Bloodlust is worse than ignorance

When Christians (and smart agnostics) talk about the New Atheists, what they usually talk about is their ignorance, because it is so glaring and obvious. Ignorance about philosophy, ignorance about the world, ignorance about history, ignorance about humanity.

But really what ought to be striking about the New Atheists is what I can only call their bloodlust. These are people who quite clearly and nakedly want to see religious believers oppressed, and even eradicated. Like the European anti-Semites who don’t want to fall afoul of speech laws, they know very well where the line is, and they know very well how to walk right up to it and not cross it, but there’s little doubt where they’re headed.

Hitchens believes that religion is the main driver of war, but of course the best rebuttal of this is not a book of history or sociology, but his own history. Hitchens needed no Yahweh and no Shiva to enthusiastically call the thunder of war upon countries he deemed less civilized than his, and orgiastically luxuriate in the ensuing bloodshed. Hitchens was an enthusiastic advocate of the idea that more civilized groups should wage war on the less civilized; he was an equally enthusiastic advocate of the idea that religious belief is the mark of the uncivilized. He didn’t say “2+2=4” but the math is still straightforward.

As Damon Linker noted in the only perceptive essay I’ve seen on this, Richard Dawkins has written very clearly that bringing children up to believe in God is not only tantamount to child abuse, but actually worse than sexual abuse. Dawkins doesn’t explicitly spell out the only logical conclusion of this—that society should treat religious parents the way we treat sexual predators, with prison sentences, thorough ostracism, and perhaps “reëducation”—but he doesn’t need to.

Here’s a TED Talk by Sam Harris on science and morality. Now, normally the impulse of any Christian (or other slightly educated person) would be to note that his argument that science is a moral guide doesn’t, you know, make any sense whatsoever.

But actually, that’s missing the point. Skip to 10:15. What Harris does here is fascinating. It’s rhetorical three-card Monte so you have to put it on slow motion to break it down.

Before a picture of women wearing head-to-toe Islamic veils, here’s what Harris says:

We might not like this, we might think of this as wrong in Boston or Palo Alto. But who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? Who are we to say even that they’re wrong to beat their wives with steel cables, or to throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege to be smothered in this way? Who are we NOT to say this? Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this? I’m not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil. Women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I’m concerned. But what does “voluntary” mean in a community where when a girl gets raped, her father’s first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame?

Notice, first, the big straw man. Harris conflates the wearing of a veil with beating wives with steel cables or throwing battery acid in their face. I’m pretty sure “we” tolerate the former but not the latter. I’m pretty sure that “we” are quite comfortable in saying that these things are wrong. I’m pretty sure that in any advanced country if a man throws battery acid in his wife’s face and is arrested, “I am a proud denizen of an ancient culture” is not actually acceptable as a legal defense. So this is a complete straw man, but Harris gets to conflate everyday, mundane expressions of religious faith with utter atrocities, and paint a world where we are dangerously complacent and inhumane by tolerating these atrocities.

Note also how Harris talks about the supposed toleration of fundamentalist Islam in “Boston and Palo Alto” at the beginning of his paragraph but it’s pretty clear by the end that he’s talking about fundamentalist Islam wherever it may be.

But note, most importantly, the little switch at the end. This is where you lose sight of the lady.

Does Sam Harris think we ought to make the wearing of Islamic veils illegal? He quickly reassures us: “I’m not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil. Women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I’m concerned.”

Phew.

A pause.

And then he says this. “But what does ‘voluntary’ mean in a community where when a girl gets raped, her father’s first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame?”

See what just happened?

Of course, voluntary expressions of religious faith should be allowed…except that the meaning of “voluntary” is in question. Indeed, who could say it’s “voluntary” for you to belong in a cult if you’ve been brainwashed into doing so? Of course, Harris has made it clear elsewhere that he believes virtually all religious belief is brainwashing. So voluntary expressions of religious belief are fine, except that it’s an open question whether they’re really voluntary, and if they’re not “voluntary” by Harris’s definition, then they’re really fair game for the coercive powers of the state.

You really have to watch the video. Harris says the “voluntary” part softly, almost musing to himself, you could easily miss it. And then he brings up the shocking idea of a father murdering her daughter for being raped (and insists on that image) so that you quickly forget the little parenthetical about the definition of “voluntary.”

