Portrait of an Internet Atheist

                                                            Portrait of an Internet Atheist
       A friend of mine once informed me that she was raised a Catholic not a Christian. On the face of it this seemed silly as Catholics are, last I checked, Christians. However, I knew exactly what she meant. Christian has come to mean a certain thing and it is idle to complain about this fact. By Christian she meant a science-hating, MAGA hat wearing, violently xenophobic person negatively obsessed with other people’s sexual lives. What is more she meant a protestant science-hating, MAGA hat wearing, xenophobe.  A Christian is a conservative evangelical who votes for the Republican party in the U.S. and the Conservative party in Canada.

The word atheist is currently undergoing a corresponding transformation.^[1] It may now be as idle to consider Jean Paul Sartre an atheist as it is to consider Meister Eckhart a Christian. These words, as words often do, are taking on a life of their own. They have done so quite recently. Up until a couple of years ago it was still possible, for instance, to associate the word ‘atheist’ with the comparatively genteel folk we call ‘secular humanists’. Now progressive or even humanist opinions are as likely as not to provoke the accusation of ‘regressive leftism’ which, along with political correctness, the atheist is so done with.^[2]   

Perhaps you haven’t met an atheist. The atheist resides on the internet not only in the sense that he purveys his opinions there but that virtually everything he thinks he knows comes from blogs, You Tube videos and web-forums. By the way, the atheist is in almost all instances a ‘he’, perhaps in the 15-40 age range.^[3] If he has an educational background (not a necessity for the atheist) it is in STEM. He is loudly and proudly ignorant of the humanities. Being an atheist he is automatically part of the intellectual elite (which is his own peculiar form of cheap grace). So much so that studying the subjects he comments most loudly and aggressively on is, for him, a useless distraction. He has read, he claims, the Bible and the Quran many times and regards his untutored reactions to these texts as direct manifestations of his superior insight. He understands scripture, it seems, by direct inspiration of the unholy spirit. For this reason, he requires no secondary study to grasp anything, particularly anything textual. This is because texts simply say what they mean. Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn is a description of a pot. Hermeneutic studies are merely a ploy to hide the simple, sublime truth that a cigar is never anything but a cigar and a talking snake never anything but a talking snake.

Thus, he regards Christians (in the current sense) as his only true opponents. The atheist is, as many have already noted, angry and vitriolic, doling out insult and abuse. At the same time, though, he is hyper-sensitive, reacting to even the mildest criticism like an injured child. Often, the atheist is an ex-fundamentalist who still regards the conservative evangelical Protestantism he left as the only conceivable religious stance. He cannot even imagine a Christianity that is not focused on the rapture or other end-time contraptions. Though committed to ‘reason’ in theory he is in practice devoid of it: it is only a talisman or magic word he says over and over to himself.^[4] He is, in fact, tightly wound, a ball of emotional reactions uninclined to either rigorous argument or research, which, after all, demand study and attention and, even worse, respect for the opinions of others. He craves, rather, the instant gratification of ridicule and the bracing certitude of unthinking rejection. Perhaps the best atheist I have yet seen was a fellow on You Tube who had the word ‘reason’ tattooed on his arm: far from being a discipline or a cognitive practice ‘reason’ is now a literal fetish. At any rate one can see at a glance that if anyone engages in reasoned, critical discourse in this world it is not people with ‘reason’ tattoos.

Atheists, as I mentioned, were at one point progressives. They are now, increasingly, joining their Christian brethren on the right.^[5] Some of them are even donning MAGA hats. There will come a point, I suspect, where the two groups will simply merge in their common hatred of ‘others’ as they have already done with respect to Islam. They will consummate their increasingly incestuous relationship. This, alas, is the common fate of antagonists who talk only to each other. They become largely indistinguishable to outsiders even as they assert their own differences as absolutes. This is the reason why, though I interact happily with casual non-believers of every sort I greet the approach of the ‘atheist’ with as much enthusiasm as I would that of a Jehovah’s Witness. One has to stand for something in this world and I stand for Terence’s claim that nothing human is alien. In fact, I would claim this is a central moral demand of the European enlightenment and that anyone who truly understood that great cultural moment would regard the arrogance of sectarians as anathema.     

One further point: it is clear who is to blame for atheists. It is not so much the schoolboy Richard Dawkins who writes at a 14-year old level on all subjects outside biology (just the level at which most people read; hence his enormous success).^[6] It is the smarter and creepier Neo-cons Hitchens and Harris^[7] who tilted atheists to the right and even far right. It is they who have set the template for being a 21^st century anti-theist by abandoning intellectual responsibility and empathy on the principle that literally anything could be said or done so long as it served the great cause. Atheists are, I think, their lazy, incurious, petulant children. To some degree, God be thanked, this portrait of the atheist remains satirical (I have to emphasize this as the Atheist, like the Christian, is always in deadly earnest and has no functioning sense of irony).  Nonetheless, I have met him often enough to know he is at least as real as the MAGA wearing, gun toting evangelical. To conclude, however, I suggest a summit in which followers of Jesus Christ and non-believers in a deity meet to decide what it is, henceforth, we are going to call ourselves given that the existing labels are now taken.

