The Atheist Bus Campaign is a project of the Freethought Association of Canada to offer an atheist message in the form of paid advertising on public transit vehicles in Toronto. It emulates the very successful Atheist Campaign started in the UK, and which has recently enjoyed a victory that will ensure its ability to continue unhindered.

The TTC buses showing these ads should start rolling in May, and the proposed message is the same as that used for the UK campaign: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Messages and hierarchy

I was made sleepy by the expected reaction from zealots, but was somewhat surprised to find opposition to the campaign from unexpected quarters. A non-religious acquaintance seemed baffled, wondering aloud what the purpose of it could possibly be. And Author Stephen Marche, a self-declared atheist who uses the term interchangeably with “secular humanism”, bemoaned the campaign in The National Post, finding it distasteful.

I believe what Dawkins and Hitchens write, and I certainly don’t need to be convinced of religion’s inherent toxicity… But turning secular humanism into a movement with a message is no way to stand in opposition to the terrifying global rise of religiosity.

It’s a startling declaration at first, apparently bereft of conviction and courage. But Marche is merely arguing that the first step toward dogmatism, the rigidity of viewpoint that atheism is supposed to refute, is hierarchy and organization. The kernel of his warning is a sound one: dogmatism, or militancy, of any kind, including militant atheism, is bad. It refutes rational investigation, the very foundation of most atheism, and ultimately rests on nothing more than unfounded propositions and opinions bleated loudly, lacking any appeal to reason.

Unreasonable lassitude

Like most atheists, however, Marche seems happy to silently live his life surrounded by the messages of religion, even while finding those messages to be irrational at best, and poisonous at worst. In October 2008, a “leading Vatican official” called homosexuality “a deviation, an irregularity, a wound.” There is a tiny, one hundred strong Christian sect in Kansas in the United States that has had global publicity far in excess of what is merited based on its size, the worthiness of its assertions, and the guttural offensiveness of its messages. And of course, Joseph Ratzinger, the current pope, previously head of The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — known a century or so ago as The Inquisition — said on December 22, 2008 that humanity needs to be saved from homosexuality and transsexualism, likening these conditions to its own destruction. (As an aside, I’ve walked down Church Street after midnight on many weekend nights in my youth, and humanity is in no danger of being eradicated by the various incarnations of Marylin Monroe and Jane Mansfield you can find flouncing around there.)

To my knowledge, Marche has not written any articles in major national newspapers decrying messages as offensive and anti-human as these. It is startling to me that he has decided to pick on the inoffensive and agnostic, even sheepish and apologetic message of the bus campaign.

This is morally repugnant to me. To take a position against the hurricane of life-denying poison coming from the lips of many of the faithful, a small position, so discrete as to be almost invisible, seems to be the only recourse many people have. To display one’s world view in quiet, gentle opposition to the regular religious harangue — to, horror of horrors, stand in opposition to all of this with an actual message! — is a noble effort, a kind of life-affirming “excuse me but” in the face of a pervasive, opposing rant. It is not only a good way to stand in opposition to the relentless march of religious intolerance and irrationality, it is a necessary act. A baby step perhaps, but an important one.

Much in a single line

Most importantly, much to the dismay of Marche and many people like him, the eleven words of the campaign message represent a coming together of people weary of the intolerant unreason issuing from the side of the faithful. Something quite simply has to be said, in as cheerfully inoffensive a way as possible. Gathering for this effort, sending money or putting up a website or ordering advertising on the side of a bus, is not the sure road to rigid dogmatism that alarmists are worried about. It is simply the required response of a growing population of reasonable people who reject the unreasonable, sometimes offensive and toxic, dictates of religion.

The message is directed at believers, and it is a simple one: Yours is not the only message around. There are others with a message more wholesome and more life-affirming. Fear is not the dictator of morality, and good works do not come from an abundance of faith, but from an unfettered love of humanity, from pleasure in humankind for its own sake, from the joy we take in our fellows simply because we live, because we are, because we eschew suffering and embrace life; because we believe in ourselves.

