due to my age, and being bitter about being raised Catholic.
I have certainly mellowed out and my feelings now are similar to yours. My life experiences to this point have lead me to believe that organized religion is a net negative on the world and whether God exists does not matter.
I would say that it is more neutral than negative, but I understand where Freddie is coming from in regards to religion's overall impact.
I think you are underestimating the fear that people have of freedom. Being autotelic is terrifying for many, and religion certainly fills the need for an external story.
This is beautifully said; I find great comfort in beauty and in small meanings.
I think I sort of fall into the view you are criticizing here. I've been an atheist and/or agnostic since I was a kid, and my first foyer into arguing on the internet c. 2000 was strongly focused on arguing the atheist position. At the same time, I've generally appreciated the right kind of church, to the point of attending a UCC church for a few years c. 2005. I probably would do so now, if it wouldn't freak out my wife.
I tend to agree with Haidt that, even if religion has problems, many of which the Religious Right likes to highlight, it has benefits too, and we've sort of thrown the baby out with the bathwater with a plan to replace those benefits.
For me, it's less of a "god-shaped hole" and more of a "Sunday morning-shaped hole." Church service the purpose of providing semi-mandatory social mixing of members of the community (although obviously not all) who otherwise wouldn't interact with each other. When we got rid of it, we didn't really replace it with anything (the closest comparison I've seen is children's birthday parties, where you are forced to socialize with the parents of whomever else happens to be in your kids class). I tend to think that the loss of this sort of socializing has contributed to both the loneliness epidemic/bowling alone, as many people now lack a way to meet people with whom to make friends. I also think that it has contributed to polarization, as without this sort of social mixing, you are less likely to wind up being friends with people who different life experiences than you. Lamenting this loss of community building isn't "praying to the god shaped hole."
I also think that there is some merit to the "god-shaped hole" argument, although in a slightly different way that you describe. I don't think everyone has a "god-shaped hole," I am pretty sure I don't. However, it does appear that there are a lot of people who do. This takes the form of both needing some sort of meaning for life, the universe and everything and wanting some sort of righteous cause to follow. As people have given up traditional religions, I think you've seen them take up replacements. Some of this is taking up non-traditional spirituality, e.g. wicca. Some of it is buying into grand conspiracies, e.g. QAnon, and some of it is going hard into new moral systems, e.g. "Woke" politics. This, however, is more of an observation than a lament. I don't think that we need to worry about filling the god-shaped hole, because I think people who need to, will find a way to do it. At most, you have to be concerned about what they are filling it with, and, while I'd prefer people get into a main-line Christianity than QAnon, I don't know that, on average, people are filling their god-shaped hole with something worse than they once were.
I think that 'god-shaped hole' some people think they need to fill is just our human ego masquerading as divinity. Some people just need to feel special, and religion has a way of supercharging that need. It's like the ultimate old-school snowflake construct.
My belief system begins with three tenants:
1) I'm not special
2) human beings are not special
3) Earth (and our solar system) is not special
When your philosophical point of view begins from a position of abject humility, I find basic existence to be much easier to tolerate and appreciate.
Yeah, I think the "god-shaped hole" is something most people actually don't feel.
It may be worth considering cultures that are predominantly non-religious. When I lived in South Korea, people weren't desperately trying to explain to everyone why they don't believe in god or why they don't need god. They just...went around living their life feeling the way most people feel.
It's not like every Christian and Muslim walk around all day thinking about god or feeling god's love.
They're just regular people.
I really do think it's a weird statement to make because it seems to only apply to people in the US in the last twenty years.
Somebody call the cops...
"...the people who advanced it should have been placed in a god-shaped hole in the ground."
Clearly a call for violence.
Interesting, I also lived in South Korea for a little while and my guess is that while Koreans are among the least religious in the world, there is still plenty of cultural weight to Buddhism, confucianism, and protestant Christianity. The confucianism in particular might explain why they didn't seem to be (at least to my observation, and yours too it seems) trying to fill a God shaped hole in that most of the people I encountered had strong traditional family norms and involvement in their community. The positives of religiosity remain - the rituals, sense of meaning, traditions, ties to family and connection to community- but less of the dogmatic belief that leads people into dark places. This is probably an over generalized perspective, but a society in which children run around at night with no fear and virtually no street crime is doing something right.
I mean, we can just add any kind of meaning to whatever "god-shaped hole" is and use that to justify the existence of the phrase, but I think it's more a comforting term for people than anything else.
