Liberals and opinions

[liv]

siderea wrote a really interesting and thinky post about the unpopularity of New Atheism. There's a lot of insight her post, particularly on the necessity of religious tolerance for civic peace even while it has some unresolved issues. It seems it is having unintended side effects (e.g. on intellectual freedom) and may yet be proven to not actually work to maintain civic peace. The main point of the post is the very sensible observation that people aren't annoyed with New Atheists for being loud and in-your-face about something that everybody basically agrees with; they're annoyed with New Atheists because the New Atheist view of religion is in fact threatening.

My response here is more some thoughts that were activated by the post, than a direct rebuttal. Siderea personally, you're very welcome to skip this post if it seems likely to be annoying to you, and also very welcome to challenge me in comments if you'd like to. Where I'm coming from is that I think the OP is making some common, but not entirely accurate, assumptions about liberalism, and it's those I want to talk about.

The thing is, I am absolutely, to my core, a liberal. I'm also religious, but in some senses that's more incidental. Well, not completely, because I've chosen my religious path very much based on upholding my liberal values, and also my commitment to liberalism to a great extent flows from my religious beliefs as well as my very intense ancestral memory of what happens to Jews in illiberal societies.

But in as far as I'm offended by Dawkinsite atheists, it's much more as a liberal than as a religious person. It's not quite for the reasons that siderea postulates, though: To say that religion is bad and people should not indulge religious beliefs flies right in the face of the beloved liberal moral values of cultural tolerance and intellectual freedom. Those are my values, and yes, they are beloved to me. But my liberal values are not violated by atheists declaring "people should not indulge religious beliefs". They're violated by atheists declaring that people who hold religious beliefs, or even people who are vaguely associated with the badness that religion is presumed to be, are deserving of violence. Siderea quotes Dawkins being massively disingenuous and saying hostility [...] towards religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody [...] just because of a theological disagreement. Any 12-year-old first cutting his teeth on internet debates about religion can tell you that institutional atheism has a body count at least as bad as any religious wars. It's not just that puerile, Stalin murdered more people than Hitler stuff; people are killed for following religions (sometimes called superstitions, because we often don't give non-Western religions even the minimal respect of being regarded as incorrect religions) that are seen as a threat to modern colonialist powers. And that includes capitalist ones as well as the communist examples everybody always reaches for.

I think the discussion about rudeness and civility (implied in the post, expanded in the comments) is a bit of a red herring. The problem is not "rude" atheists saying things like 'LOL, theists are so dumb, they believe an invisible sky fairy created the world and tells them what to do. Fuck them!' The problem for me as a liberal is atheists arguing, in entirely formal register and using academic-sounding language, that the scientifically correct thing to do is to kill disabled children (Singer) or that it's desirable to destroy Muslim countries with nuclear bombs (Harris). Atheists have to be held to the same standards that they hold religious people: their beliefs have consequences. And they don't get the excuse that atheists don't hold power; in some circumstances, yes, atheists hold substantial power to act on their beliefs, and some of those beliefs are harmful. Particularly the kinds of beliefs that cluster around the idea that the Enlightenment was the best thing that ever happened to humanity and it was mostly initiated by middle-class European men, therefore middle-class white men are inherently superior to all other types of humans.

The common misconception about liberalism is that liberals believe all opinions are equally valid and deserving of respect. And therefore liberals are upset by New Atheists trashing religious beliefs (whether or not they are beliefs that we personally hold). Not so! We believe that all humans are equally valid. Liberals are perfectly entitled to disagree with others' opinions, indeed to challenge them vigorously. What liberals don't do is rule any opinions as excluding people from the basic freedom and respect that all humans deserve. That means we don't have the recourse of telling anyone, if you profess that opinion, we will punish and exclude and torture you until you change your bad opinion.