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The level of acrimony between atheists and believers is high. While atheists assert their right to challenge the faith of believers, believers feel mounting pressure to counter-attack. There have been a flurry of books in response to The God Delusion and others, but nowhere is the rancour more evident than in popular discourse, where there seems to be few rules of decorum, and where dogmatic positions in both views undermine whatever argument any particular adherent wishes to put forward. True communication in this scenario is not possible.

I understand the potential for militancy in atheists’ positions. Logical discourse mostly fails when attempted with many believers, because faith is necessarily impervious to logic. Many atheists assert that religious faith, especially fundamentalism, has seriously eroded education, science, and intellectualism, has made inroads in politics that have accelerated this process, and has changed the face of popular culture (such as it is). In the face of the inability of believers to accept rational arguments criticizing their beliefs, a reactionary response from atheists follows, buoyed by a feeling of fatigue with staying silent. This leaves the avenue of assault wide open — while simultaneously closing off common ground.

From the viewpoint of the believer, the nature of faith makes it impossible to reconcile its tenets with serious critical inquiry, and thus, there is no point in any dialectic concerning faith. To have faith implies that one accepts the infallibility of the articles of that faith. In extreme cases, inquiry of any kind is a sort of heresy. For example, even the soundest forms of biblical criticism and analysis would not alter the way some believers hold to the specifics of their faith. While this way of dealing with the world is a kind of refuge for believers, it necessarily cuts off all communication with those who do not believe.

In Canada, twenty-three percent of the population identify themselves as atheist, remarkably about double the number of the estimated percentage of atheists in the entire world. Even in the United States, where about 8% of the population report being atheist, the number of non-believers is growing, especially among the young. Even so, believers far outnumber atheists in North American society, and in society at large.

It seems apparent that both sides should be communicating with one another.

There is some attempt to do this. David Emery, a pastor at Middletown Christian Church in the US state of Kentucky, offered a series of sermons that sought to respond to what he calls the valid arguments of popular atheists like Dawkins. In his short but incisive book, Atheism, Julian Baggini, who is not shy about revealing the abundant absurdities of faith, warns about militant and dogmatic atheism, and its cost to reasoned discourse.

A model of common ground that would temper acrimony would be the understanding that a moral position is possible for both the atheist and the believer. Believers can be coached to accept that morality is possible with no belief in gods; that, in fact, morality and altruism are the default modes that human beings operate from. The sheer abundance of evidence of moral behaviour throughout recorded history, where the nature of belief in gods has continually changed, is indicative of this. That most atheists are even concerned with moral and ethical issues should be proof positive.

Atheists must always operate from a position of moral grounding while recognizing the fundamental humanity of believers. What is more immediately important than what a person believes is what a person is, in terms of his or her relationship to the rest of the world, and how suffering impacts everyone, whether its source is an absurd delusion or not. There is no need to refrain from pointing out absurdities of faith, especially when those absurdities take on dangerous forms; but when communicating with individuals, what is important is the recognition of the sameness of the atheist and the believer. PZ Myers’ cracker desecration would have been impossible for him, if his concerns for the suffering of others outweighed his intolerance for religious absurdities.

As their demographic numbers, perhaps glacially, approach one another, the importance of the shared humanity of believers and atheists is highlighted.

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This weekend, I saw Religulous, Bill Maher’s documentary-style raz of religion.

Given to comedic ridicule, and preoccupied with talking snakes and other absurdities, the movie is somewhat predictable as Maher wends his way across the globe in search of believers he can mock. He spends much time in the US, at the odious Creation Museum in Kentucky, and the repugnant and unrepentantly lucre-driven Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida, where six-year-old children line the streets to watch a gore-covered man being horse-whipped toward his ultimate place of torture. Lovely religion.