Reading Freddie talk about atheism does feel like someone who bemoans their own beliefs. And maybe that's not how he actually feels but is him reflecting a sentiment he sees in many atheists, but I don't think most people are sad or glad about the existence or non-existence of god(s). I think the idea of this hole is a defensive measure rooted more in projection than in reality.
The "God-shaped hole" is the need to feel loved and that you're cared for, protected, and part of a community. It's nearly impossible to feel that way all the time with actual flawed humans, so some (many) people fill the gap by pretending the universe itself loves them.
The idea that wokeism is a replacement religion is something that John McWhorter and Glen Loury have talked about a lot.
Is it worse than Christianity? I would argue yes, because unlike say radical Islam modern Christianity has largely abandoned its crusader phase. Wokeism on the other hand...
I think you are giving Christianity too much credit on this front. There are a lot of branches of Christianity and some are crusading than others. However, there has consistently been a strain of conservative Christianity in the US that has been deeply political and trying to push their views on society. They no longer raise armies to invade the Holy Land (but see certain Christian's support for the Iraq War), but neither do "woke" people.
I think the key difference is that conservative Christians have long focused on political lobbying (look at the success they've had with Supreme Court justices) while the woke have focused on an inchoate, vigilante approach that often singles out individuals rather than organizations for mob style justice.
I think its a matter of what tools are available. Look how a lot of conservative Christians talk about David French (hardly a liberal squish). Along those lines, David French recently had an article (which I am failing to find) talking about a practice in conservative Christian churches where you can basically get ex-communicated for refusing to abandon a friend who is being ex-communicated, which sounds like the height of "cancel culture" mob style justice.
It seems pretty clear that it is just that the sort of conservative Christians who have a desire to do this sort of thing do not have the power to do so in any institution that people on the left-of-center care about. They do, however, have access to governmental power, which is why you see them push for this through government power.
Government power is real power though. As Mr. deBoer has pointed out time and time again the left of center crowd doesn't really have anything like real power and the frustration is what makes them bugfuck insane.
Plus look at the Supreme Court. Religious conservatives have been content to just work slowly and steadily across decades to get that win. The left of center crowd is "Revolution Now!" and about as reasonable as you would expect given that slogan.
Absolutely worse than Christianity, because wokeism never forgives.
I think there are two main types of Atheists. Some, like me, never had any religious feelings or beliefs in the first place. To us, religion just seems a bit odd and we wonder if people ever really believed or have just been playing along for social reasons (or hedging their bets, a la Decarte's wager). Then there are those who once had religion in their youth but were disillusioned when they realized it was a scam. These people often seem bitter and angry at God for not existing. Dawkins seems to fall into this camp. They tend to be the strident anti-religion evangelists.
The second camp are definitely the loudest atheists.
I often find them annoying for the same reason I find evangelizing Christians annoying. It's the convert's problem, wherein they changed their life over something so they think everyone else should too.
I fall into the latter camp, but also still don't consider myself a full-on atheist. I convinced myself I was deeply religious in my adolescence. I had a lot of shit going on at home, and I was figuring out (and admitting) that I was gay in a very oppressive and emotionally violent environment, so I was definitely Searching for Something. It wasn't my sexuality that ultimately killed faith for me, though. It was the concept of hell. I couldn't square the idea with an all-loving and forgiving god, and from that crack it all fell apart. I later admitted to myself that I never "felt" my faith like some people do - it was something I performed in a feverish quest to actually experience, and it never really panned out.
I still think religious people are pretty delusional. I know a lot of very lovely religious folks, including some good friends, and one close friend who is actually a priest! So I don't think they are all bad, but I do think it is a very deliberate choice people make, even if they don't see it as being such. I don't consider myself atheist because I think there probably is some kind of metaphysical spiritual realm out there "bigger than we are" but I don't purport or claim to have any idea what it is. I certainly don't think it's Jesus or whatever. Their certainty is probably what drives me most crazy about religious people, and some of the most truly faithful people I have ever know have admitted they doubt their faith all the time, and to me, that is the sign of someone who takes it seriously.