I see the same fundamental misunderstanding of liberalism in some of the fruitless debates about freedom of speech and punching Nazis. It feels like people who lean to the authoritarian left are arguing with a straw liberal who somehow thinks that racist, pro-genocide opinions are equally valid as pro-human, tolerant opinions. The whole "so-called tolerant liberals" thing from the right seems to be implying that if we really commit to liberal beliefs, we have to "respect" Nazi opinions that we should be murdered. No, I'm a liberal and I believe that Nazis (and a whole long list of other people) are entirely, and sometimes dangerously, wrong in their opinions. I also think those dangerously wrong people have the same human rights as people with fluffy lovely opinions; that's why they are human rights. If people commit hate crimes they are entitled to a fair trial and a just, proportionate punishment if proved guilty; if they advocate for others to commit hate crimes, then it's right for liberals to act to prevent those ideas from taking hold, but using legal, or failing that at least morally decent, means. (The question of whether violence is ever justified to prevent more serious harm is not, I think, one that there's a standard liberal answer to, but the point is that a liberal should never justify cruelty to someone for holding a wrong opinion.)

This goes for religion too. I have some very specific and very firm opinions about religion, and the number of people who agree with me is probably well under a million world-wide. I respect the people who disagree with me as people, but that doesn't mean I think their opinions about the existence of God and the relationship between deities and humans are just as good as mine. My beef with New Atheists, though, is not that they mock my opinions about theology. It's that they assume the only reason I'm religious is because I hold stupid opinions (usually young earth creationism, *sigh*). They don't understand that religion is so much more than a set of propositions. siderea touches on this in her post, and I think the parts of religion that New Atheists miss are really critical.

She poses the question to another commenter who like me identifies as both religious and liberal: would it be better in your lights if their criticism of all religion were more thorough and intersectional? I can't speak for brooksmoses but personally I would dearly love a thorough, intersectional criticism of religion. Indeed, my own religious path is all about debate and criticism and finding new ways to treat our fellow humans better! I'm willing to put up with a lot of annoying New Atheist guff to find that intersectional criticism, but so far I haven't seen much of it. Indeed, I recently read a Tumblr post claiming that the reason Greta Christina's Atheism+ movement, that aimed to be more intersectional than its parent movement, failed, was because feminism and anti-racism are cults and atheists are too intelligent to join cults. #NotAllAtheists, sure, but that kind of attitude is much more of a problem for me as a liberal than (often justified) criticism of religious beliefs.

Comments

[pseudomonas]

This is a slightly pedantic point, but it's probably worth getting in there before there's too much cross-purposing in the discussion; "liberal" has rather different general usage in the UK and in the US. I'm not sure how much this actually impacts in this case, but I suspect that the "so-called tolerant liberals" stereotype at least differs between there and here?

[liv]

Yeah, I think there is somewhat of a US-UK difference here. But given the American OP specifically talks about tolerance and intellectual freedom, I think she's talking about liberal in the narrow sense, rather than liberal in the very broad sense of being vaguely in favour of some kind of social safety net.

[pseudomonas]

I think so, but it's still tied up with "things that members of this political/social tribe tend to (or are alleged to) think" and it's not the same tribe in different countries, even if it goes by the same name.

[pseudomonas]

I think that in general, the reconciliation between liberalism and the existence of religion has historically been secularism; a consensus that the boundary of acceptable religious belief and practice is that religion not be imposed within the public sphere.

Arguing against this consensus point from either direction tends towards the illiberal, but also tends towards the unstable.

[davidgillon]

If we assume all views are equally valid, then pure secularism is from some perspectives an unbalanced approach, automatically excluding the views of believers from public life. It's an approach that seems inherently biased towards an atheist interpretation.

An approach that respects all views seems essential, but a way of attaining that balance in the mechanisms of state is rather elusive.

[pseudomonas]

I don't think it's about respecting all views equally, merely about formalising the position that people are equally free to believe whatever they wish (this being the part that AIUI New Atheists would dispute), but not to expect their views to be enshrined in public policy.

[green_knight]

You're not wrong - but the 'public life' tends to be open only to a small number of religions - and the more support those religions have from the state, the less public life is open for a) atheists and b) other believers to follow *their* beliefs.

If schools have a moment of contemplation, nobody knows what you're saying inside your head: you might address a deity, you might simply go 'I hate this place'. If schools have a school prayer you're supposed to say aloud, then those who belong to that religion can practice openly; those who are not have to jump through extra hoops and may suffer consequences. And the less happy they are to sit through a daily prayer, the more problems they might invite.

'Not privileged' does not equal 'excluded'.

