Oliver Willis on Atheist Sam Harris Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Oliver Willis on atheist author and activist Sam Harris:

I keep wondering how anyone can read the things that Sam Harris writes and not just see another version of Dobson, Falwell, or Mullah Omar? It's fire and brimstone invective, in which the Chosen People are the ones who share Harris' ideology of non theism and anyone who doesn't get on board is literally Left Behind.

It is the same thing. It is the other side of the coin. The rude, condescending and elitist attitude exhibited by Harris and his fans are just atheistic versions of religious fundamentalism, a dogma that relies on faith and the demonization of everyone who disagrees with the faith. That the central belief in this faith is the lack of a divine being or beings is of no consequence, Harris is as certain of the nonexistence of a deity as Pat Robertson is that the end times are nigh. Neither one of them has any sort of proof that would stand up to a scientific test. They've got... faith.

I respect Oliver Willis and have linked to his blog often, but don't agree with him here.

Here's what I think got under Willis' skin from Sam Harris' editorial in the Los Angeles Times upon the announcement by Representative Pete Stark (D-CA) that he is an atheist:

PETE STARK, a California Democrat, appears to be the first congressman in U.S. history to acknowledge that he doesn't believe in God. In a country in which 83% of the population thinks that the Bible is the literal or "inspired" word of the creator of the universe, this took political courage.

Of course, one can imagine that Cicero's handlers in the 1st century BC lost some sleep when he likened the traditional accounts of the Greco-Roman gods to the "dreams of madmen" and to the "insane mythology of Egypt."

Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham — the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo.

Dobson, Falwell and Mullah Omar have long careers aimed at denying the civil rights of others; Harris is guilty of thinking that religious people believe crazy ideas. They want to use the public power of the state to constrain the liberty of the non-Christian and the non-Muslim, and to force the non-believer to live according to the dictates of their religion, Mullah Omar by the most extreme means. Frankly, I don't think it's fair to compare Dobson and Falwell to Mullah Omar. I find Dobson and Falwell completely obnoxious, and Falwell a racist reconstructed superficially for political and financial expedience, but they don't deserve to be compared to the murderous Taliban. Harris at least made more of a gradation among his rhetorical targets than that.

Fire and brimstone invective? No he didn't. Chosen People? I think Willis got his teachings on the Jewish idea of the Chosen People (which, if I understand correctly, can be translated as "Choosing People" i.e. choosing to follow the covenant), the Calvinist doctrine of the Elect and Sam Harris' doctrine of the Atheist Elect confused. Oh wait, Harris doesn't have that doctrine. Oh rats.

It may be true that Harris cannot prove a negative factually on evidence, only to attack it as logically inconsistent, but for this Willis compared Harris to Pat Robertson who has called down God's destruction, or countenanced it solemnly, upon U.S. public officials and U.S. municipalities including nearby Dover, Pennsylvania. (God did not destroy that York County town; I don't know that property insurance premiums have even increased since Robertson threw his last fundraising tantrum.) Harris has called for the terrorist or other destruction of zero American cities and towns. Harris cannot prove that the God of the Bible does not exist; he also cannot prove that Zeus and Apollo don't exist. But I have a feeling that Oliver Willis is a lot more agitated about what Harris said and implied about the God of the Christian Bible than about Zeus and Apollo.

Rudeness is not what makes fundamentalism fundamentalism. It's the willingness to use force to achieve one's goals and being divorced from all common sense. Harris may be obnoxious or a poor advocate for secular or atheist viewpoints, and may have used strident rhetoric that backfires and that was guaranteed to get an angry response from religious Jews, Christians and Muslims, but that doesn't make him a fundamentalist any more than it makes Howard Dean or Roscoe Bartlett "fundamentalists" when they use aggressive, hard-edged rhetoric. Making people angry doesn't make you a fundamentalist.

My own beef with Harris (other than his apparent greater desire to inflame rather than persuade) is that he seems unwilling to explore religion from a humanistic viewpoint: not from the more modern use of the term "humanist" as an antonym of "theist" but in its older Renaissance sense of "that which pertains to the human being or humanity." In his book The End of Faith, Harris is a little less strident than in LA Times article that spurred from Oliver Willis into what I would characterized as a rhetorical overreaction to Harris' heated rhetoric. But in neither his book nor this firebrand article did he attempt to approach religion as a repository and vector of human history, culture and civilization. Which is his right, but that absence cheapens his rhetoric and weakens his analysis.

But if Oliver Willis wants to find atheist fundamentalists, I would point not to Harris but to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. On the narrow point of separation of church (and mosque, and gurdwara, etc.) and stste, I agree with them. But I find several aspects of their program problematic. In their website shop, they sell stickers to affix to, among other targets, the Gideon Bibles that one often finds in hotel rooms in the U.S., donated by the Gideons International. One of the stickers makes specific reference to the Biblical/Torah personage of Gideon, and the other states words to the effect that "Literal belief in this book may be dangerous to your life or health."

My problem is not with the communication of these messages, but with the attachment of a sticker to a Bible that the "sticker-er" does not own outright. While I think that the Gideons want their Bibles to be taken by interested readers, they don't want their Bibles vandalized. I think a reasonable person would think that the implicit offer by the Gideons of their Bible is intended to be for purposes of their non-profit mission, i.e. the spread of the evangelical Christian message throughout the world. To me, this is the equivalent of throwing paint on a stack of free weekly newspapers; if you don't want to read the paper, leave it alone, don't poison the source or damage the inventory maliciously for others. Frankly, if the atheists wanted to hurt the Gideons, they would take the Bible and incorporate those Bibles into "atheist Bible classes" which have grown of late. And it's a bit condescending to tell an adult that literal belief in the Bible will damage him. I mean, really.

I have listened to podcasts from the FFRF spokespeople conducting interviews and discussing issues surrounding church-state separation and other issues. They sound terrible - worse than Rush Limbaugh's or Ann Coulter's most obnoxious stereotype of a rarefied, airy, condescending liberal. Really. It's not cruel to point this out; they are in the communication business.

I am no Clarance Darrow in my spoken presentations, but those people desperately need to learn how to speak to real people with real respect unless they want to keep their organization tiny, cute and meaningless. Frankly, secular-minded people should consider sending them hate mail to motivate them to improve. One FRFF broadcast had an excerpt of evangelical attorney and activist Jay Sekulow criticizing the FFRF for the stickers; I think Sekulow was not particularly well spoken that day in his criticisms but man! how much better he was than the two Saturday Night Live caricatures of themselves who, in a moment of aggressive stupidity, put on a superior speaker to mock him and then mocked themselves in dramatic irony.

I was a very, very receptive audience, but these guys really made me want to knock down a few shots of Kentucky Bourbon and listen to Ted Nugent to purge the overpowering plummy condescending "slime" off of me, or go borrow one of my uncle's Mossbergs and shoot some innocent animal in the face that had not bothered me. But you really cannot do that sort of thing outside the Farragut North Metro station in DC, they have laws....

There are good advocates for the separation of church and state (which phrase, in my view, a logical interpretation or conclusion and a good idea but NOT the text of the U.S. Constitution.) The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are more effective, in part because they have religious people active in their organizations and on their boards. There are worthier targets for Oliver Willis' frustration than the target he hit, and good hunting awaits.