To listen to some people these days, you’d think that atheists are the new Taliban. First we have the preposterous Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, ranting that:
“atheists like Richard Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube”
And then sophisticated poseurs like Stuart Jeffries seek to portray the situation as a shouting-match between two equally dogmatic and intolerant factions: believers and unbelievers. Now Caspar Melville, editor of the New Humanist, provides a welcome rebuttal:
The evidence for [Jeffries] claim is depressingly shopworn. He quotes without challenge [from] Colin Slee… [and] criticises both Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens for their “aggressive” attitude to believers without addressing the substance of their many and complex arguments. […] Throughout, atheists and secularist are characterised as “dogmatic”, “evangelical”, “fundamentalist”, and as obsessed by God and the idea of belief, as Billy Graham. Jeffries is quite right to point out that these days secularists seem exasperated. But who can blame us when the case against unaccountable and undemocratic religious privilege is so misrepresented by articles like his?
Melville goes on to describe the diverse views of contributors to his journal and others, disproving the assertion of a uniformitarian quest to “airbrush” religion from public debate, to create a soulless, value free public sphere.
Ultimately I would think that believers of any stripe would be unwise to associate themselves with Jeffries’ wry cynicism. The logic of his position is that it doesn’t really matter what people believe, and we should accept all beliefs with a Mencken-like shrug. I don’t think so. For people like Dawkins and Hitchens and PZ (and me), belief matters – and irrational beliefs should be “named and shamed”.
Melville concludes:
Was this the same Mencken who wrote: “The evangelical churches are rapidly becoming public nuisances. Neglecting almost altogether their old concern about individual salvation, they have converted themselves into vast engines for harassing and oppressing persons who dissent from their naïve and often preposterous theology.” Hardly “respectful of others cherished beliefs”, was he? […] I suspect that if he were around now his arguments would be far closer to those of Christopher Hitchens than Stuart Jeffries would like to imagine.