[davidgillon]

the more support those religions have from the state, the less public life is open for a) atheists and b) other believers to follow *their* beliefs.

Which ironically seems to be more of a problem in the US, with theoretical separation of church and state, than in the UK with an established churche, and a fairly meh attitude to politician's religious beliefs.

[davidgillon]

The problem for me as a liberal is atheists arguing, in entirely formal register and using academic-sounding language, that the scientifically correct thing to do is to kill disabled children (Singer) or that it's desirable to destroy Muslim countries with nuclear bombs (Harris). Atheists have to be held to the same standards that they hold religious people: their beliefs have consequences.

When we're talking medical ethics, the field in which Singer has argued for the implementation of eugenics, and attempted to paint disabled people as the aggressors against him (I sense a pattern), the point from which they propose these arguments is very much that their beliefs can be argued without consequences.

A few years ago now there was a paper published in the medical ethics equivalent of the BMJ, it was written by two medical ethicists working out of an Australian university, at least one was actually Italian. The paper argued for the application of 'retroactive abortion' on disabled infants (yes, it actually called it that). The ethicists were allegedly surprised when there was a huge outcry. The journal responded by publishing an editorial by the editor, who was both a professor emeritus and a right reverend if memory serves, claiming that all those who opposed the paper were 'terrorists'.

The right-to-lifers were involved, so there may well have been threats, but disabled people were also protesting and being tarred with the same brush. I spent a couple of months on the journal's forums, trying to get them to actually address the points disabled people were making. I got nowhere.

They insisted their proposals had no practical impact, that they were merely a thought experiment - patently not true, they were being reprinted in the tabloids, and the aggressive disablists were taking the argument as justification. Attempts to get them to examine the underlying assumptions of their thought experiment - that someone with a disability is less fit to live, got nowhere. Even the respected forum regulars had a tendency to treat us as a source of humour for our quaint views and to poke fun at our requests for them to try and see our point. At one point the Right Revd Professor proposed that if we thought we had a point then clearly we would be able to write it up as an ethics paper and submit it to the journal for peer review - ah, that would be a no.

That was the nearest we got to them understanding that if they were constructing scenarios for doing away with us, then they should probably allow us a right to reply. But they never made the leap to actually accepting its legitimacy, they just gently derided it as some quaint folk belief current among the unlettered masses.

The one thing it helped me understand is why Singer is not mnore controversial within his field - most of them agree with him.

[rachelmanija]

I'm an atheist and I don't like what I've seen of the New Atheist movement because a lot of the times I see members pontificating, they're not just saying that God doesn't exist and religion can be bad for society and human beings, they're also saying horrifying shit like that. It's like the cliche about left and right extremists becoming indistinguishable. Once you start talking about people who shouldn't exist, it becomes morally irrelevant whether you mean Muslims or disabled people.

Also, devil's advocates are always, 100% of the time, assholes.

[lilacsigil]

My position exactly, which is why I'm a small-a atheist, not a paid-up capital A Atheist. Like many high-up religious people, the New Atheists seem to have little care for kindness or tolerance of difference, let alone acceptance or celebration of difference. And those opinions have genuine and awful consequences for actual people.

[davidgillon]

devil's advocates are always, 100% of the time, assholes.

I think it's part of the job description ;)

[lavendersparkle]

I think a difficulty is that most Western countries already enshrine in law that someone with a disability is less fit to live. In England the legal gestational abortion limit differs by nearly four months based on whether the foetus is disabled. This is the popular consensus that only gets challenged by pro-lifers, 'abortion on demand up until birth' style pro-choicers and disability rights activists. So I can see why medical ethicists would take that as a given and go " well there's not much difference between an abortion at 36 weeks gestation and euthanising a newborn, so euthanising a disabled newborn must be OK".

[davidgillon]

The impression I got was they didn't care about justification, we didn't get a vote. There was a definite 'you aren't intelligent enough to have an opinion' vibe, which is probably self-reinforcing when the topic is eugenics..

[siderea]

Not irritated at all! And I did a quick first-pass read, and only have quibbles.

