There’s nothing like those atheists who tell other atheists that we’re DOING IT RONG. We should either shut up, cozy up to the faithful, read more Sophisticated Theology™, or, in the case of Chase Madar, a New York attorney writing in Al-Jazeera America (a venue that I find increasingly distasteful), we should give up our criticisms of God and go after those other irrational ideologies, which are clearly more harmful than religion. And by those he means these three:
- The “cult of community.” After all, he says, there are some bad communities, like xenophobic religious communities. (He doesn’t mention the helpful communities, like those who gather supplies for the homeless or victims of disasters.)
Look how dreadful his discussion of community is!
If you live in the United States, you’ve most likely been exposed in some way to the cult of community (pronounced with a nasal elongation of the second syllable: com-muuu-ni-ty), that nourishing cosmic teat of the 501(c)3 firmament and even the nonnonprofit world.
What a cozy world we live in, so wall-to-wall full of communities! The Subway franchise community! The diabetes community! The Latino community! The international community! And, best of all if you’re in the nonprofit world, the funding community! Of course, this is sentimental nonsense. “Community” implies a kind of cohesiveness that is just not there in various business associations and broad categories of people who have little in common —granfalloons, in the old neologism of Kurt Vonnegut.
Brothers and sisters, let us be ecumenical in our disbelief, as religion has not cornered the market in rancid dogma.
And even when the phrase isn’t gibberish, the blessed realm of community is really no nirvana. Lynch mobs were and are a form of community justice; child molesting without legal consequence has been a feature, not a bug, of Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jewish community and many Catholic communities. Communities can be nurturing and warm, but they are also liable to be xenophobic, intolerant, suffocating.
Communal bonds are, of course, real — and there is such a thing as society — but we should at least be agnostic here and recognize that this goddess is not all Vestatending her hearth but more like Kali, the Hindus goddess who, despite a maternal streak, is known as a blood-fanged force of destruction. [JAC: TERRIBLE writing: drags in irrelevant erudition to no end at all.]
- Air power, and by that Madar means everybody who bombs anybody else. But that’s no an ideology, it’s a tactic, which often doesn’t work but sometimes does. At any rate, it’s not at all the same as the supernatural, nor is it a belief based on faith alone.
To go to his article, click on the screenshot below:
The article is so poorly written, and so incoherent and illogical, that I can hardly believe it got published. (Did the main get paid to write this?) And, in fact, the argument can be used against anyone. Helping the homeless in your town? You’d be better off giving money to starving children in Asia and Africa. Battling child abuse by Catholic priests? Waste of time: campaign against drones, which are far more irrational. Writing for Al-Jazeera to criticize atheists? Your time would be far better spent criticizing the oppression of women by Islam.
Here’s Madem’s stirring conclusion, ridden with snark and ill will. And notice how dreadful the writing is:
Belief in any of the above non-god gods is far more pernicious than belief in an old-fashioned god god, whose retro appeal I can often appreciate, what with Mahalia Jackson and all the stained glass. As for the list of secular idols, it could go on — education reform, the infallible wisdom of the U.S. Constitution, awareness, American exceptionalism and that creepy and narcissistic pseudo-divinity spirituality. [JAC: When in doubt, pile on the adjectives!]
Whether or not you’re, like me, an atheist, the odds are you know plenty of religiously observant people (including some clergy) whose bullshit detectors are splendidly calibrated when it comes to the more powerful irrationalities disfiguring our world. Heck, the popes in Rome, even the conservative ones, have been criticizing capitalism for ages! It would be a good thing if our atheist celebrities Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Bill Maher diversified their Johnny One-Note disbelief and went looking for bigger Nobodaddies to dispel. [JAC: A common trope: breezy cuteness that actually weakens his argument.]
After all, given the choice between Maher, who espouses the apocalyptic belief that our Vietnam War was really great and noble, and the Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas, whose lucid and well-informed antiwar writing I find most enlightening, there can be no doubt of which is the more rational of the two. It’s funny how much theology remains standing even if you don’t buy the divinity stuff, buttressed as theology often is by logic, reason and experience.
How about given a choice between Maher, who espouses the doctrine that child rape by priests is unconscionable, and William Lane Craig, who claims that God’s orders to kill all the Canaanites were moral? Who would Madar go for?
That last sentence above, which I’ve put in bold, shows the intellectual vacuity of Madar’s whole approach. Criticism of people like Maher, Harris, and Dawkins has come in many forms, and from many directions, but I’ve never seen someone say that they should be directing their ire not at faith but at the Wrong Kind of Community, or at capitalism. Has Madar never heard of the principle of comparative advantage, whereby things function better if each person does what he or she is best at?