Maher takes on the usual suspects: a fundamentalist senator, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who stumbles his way through an interview in which he seems to admit his less than stellar IQ; a Jewish convert to Christianity whose sole reason for finding Christ had something to do with a rude believer who told him to hold a glass of water out the window if he was thirsty — which he inexplicably did — purportedly resulting in a deluge from the heavens; a gay man who, on turning to Jesus, suddenly married and fathered three children and found this reason enough to make his life’s work the conversion of gay men everywhere to his special brand of Christianity; a bunch of slack-jawed, slack-bellied truckers whose chapel is in the bowels of a transport truck and whose command of English is as one would expect; and on and on and on.

The interviews are fodder enough for Maher, and the movie punctuates each idiotic quip and every forehead-slapping affront to reason with clips from old movies, which serve to punctuate the stupidity of it all. This is great fun, and one of the better reasons to see the movie. But Maher isn’t too concerned with getting things exactly right.

For example, he cites a figure of 16% from a “recent study”, that represents, as he puts it, Americans who do not identify with any religious group. He says this percentage is a larger demographic than blacks, Jews, homosexuals, and others that have a strong political lobby. He seems to admonish the audience to use this knowledge in order to effect secular change in the political landscape of the United States.

He doesn’t name the “recent study”, but it’s probably the 2004 report done by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, entitled The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States. But the study does not suggest that this number of 16% of religiously unaffiliated people are either hard-core secularists or agnostics, and they are certainly not atheists. In fact, one of its major findings is that those who don’t identify with a religious group — a turn of phrase that Maher himself uses in describing the study he refers to — do, in fact, practice some form of religion.

Sizable numbers of those who do not affiliate psychologically with any religion are, nevertheless, occasional or unsettled practitioners. As such, they might sometimes attend religious services, have previously identified religiously as adults, or expect to take up a religion sometime in the future. A more complete religious profiling requires additional information about religious beliefs and behavior.¹

So described, these are hardly the sorts of people who are going to be demanding a lot of fundamental secular change in the way politics is conducted in the United States.

Maher also conflates the biblical account of Jesus with the stories of Mithras, Horus, Osiris, and Dionysus, as has been done before, most notably in Brian Flemming’s documentary The God Who Wasn’t There. In fact, he even uses a similar device for counting matches between the stories, where his narration of the similarities is punctuated by a visual and audio element that increases a counter as the matches accumulate.

Maher isn’t the quickest thinker on the planet. On ridiculing the trinity, he was impressed with one believer’s response that compared the Christian god to water, which, said the believer, also has three states of solid, liquid, and gas. Without needing to get into the fallacious nature of this analogy, Maher could simply have said something like, “But they’re not all three at the same time,” or some such, and neutered this non-starter with a non-starter of his own. Alas, he was merely impressed.

The most memorable interviews were with a cantankerous but oddly lovable Catholic priest outside the Vatican, and a Catholic priest and scientist who deftly swept aside creationism and fundamentalism as the backward anomalies they are.

The movie takes a dark turn in the last five minutes. Standing on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of the end of the universe according to all three major monotheistic religions, Maher launches into a dark oratory, concluding that, indeed, the world might end because of religion, but not for the reasons believers think. He makes a worthy appeal to reason, and to the reasonable, and asks doubters and atheists to come out of the closet to make reason and logic important in the national discourse once again. It’s a good ending to what had been a fun and fluffy ride.

Here and elsewhere, Maher owes a lot to writers like Christopher Hitchens, and especially Sam Harris. His appeal, though condensed, strongly echos the essays in Harris’ The End of Faith. He is neither as eloquent nor as studied as Harris, of course, but the resemblance to the gist of Harris’ book is striking.

I enjoyed this movie, and so did the audience. It’s not for everyone. It’s certainly not for the believer who is easily offended at irresistible clarity. Nor is it for the atheist who is squeamish when the believer is unapologetically ridiculed. But the message, like the urgent message carried by all atheists in the early twenty-first century, is important indeed, and I would recommend this movie both for its entertainment value, and its five-minute ending message.