Harris knows that even though an audience like TED is probably not a big fan of religion, it’s also probably not quite yet willing to strip all religious believers of their civil rights, so you have to just push slightly at the Overton window.

If you think I’m being paranoid, Harris doesn’t hide his comfort at using the levers of state to punish religious belief.

Harris is actually refreshing among the “New” Atheists as not exactly lumping all religions together. He thinks some religions are worse than others, and has no problem contrasting them. (Sometimes you prefer a New Atheist who recognizes differences between religions to a milquetoast agnostic who thinks all religions are the same…) And he thinks the worst of them is Islam. And because when he talks about violence against religion he talks about Islam specifically and not religion in general, he is less guarded about showing his true intent.

Harris has argued against the building of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. He has argued for the use of torture in the War on Terror—in fact he doesn’t like the expression “War on Terror”; he wants it to be replaced by a war on Islam (Pope Benedict couldn’t get invited to TED, but maybe if he’d said that…). He has argued for a nuclear first strike against Iran should the country acquire nuclear weapons, an option that even Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t contemplate. (He has noted that the prospect horrifies him, which I’m sure would be a great comfort to the good citizens of Tehran. This will hurt me more than it’ll hurt you, etc.)

So in other words, Sam Harris is wholly comfortable using civil oppression, war, torture and weapons of mass destruction against the believers of a religion. Now maybe it’s just a religion, not all religions. But Harris has also made it abundantly clear that he only feels microscopically less contemptuous of myself and fellow Christians than of Muslims. And of course once the terror machine machine gets started it needs to feed on new enemies.

Do I believe that Sam Harris is actually actively plotting to wage a global jihad on all religious believers? Well, I’m agnostic (ha) on the question.

But (yes, I’m going there) if you think of an event like the Holocaust, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. It grew from a fertile terrain of anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism which had intellectual promoters, many of whom were very well-read and well-credentialed, many of whom were good husbands and good fathers. If you’d asked one of these men, circa say 1920, whether they favored a plan to systematically murder all of the Jews on the planet, they would have scoffed—and sincerely, too (for some of them anyway). But they did help bring it about. And once it happened, of course, none of them (that I know of) turned against it, and many of them cheered it on and actively participated.

Now, I obviously don’t think the situation of Christians, or religious believers in general, in wealthy secular countries is anything like the situation of Jews in, say, Vienna or Paris in 1890, let alone Berlin in 1932. And there’s a very good chance we may never get there.

But I do think Christians in the West are much too complacent about it, and this complacency is reflected in our response to the “New” Atheists, which gave them a heck of a lot of credit. In a sense, this is admirable. Very Christian. These guys are one shot of vodka too many away from calling for all our heads on pikes, and we’re patiently explaining Philosophy 101 to them.

The problem is that while this is going on, Sam Harris goes to TED and gets a standing ovation. And a slightly-less-strident (at least in public) version of “New” Atheism is increasingly taking over the elites of our culture. (If you’re wondering why I’m writing about “New” Atheism now when no one’s talking about it, it’s because of this Buzzfeed post.) There’s more than one kind of atheism, and because it’s the worst, we’re assuming it’s going to stay the minority. But there’s nothing in either past or recent history to suggest that that’s true.

Mainstream Christians and run-of-the-mill agnostic liberals are united in their belief that “it couldn’t happen here.” But the French Republic kicked religious orders out of the country and banned religious schools just a short century ago, in a democratic country where there were devout Christians were a significant minority with significant political clout. Again, I’m not saying it’s going to happen in the US. I’m saying it makes no sense to be complacent about it, something the Founding Fathers would wholly agree with.

And one thing I’d like would be for people who talk about these guys to be clear with what we’re dealing here—religious people, but particularly non-believers. These are not people who are “extreme” because their ideas are too simplistic, or because they’re not civil, or not nice (we believers can handle ourselves on the tough streets of ideas, thanks)—though all these things are true. These are people who are extreme because they don’t really think religious believers deserve civil rights. This is something I hadn’t realized until looking into them many years after their books came out and many years after I’d read the reviews of them. I wish we’d had said it.