The typically brilliant Mark Steyn has a great piece on how secular atheisists are rationalizing themselves out of existence. Particularly pithy for the holiday season.
Peter Watson, the author of a new book called Ideas: a History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, was interviewed by the New York Times the other day, and was asked to name ‘the single worst idea in history’. He replied:‘Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on Earth determines how we will go into the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.’
And a Merry Christmas to you, too. For a big-ideas guy, Watson is missing the bigger question: something has to be ‘responsible for most of the wars and bigotry’, and if it wasn’t religion, it would surely be something else. In fact, in the 20th century, it was. Europe’s post-Christian pathogens of communism and Nazism unleashed horrors on a scale inconceivable even to the most ambitious Pope. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot: you’d look in vain for any of them in the pews each Sunday. Marx has a lot more blood on his hands than Christ — other people’s blood, I mean — but the hyper-rationalists are noticeably less keen to stick him with the tab for the party.
So the big thinker would seem to be objectively wrong in what, for a secular rationalist, sounds more like a reflex irrational bigotry all his own. A thinking atheist ought to be able to appreciate the benefits the secular world derives from monotheism — for example, the most glorious achievements in Western art and music. By comparison, militant atheism has given us John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, that paean to nothingness whose lyric — ‘Above us only sky’ — is the official slogan of John Lennon International Airport in Liverpool.
I second that. This is a particularly good piece from an excellent writer.
The piece is good.. but MW's spin isn't. The spin here is the application of the label "militant atheists" and the associated description and connotation as described by Mr. Steyn to the broader group of secular atheists.. the vast majority of which do not subscribe to Peter Watson's opinions.
I'm not a "militant atheist"... and neither are the majority of atheists.
Mark, why do you assume that he's writing about you? And how does a secular atheist differ from an atheist?
BB: I never said he was talking about me. When I mentioned that I'm not a "militant atheist", it was a separate statement.
I agree that the nomenclature, "secular atheist" and "atheist", is somewhat redundant.. but that's not a factor of this discussion that I'm responsible for introducing.
You said that you're not a militant atheist, which made me think you felt that you had been accused of being one. But wouldn't you agree that such people exist, and that they're very influential?
BB: I'd agree that they exist. I wouldn't say, though, that they're very influential.
If, as the saying goes, all politics is local.. so too is it with things like conservative and liberal, religious and non-religious, etc. I would expect larger urban areas to have larger concentrations of atheists and among those, for there to be a number of "militant atheists". I would also expect smaller urban, suburban, and rural areas to have much smaller atheist populations with even smaller populations of "militant atheists". The level of influence that these militant atheists have, regardless of locale, is dependent upon the size of their group.
The point, I suppose, is that in order to talk about the level of influence one group of people has, the conversation must be specific to a particular locale. Any proclamations about the level of influence that are larger in scope are inherently less reliable.