1. Sid Groeneman and Gary Tobin, The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States, Institute for Jewish and Community Research, San Francisco, 2004, p. 3 [↩]

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Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, authors of Breaking the Spell and The God Delusion respectively, are perhaps most responsible for what is popularly called “new atheism”. With Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, they have added the concerns of atheist thinkers to popular Western discourse, unapologetically, with no sensitivity for the bruised feelings of theists. Perceived variously as rude, arrogant, unfeeling, or high-handed, their response is generally to point out that, when talking about ideas that are so important to humanity and indeed often dangerous to it, it’s best to leave the kid gloves at home.

The fact is, there is no way to politely point out that another’s views are absurd, irrational, and dangerous, and there is no way to sample the irrationality of religious belief without exposing it. The “new” aspect of atheism represented by this group seems a rather time-tested idea: argue well, with all reason, and refuse to accept illogical absurdities. Through their discourse, they are admonishing us not to retreat into niceties when it comes to certain taboo subjects, but to represent our arguments in the coolest, most reasonable way possible.

The response to this way of dealing with theism is predictable, and could be ramping up. In addition to claims of tactless injuriousness in the arguments of atheists, apologists for theism and religion are adding the element of alarm into the mix. New atheists are dangerous. Beware their ideas.

As usual, this comes when the realm of reasoned discourse has failed, and the only option left is the peddling of fear.

In Faith Attack, Clifford Goldstein, the rabidly fundamentalist Seventh-Day Adventist and former editor of Liberty Magazine, describes new atheism as an unprovoked assault on belief.

In usual style, he diminishes his own arguments with thinly disguised ad hominems; for example, he chooses to quote the word “intellectuals” when describing Dawkins-Dennett, Harris-Hitchens. But in his description of these men as harbingers of a kind of chilling philosophical fascist state, where he imagines the most provocative of their arguments having come to life as draconian law, he has chosen not to address the arguments themselves, but to assume their worthlessness by extrapolating an absurd scenario while making sure to add a healthy dose of fear-mongering along the way.

This is not a challenge to the arguments at hand, but merely a kind of red herring. Attractive though this vision might be to apocalyptic doomsayers and science fiction aficionados, it is a silly counter to very real concerns. One is happy to find that, ultimately, Goldstein does not even take himself seriously.

Fortunately, their views aren’t likely to become public policy anytime soon, and certainly not in the United States (after all, look how well they worked in the Soviet Union).

Here, and elsewhere, he can’t help but draw comparisons between an atheist argument and the Soviet Union. This tiresome trick is described by Alonzo Fyfe as The Hitler and Stalin cliché. It is just as unconvincing when issued by Mr. Goldstein as it is when trundled out by any other apologist lacking a cohesive argument.

Reflecting Dawkins’ assertion that teaching children about hell is a species of child abuse, Goldstein says the same about teaching children evolution, and telling them about the finality of death. This is particularly egregious, not just for the strident insult to the science of evolution, but to the twisted reversal of values that places more importance on selling an arbitrary fantasy to impressionable people, than familiarizing them with the reality of life in the universe.

Expressing dewey-eyed remorse that children might not be taught about their “origins” or “destiny”, and emoting over the fact that kids might be told they’ll never again see Grandma and Grandpa after they’re gone, Goldstein cannot bring himself to imagine that children are stronger than this. What has he to say about Dale McGowan’s daughters, who discovered both their fear of death and their victory over this fear at the same moment? About their ability, at ages six and ten, to understand and reject the argument of First Cause as a logical absurdity? Clearly Goldstein attributes no quality of intellect or reason to children.

By the end of the article, Goldstein ironically recognizes the counter-attack that will soon issue forth from the hard religious right.

[New atheists'] most damaging impact might be…the fertile fodder they provide the Christian Right, long trying to convince the flock that their religion is under attack by secular elites…[T]he extremism of the new atheists will only feed the extremism of the Christian Right, each side pushing the other further in a direction that neither needs to go.

Though there may be some truth to this, he seems to have missed the point that he himself is a carrier of exactly the same kind of fear-mongering these flock leaders would be guilty of. At least in the case of religious extremists, such a reaction is understandable. In Mr. Goldstein’s case, we can only guess that, for want of a cohesive and rational argument of rebuttal, alarmist calls about the falling sky is the only response left.

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