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

[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..