The future of God – Militant atheists shouldn’t behave like religious nuts

Another ‘we need to learn to get along‘ blog that fills G in my alphabetic ‘future of’ series.

Extremism hides in all sorts of places.

Atheism – not believing in the existence of a god – is a perfectly sound and rational assessment of the observable universe, a reasonable conclusion to come to, and I won’t say a word against it, but atheism isn’t the only reasonable conclusion available. Atheists don’t have a monopoly on rational thought. Sadly, some atheists have taken to being militant, started to make lots of regulatory demands and generally attacking and trying to oppress those who disagree with them. Militant atheists have always existed but their numbers have grown and they have been making a lot of noise lately. I am not alone in thinking that is not a healthy trend. Bigotry is unpleasant wherever it is found. Let’s be clear: atheism is perfectly reasonable but militant atheism is just another form of bigotry. Some militant atheists say they hate religious people because they are intolerant, without realizing the hypocrisy in such a statement. They compound bigotry with stupidity.

I won’t consider the virtues and faults of any belief set here, nor discuss my own stance, which has varied over time considerably. I will only argue against extremism and bigotry.

Although many have tried hard, and it is certainly easy to pour scorn on the idea, you can’t actually prove that there is no god. The observable universe can be explained without needing any reference to a creator but that doesn’t prove there wasn’t one. Personal religious experiences can be dismissed by citing possible psychological explanations, but they could be genuine. Without experiencing something first hand, it’s hard to know what you’re trying to explain away, or whether your explanation makes any sense. In the absence of proof, you make your own observations, listen to the arguments on both sides, you weigh up the sanity and intelligence and possible agendas of people claiming first hand religious experience and of those who have strong faith, and then you make up your mind which ones are most convincing to you. Then you sit on that side of the fence. You could decide to sit on the fence and be agnostic if you think there is a reasonable case for both sides, or if you don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort thinking through something that isn’t terribly important to you. You may even swap sides now and then. But what you can’t reasonably assume is that everyone who reaches a different conclusion from you is an idiot.

If a lot of smart people believe in something, they might all be wrong but there also just might be something in it. A superficial and contemptuous cherry-picking glance at their religion won’t tell you anything about its underlying truths. Lots of people have been atheists in the past, it’s hardly a new idea. Lots of them were strongly convinced they were right but were later converted to a faith. Believing there is no god ends up just as much a belief as believing that there is. You can fiercely argue on probabilities or about whether particular faiths are dumb, but it doesn’t change the fact that you simply can’t prove it either way. Atheism may not be a religious faith, but in the absence of proof and in the presence of the evidence of billions who genuinely believe the opposite, atheism is still just an unprovable belief.

Being an atheist is still perfectly reasonable, but it should therefore be accompanied by a degree of intellectual humility. The majority of atheists accept that it is possible to come reasonably to either conclusion about a god and manage to find the humility and to live alongside those of faith. Many people haven’t given the matter a great deal of thought and that’s fine too, provided they too live peacefully side by side with others who do believe something or nothing.

Sadly, this increasingly vocal minority of militants don’t want to live peacefully side by side with those who believe in a god. Militant atheism, where the humility is absent, is simply misplaced intellectual arrogance and bigotry. Assuming that you are smarter than all those people who believe, that you fully understand their belief mindset and can clearly see where and why they are mistaken, even though all those people can’t see it for themselves in spite of endless study – that is quite a conviction of your own intellectual superiority over the vast number of your fellow people. Some of those that believe probably have higher IQs than you, are better qualified, have been around more, investigated the religions more thoroughly, with less prejudice, some have read the various writings for themselves, and thought it all through in more depth. They haven’t all just listened to superficial mockery of things that may have been misrepresented or dragged out of context by someone with an agenda to push. They haven’t just blindly absorbed a celebrity tweet and joined in the oppression of believers so they can look cool and trendy without bothering to expend any effort thinking it through for themselves. With all that background, are you still sufficiently convinced that your intellect and judgment is so superior to all those people’s that you’re prepared to be a militant?

That’s quite a conviction to have. Most people who hold it shouldn’t and aren’t as smart as they think they are. Being atheist just means holding an honest and reasonable belief alongside billions of others holding theirs, but becoming a militant atheist renders you no more deserving of respect than those militant religious extremists you despise; your position and your behavior are essentially the same – I’m right, you’re wrong, therefore I should be in control and you should do as I say, and I have the right to walk all over your rights, because my beliefs are less primitive, more enlightened, more important than yours. That’s not a reasonable position. Religious militants have brought much misery to the world throughout history, but this new bunch of militant atheists are no better. They are just religious oppressors in different uniforms.

Atheism is a respectable faith that there is no god. Militant atheism is just another extremist faith followed mostly by people who think they are smarter than they are and by those who want to seen as fashionable but are too intellectually lazy to think for themselves so just parrot their favorite celeb. Neither is a laudable role.

Atheism is reasonable. Agnosticism is reasonable. Some religious faiths are reasonable. Militant religion isn’t. Militant atheism isn’t.