I really hate this article, especially as it vacillates between making sense and being totally full of shit. My two cents . . . maybe more like, five dollars . . . . Atheism does not need to be, nor should it be made to be, “nice” for anyone. The word, itself, means “without God”, pure and simple, which is in fact, a linguistically negative term. The very term itself, being a negative statement against an implied consensus, is an act of dissent. If you you are not comfortable with active and interested dissent, yet you dont probabilistically give room for the possibility of God and/or other spiritual/superstitious beliefs/belief systems, maybe you should choose another term. I hear that “secular humanist”, or simply “humanist” are both nice and relatively innocuous. No matter how much anyone wants to pretend to the contrary, ideology, however – exempli gratia, belief – is never innocuous. As such, neither is the fight for the inverse of faith and belief, and the philosophical implications of non-faith and non-belief. The people who know this the most deeply are those who take a stake in the implications of ideological schism, beyond labels and identity negotiation. When considering the broader implications of rejecting such religio-spiritual tenets as intrinsic, universal morality, ontological and philosophical totality, fatalism, and divine right, it becomes evident to not just the atheist, but to the devoutly religious, that a cultural war of some sort is unavoidable. There is no live-and-let live, when civilizational rights and structures are at stake. The impassioned religious zealot knows this, and they are relentless in their pursuit of what they see as right. Atheists, and secularists, more broadly, need to invoke the same passionate practice in fighting for a more secular world, as the faithful do when fighting for a more religious one. Further, before anyone gets into footing the blame of the sorts of flame wars we see between capital A Atheists and the world of believers, let us not forget who is in the majority. If seen as an emancipatory movement or position, one cannot blame atheists for fighting the perceived oppressors with every tool in the toolbox, including incendiary invective, propaganda, aggression, and brutal cultural dissection. Those who decry the ardent Atheist for not “playing nice” with the enemy, simply dont understand the stakes. Atheism, as such, isnt a consumer movement that needs to rehabilitate its PR campaign; its a bold conclusion about the very shape and nature of reality; a triumphant exaltation against an entrenched majority view. Further, those who desire civil consonance between the secularist and the anti-secular dont understand that the very label atheist – the declaration of an inverse of belief – is a violent pejorative epithet in the eyes of nearly all of the of the religious world. From the seemingly passive woo-woo New Age hippie, to the Billy Grahams of the world, to the young person finding belonging amongst believers, to the most violently anti-secular Imam, the word “atheist”, itself, is a threat. Its a terrible monster, sitting in the corner of the psyche, threatening a lack of predestination, moral authority, and cosmic unity. Implicit in the word “atheism” is a reality which threatens that, in fact, the universe is an indifferent, non-unified set of disparate products of random causality, converging to a meaningless, yet richly populated whole, which is never totally knowable or completely definable. The threat of atheism – that it potentially releases one from the dogmatic inculcation of religious practice, leaving one in an actuality where there is no one tending the candle at the end of the dark tunnel of life, there is no guiding force, there is no all-encompassing self-object to find solipsistic solace in – is the thing of nightmares for those who refuse the ownership of their actions, the paths they take through their lives, and the collective violence they might inflict on others in the name of unified totality. This threat will always put the atheist in a place of fighting for emancipation. That fight must never be treated as something to be “nice” about. Thats not to say that there are not plenty of atheists who still behave as religious zealots, despite the label on their ideological masthead. Many are those who are raised in a highly religious environment, who simply adopt a different label. This is a common practice, but not one to be dismissed lightly. Whether its the social justice warrior, born in the banal fires of their own collegiate Siddhartha moment, who adopt the term “liberal”, only continuing to behave like a guilt-ridden, temperance-loving conservative; or its the highly-religious kid, who, when confronted with similarly analogous rude awakenings, adopts the term “atheist” or “agnostic”, only to behave as though their life is fated, destiny is all around us, and that morality is a cosmic universality, rather than a human construct; there is an over-abundance of those who adopt the labels of ideological and philosophical liberation and emancipation, only to forgo challenging their actual societal programming. For those who can actually accomplish the strength of emotion and intellect to parse this dichotomy, this makes the vehement demand for a more secular world an even more important fight. For those few, there is no PR campaign; for those few, there is no “playing nice”; for those few, there is only the truth of their conviction. Put in more religious terms, there is only the truth, spoken to power. (If you like what I wrote, leave a comment. Dont give this article more likes than it deserves.)
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 12:54:54 +0000
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