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[1] As it has in the past. The atheist in Tourneur’s 17^th Century The Atheist’s Tragedy is not simply a disbeliever in God. The eponymous epithet refers not to his beliefs but to his nihilistic attitudes and cynical actions: he acts as if he were responsible to no one and nothing outside himself. In fact, he is a cheerfully amoral capitalist. It is not, I think, until the 19^th century that ‘atheism’ came to consistently designate a simple absence of belief in a deity.   

[2] See “https://www.buzzfeed.com/markoppenheimer/will-misogyny-bring-down-the-atheist-movement?utm_term=.qtO2QwJprY#.uhyBn1gjxp) for some background. The Atheist community seems an odd amalgam of progressives, scientists and libertarians with the latter including magicians, comedians and sci-fi geeks. When progressives in the movement sought to introduce feminist concerns they experienced a significant backlash and this may be one part of what is driving the movement rightwards (along with its inherent ideological commitment to Islamophobia). At any rate one major figure in the effort to align atheism with a right wing critique of political correctness is the ‘politically incorrect’ comedian Bill Maher who, I must grudgingly admit, seems to have come up with a surprisingly marketable idea.   

[3] I am not the first person to have noticed that contemporary atheism is a testosterone soaked affair depending as it does on moralistic posturing and aggressive verbal sparring. In fact, the polemical tone of the current batch of atheists is curiously like the confessional polemics of the early modern period. Certainly their moralism is very much in the best Puritan tradition (in fact, scratch an atheist and you will all too often find a shrill, moralistic scold). This is also, in part, a legacy of analytic philosophy and its persistent confusion of eristics with intellectual rigor. This is something, I am told, which drives many women out of philosophy. To quote Mary Warnock on the matter: “…I think that academic philosophy has become an extraordinarily inward-looking subject, devoted not to exposing and examining the implications of the way we think about the world, but to exposing instead deficiencies in the arguments of other philosophers. If you pick up a professional journal now, you find little but nitpicking responses to previous articles. Women tend to get more easily bored with this than men. Philosophy seems to stop being interesting just when it starts to be professional.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/25/philosphy-women-warnock-baggini-debate). On women and atheism see:  https://qz.com/613270/brazen-sexism-is-pushing-women-out-of-americas-atheism-movement). If Ms. Bianco is correct we may add social Darwinism (which is taken to justify aggressive competition) to the stew of puritanism and positivism mentioned above.

[4] By reason he also means “reason as opposed to history”. The atheist has no historical sense and prefers the timeless, Platonically pure knowledge of ‘science’ (which, of course, has no history in any interesting sense- just a straight linear trajectory). Unable to contextualize anything in a time period he will denounce 7^th century prophets or Inca priests as his exact contemporaries. This reflects not just empirical ignorance of historical facts (to which the atheist prefers an extremely simplified and essentially mythic Whig narrative) but a failure to understand ‘historicity’ as a dimension of human experience.     

[5] See https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/3k7jx8/too-many-atheists-are-veering-dangerously-toward-the-alt-right. See also: https://www.salon.com/2017/07/29/from-the-enlightenment-to-the-dark-ages-how-new-atheism-slid-into-the-alt-right/. Suffice it to say that New Atheism has never really been about anything but defending Anglo-American supremacy in culture and by extension politically. It is inherently an imperial and reactionary project as Christopher Hitchens’ support of the Iraq war made clear years ago. Sam Harris has inserted himself in the ‘Race and IQ debate’ which is not actually a debate because there is no such thing as race and no such thing as IQ: these are statistical and cultural constructs not real world ‘things’.  

[6] The career of Dawkins illustrates the role of luck in human affairs: no one would take him seriously if he did not speak in an Oxbridge accent. An Oxbridge accent is a ticket to comment freely on everything under the sun with the urbane Voice of Authority. Indeed, the less one knows the better this works for genuine knowledge would make one stumble and grasp for nuance undermining the illusion of universal competence. This is why the aristocrat cultivates ignorance not as an obstacle to power and authority but as the surest path to it. He seeks to demonstrate to all and sundry how superior he is to the plebian need to know what he is talking about. That is why aristocrats in the past who were connoisseurs of the arts hid this fact under a mask of nonchalance. That said Dawkins is a political innocent in what is probably a good sense and does not share the bloodthirsty fantasies of the atheist neo-cons.  

[7] As for Mr. Harris incarnation of reason itself see the following: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/being-mr-reasonable. The author of this piece convicts ‘Mr. Reason’ of evasiveness and dishonesty in the service of stunning irrationality and I must say that anyone who plans to hector others on how ‘irrational’ they are had better have his own house in order first.