A previous poster mentioned holding people to account for their behaviors rather than beliefs, and I can relate to that. Some people I know use their faith in amazing, positive, and transformative ways, others use it for evil. I think the vast majority of religious people don't think much about it one way or another, just consider it a thing they do. I do, frankly, wish fewer people were religious, and I don't know what kind of effect a mass loss of faith would have on a society. I suspect we're seeing it now, even among the "faithful." Nobody tries that hard to control other people when they are comfortable in their beliefs. So no, I don't particularly respect religion or other people's faith. But I respect and love a lot people who claim to have faith, and as long as they are not being terrible people, and acting in concert with values I deem to be good and socially redeeming, I have no problem with it.
While I generally agree with the thrust of this article (or at least, I agree with it insofar as I can, while being a believing Christian) that it's probably better for an atheist to be clear-headed and forthright in their considered rejection of religion rather than to get mixed up in a vague post-modern "you do you" muddle, I think that there is room among the various strains of atheistic thought for differences in the degree of favorability toward religion.
I don't think that the core of atheism -- believing that there is in fact no god -- necessarily has to entail a highly critical posture toward religion. Though it certainly often does, and it's probably the most intuitive sociological position toward which to proceed from atheism, I don't think it's actually an inherent consequence of an atheistic starting principle.
As there are a wide variety of both religions-in-general and specific practices within religions, I think it makes sense for an atheist to be more critical of some religions and less critical of others.
One might, for example, be more negatively disposed toward the Christianity that motivated American slave owners but more positively disposed toward the Christianity that motivated abolitionists, while still retaining the viewpoint that both were wrong to derive their principles from the illusion of Christianity.
In a more contemporary example, one might be more friendly toward the Christians that staff refugee service charities than one is toward those that staff the Heritage Foundation, while again still criticizing the motivating beliefs of both.
As religion is not an undifferentiated monolith, neither does an atheistic perspective on religion need to be a singular response.
I don't see a point in being offensive about someone's beliefs...until they try to either shunt them onto me, make rules about how I must behave based on their religious beliefs, or are otherwise critical of non-believers (such as those who claim it's impossible to be moral without belief in god).
So up until those points, I'm perfectly happy to say "I believe it is incredibly unlikely that your religion has found 'the Truth,' but I'm glad you've found something meaningful in your life that gives you rituals and a community which bring you joy and comfort when you need it." I'm being entirely honest. Is that really more condescending than bluntness? Why is that more condescending or less authentic?
Lolol I thought this was going to be, "Who cares where the holidays come from, they're fun! Eggnog! Presents!" instead FdB is like, "GOD IS DEAD." Cheers!
Feels more like GOD IS DEAD AND I'M SAD ABOUT IT
I mean, Nietzsche was pretty sad about it too
I thought this too. I was kind of hoping for a "fuck it tho Have A Holly Jolly Christmas, I've cracked a seasonal stout"
The point of this post is not to disparage the religious, much less the holidays. The point is that we have to take religion seriously on its own terms, to respect its truth claims by evaluating them.
Feels like many people do this and it doesn't really lead anywhere. Most religious people don't respect the truth claims of the religion they believe in!
Why should everyone else?
Seems like the correct tactic is just to go after people's behavior. Seems more productive and successful, anyway.
Evaluating the truth claims is increasingly silly as those claims have evolved into non-falsifiable beliefs about God - which cannot be proven false. False beliefs, like "The Earth is the Center" have been proven false, and ejected from the canon of belief.
"God Loves You". Is this True, False, or meaningless? Did God give us "Free Will", or not?
"God helped me stop being an alcoholic". More alcoholics, and drug addicts, have stopped their destructive lifestyle choices thru gaining belief in Jesus than thru any atheist program. More, but not all, nor even most.
In evaluating what beliefs help those most in need of help, Christianity would be evaluated as better than atheism.
The killing done by Communist atheists in the last 100 years compares as worse than Christians.
But I am not sure that is what you said. You clearly said that religion results in a lot more harm than atheism. That seems disparaging to me. The headline and the article don't quite support one another.
This thoughtful essay puts me in mind of those folks who insist that the Bible doesn't *actually* ban same-sex unions, or who can "prove" that there is no biblical basis for opposing abortion choice, blah blah. My response is always, "We shouldn't base the rules of a free and open society on a religious book, so I don't care what the Bible says."
So while I appreciate Dan Savage debating Brian Brown on what's Christian (or what isn't) about same-sex marriage, I think it's a futile exercise.
You believe in persuasion, I'd imagine. Taking someone's beliefs seriously and then arguing to them from those beliefs is a pretty powerful tool for persuasion.
I don't disagree, but then I note that Brian Brown didn't change his beliefs on iota, despite Savage's best biblical efforts.