Notes from Evil Bender

It’s no surprise that the folks at WORLD magazine think atheists live in their closets and steal their loose change, but I hadn’t seen the “practical atheism” trope in a while until they whipped it out (full text available at–where else–the Free Republic).  For those of you who haven’t ever immersed yourself in Christianist language, “practical atheism” means “daring to live your life without constant panic about the whichever invisible being I happen to believe in.” But no appeal to on this point would be complete without a requisite shot at actual atheists:

 No one would be surprised later this month, I suppose, if the editors of Time magazine were to announce they were putting Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris on their year-end cover as co-winners of the annual Person-of-the-Year award. Nobody, the editors would explain, had done more than these three pioneers during the year 2007 to encourage humankind to rethink its superstitious bondage to theism. Nobody had made it more legitimate to leave God out of the day-to-day discussion. Their widely published books, lectures, and debates—for better or for worse—were pacesetting and world changing.

I encourage those of you who still bother with time to consider if they would make any of the claims listed here. Maybe they’d suggest those in the last sentence, but they’d not be endorsing atheism, certainly: they know where their bread is buttered. And, seriously, this is the magazine that named YOU person of the year last year. No one cares who they name, but WORLD’s Joel Belz thinks making up the next winners is a great way to start his piece.

But if the editors of Time did such an unsurprising thing, they would be dead wrong. They should instead have nominated themselves.

And not, like you might suspect, because of Time’s complicity in the Bush Administration’s crimes, or because of the obvious ego of those who select the “person of the year” in the first place.

 For the truest and most effective proponents of godlessness are almost never those who are most blatant about their mission. They are instead those who purport to pick up any topic at all for further discussion—and then leave God out of that conversation. Do that with a dozen such discussions, or maybe 20 or 100, and you don’t have to do much more. You’ve implicitly made your case. God doesn’t exist—or if He does, He doesn’t matter.

Yes, how dare anyone write as though the most important thing in life isn’t whichever sky god the reader happens to worship?

No example could be more telling than Time’s Dec. 3 issue, whose cover brashly announces the main article: “What Makes Us Good/Evil.”

It isn’t just that the article is terribly trivial and wrong-headed—like when the author says flat out that “gorillas and chimps [have] mastered sign language” or when he goes on to suggest that using “tools” (as in throwing a rock) is at all the same as conceiving and making tools.

We’re off to a good start here! We’ve already got Belz denying that non-human primates can master sign-language and that they can craft and use tools. Someone should tell Belz that learning and communicating ideas through sign would be considered language use to the vast majority of us. Somehow, though, I suspect that Belz real problem with this stuff is not a Noam Chomsky-style critique of what it means to use language, but rather that Belz doesn’t like the icky idea that humans share a common ancestor with other primates.

But the author, you see, needs to elevate other species, even if he does so clumsily, in order to bring humans down to a level where moral judgment is nothing more than anatomy and chemistry. But that, I say, is not what makes a venerable magazine like Time look worst.

Now, I’m absolutely sure that the Time piece did have it’s share of scientific problems, given that Time pieces usually do. But they’re not the ones Belz is upset about. He just wants Time to posit that the reason for good and evil is “a magic man done it.”

The possibility that a meaningful God—or even a meaningless god, for that matter—is part of such a discussion gets not a single mention. In more than 3,000 words, the broad topic of “religion” is never suggested. There’s not a hint that anybody has ever talked about something called the “Fall.” It’s breathtaking, in fact, that Time could take on a cover story like “What Makes Us Good/Evil?” and leave out so much that seems so basic.

As much as I’m tired of Time, maybe I will have to track down this piece. After all, if it steadfastly refuses to attribute any credence to a fairy tale that says human being were created 2.4 million years after we developed the capacity to use tools. Belz may not like it, but there is absolutely no reason to give his particular mythology any credence at all. We can say with absolute certainty that humankind’s propensity for good and evil was not fixed by the first two humans in a garden 6,000 years ago.

Except, of course, that such is the essence of practical atheism—which is so dangerously more lethal than anything ever concocted by formal atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris. With an in-your-face atheist, you at least have time to get your senses in gear and your defenses set. With Time, the atheism is so quiet that many will miss it altogether.

By “defenses set,” Belz apparently means “you get a chance to turn off your voice to reason, so you’re less likely to question your beliefs.”

It’s a way of thinking that has been picking up speed for a long time in our culture. Our society, for the most part, decided long ago that it’s embarrassing and intrusive to try to drag God into a conversation about education or politics or entertainment or family or economics or art. So it may have been noteworthy—but not especially startling—to see in our local Sunday newspaper a feature titled “Merry Music —Add these 12 Christmas CDs to your holiday collection,” and to note that not a single one of the 12 was devoted to the historic “religious” aspects of Christmas. Christmas now instead means Clay Aiken and the Smithereens.

I’ll take “non sequitur” for 1000, Alex. The fact that not every Christmas album talks about Jesus doesn’t mean there’s a War on Christmas, though surely Belz wants his readers to believe there is. The fact remains we shouldn’t be making public policy decisions based on what any religious group believes God’s will to be. Surely Belz, who is in a panic about those who don’t believe Belz’s reading of the Bible should dictate public policy, wouldn’t care for other people’s views getting the same privileged position he wants for his own views.

OK. So the spirit of secularism has the wind at its back. Time says that the ability to empathize is a big part of the ability to understand the difference between right and wrong. And the magazine’s editors headline their optimism that “science is now learning what makes us both noble and terrible—and perhaps what can make us better.”

But even allowing for all that, isn’t it still pretty arrogant and uppity to leave out of the whole treatment of “What Makes Us Moral?” all reference to everything that has historically been central to the discussion?

No, Mr Belz, we should absolutely not give your particular superstition creedance in this discussion. It adds nothing to our understanding of morality, and in fact takes away from it. You might not like it that we’re slowly getting better at having discussions of right and wrong not predicated on what God supposedly said in whichever religious tome we happen to favor, but that’s your problem. Sorry that you are no longer being taken seriously as a moral authority based exclusively on your say so, but that isn’t my problem.

Or should we just concede that not just secularism, but practical atheism, is now the religion of our culture—and encourage the editors of Time to put a portrait of themselves on their year-end cover, symbolizing that tragic and terrifying fact?

Since Belz has conflated the two terms already, he’s obviously responsible for the sort of thing he claims to lament. But it bears repeating: no one’s religious views should be allowed to set public policy. In a democracy, secularism is the only protection we have to offer any beliefs, even those as pathetic as Belz’s.