I think pseudomonas is right that there's some relevant UK-US distinction. Not only (or even primarily) in the definition of "liberal", but in our cultures' different attitudes towards religion and approaches towards solving the problems of Wars of Religion. I think (and beyond what I've thought through, I suspect there's even more waiting discovery) that there's unobvious cultural consequences to the fact that the UK went the Established religion route, and the US expressly repudiated it, and enshrined that repudiation in it's foundational law.

In any event, reading your post, I had some "Hmmm, that sounds like it's how that works there, not here." Your comment about capitalist atheist atrocities, for instance, made me grin. Maybe there are, but you'll be hard pressed to find Americans, across the political spectrum, who associate capitalism with atheism. Our religious right adopted capitalism as a darling cause a long time ago; the capitalist fuckhead faction of US society didn't take long to notice that they had a warm welcome and safe harbor in the arms of the god-botherers, and didn't look back. Their unholy (possibly literally) alliance has been the backbone of the Republican party in the US for longer than I've been alive. The crassist, greediest industrialists, whatever their innermost convictions, are happy to publically hug their bibles to maintain that religious justification for their conduct. (Well, were; things may be changing.) I don't know you guys got hit with this, but there was something called "Prosperity Doctrine" in the conservative Protestant sects here, which basically abandoned all Christianity's teachings on greed and wealth and the value of the material world, or outright just stood it on its head.

So, basically, the idea that there are capitalists motivated by atheism, or prosecuting an atheist agenda, is not a plausible idea to most Americans. Even though 2000 years of European Christianity – and also the vigorous Catholicism of South America – would immediately indict American capitalist excesses as obvious Golden-Calf-veneration style covert atheism.

(I knew exactly what it meant when the new pope took the name of "Francis". I think most of my fellow Americans who were paying any attention – i.e. the Catholic population – were like, "Soooo... he's worried about animals??" (*headdesk*))

But Americans (radical liberation-theology hippies excepted) don't see it that way. Capitalism has been so thoroughly embraced by conservative Protestant Christianity here, nobody, not even our radical liberation-theology hippies, think that an American committing atrocities for capitalism necessarily believes themself to be sinning. The radical liberation-theology hippies here may think they're sinning, but they sadly throw up their hands in acknowledgement of the fact that the capitalist-fuckhead faction may just be adherants of one of the many popular US Christian sects that teaches that greed is good and usury is divine will.

[davidgillon]

There's a meme that the US is like it is because it got all the religious fanatics after the Wars of Religion. I suspect there's a tiny core of truth in that, in that it got a lot of the people who were unwilling to subjugate their beliefs to their responsibility to national laws (which gets more complex when you also figure in stuff like the Catholic Disqualification Acts). But that core of religion over state does fit in well with a lot of the ways the US developed constitutionally, even separation of state and religion becomes a logical, pro-religion consequence - rather than keeping religion out of politics, it's part of keeping the state out of religion.

But roll on a few hundred years and the context has been eroded, so that the New Atheists simply see it as some kind of evolutionarily superior form of areligious government. While the European states, which controlled religious hostility by subjugating it to a state religion following state goals, are viewed as inherently inferior and compromised, rather than as having arrived at a possibly equally effective solution through a different route. As a follower of a non-state religion within the UK, about the only time it consciously annoys me is when the succession to the throne comes up (because of the specific exclusion of Catholics).

WRT to the religious right and capitalism, I got an interesting reaction recently when I pointed out to someone with an aggressively pro-Prosperity Doctrine username that Christ was undoubtedly a communist given the tossing the money-lenders out of the Temple incident. That I would burn in hell for such a thought was about the least of it.

P.S.

[siderea]

but personally I would dearly love a thorough, intersectional criticism of religion.

Yeah, but of course you would: you're a Jew. Criticizing things thoroughly is how we express love and, where devout, celebrate the divine. :) :) :)

[silveradept]

This sounds suspiciously like a logical error, maybe a syllogism? The atheist that thinks themself superior by not believing in what they see as illogical religion seems to expand that feeling of superiority into all things, by virtue of their one difference of belief. In fiction, that would be rife for a riff on how similar the two beliefs are about ascribing superiority to their followers.

[seekingferret]

Maybe it's illiberal of me, but I'm at Dawkins disrespects me and acts like an asshole toward people like me, so I don't care whether or not liberalism says it's okay for him to act like an asshole toward me.