I’ve had it with National Public Radio.  Their incessant coddling of faith and indictments of atheism, without giving nonbelievers a chance to present their arguments, is reprehensible. And the nadir occurred this morning when NPR carried a four-minute story on Weekend Edition “analyzing” the murders of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Click on the screenshot below to go to the site and hear NPR embarrass itself. (There’s also a transcript of the piece.) Who was the one “expert” chosen to explain the killings? Our old friend, the religious apologist Reza Aslan.

The title at the website, shown below, tells it all.

Well, yes, maybe some see “extreme anti-theism” as a motive, but others see guns, others mental illness, others a parking dispute.  It’s all a muddle at this point, and may remain so forever. Why, do you suppose, did NPR concentrate on “anti-theism”? And who is “some”. Well, “some” turns out to be “one”: Aslan!

Here’s part of the transcript:

Religion scholar Reza Aslan says ordinary atheists just don’t believe in God. Hicks, Aslan says, was an anti-theist.

“An anti-theist is a relatively new identity, and it’s more than just sort of a refusal to believe in gods or spirituality; it’s a sometimes virulent opposition to the very concept of belief,” Aslan says.

“Virulent”? Why not “passionate”? Here are the two most relevant definitions of “virulent’ from the Oxford English dictionary, showing that the word definitely has a pejorative tone:

More:

The anti-theists have their own heroes; people like the outspoken writer Richard Dawkins, who appears often on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher condemning religion generally and Islam in particular.

“I mean these people have a holy book that tells them to kill infidels,” Dawkins once said on the show.

In fact, what Dawkins said above is the truth. Why does NPR present it as if it’s some bigoted interpretation of the Qur’an? The piece continues:

Reza Aslan says the anti-theists are few in number. But just as mainstream Muslims must confront the extremists in their communities, Aslan says, it’s time for mainstream atheists to do the same.

“To recognize that there is a small fringe element that has a belief system predicated on the inherent nature of religion as insidious, as needing to be removed from society,” he says.

Aslan is, pardon my French, a mushbrain. “Anti-theism” is not a “relatively new identity”: just go read Mencken or Robert G. Ingersoll (who wrote in the 19th century), Madelyn Murray O’Hair, or any number of the earlier “atheists” in Hitchens’s estimable book The Portable Atheist. The reasons atheists became “anti-theists” is because it simply became less dangerous to say what you thought about religion, not that some nonbelievers recently decided that religion was harmful.

There is in fact no strict demarcation between “atheists” and “anti-theists”.  We have atheists who don’t believe but see religion as either beneficial or benign, atheists who see religion as generally harmful or worthless, but aren’t activists, and we see atheists who see religion as harmful and are activists. And there are all gradations of this. None of them, at least in America, have been accused of violence—until now. Aslan, who loves to draw this distinction, now can’t resist putting it into practice by connecting it to the Chapel Hill murders.  He is a vile, unctuous and disingenuous opportunist, who loves the limelight far more than he hates atheists.

The fact is that one can make a good case that religion is harmful, even if only that it deludes people about their future, and to argue such a view doesn’t make one some kind of extremist or fringe radical whose views lead ineluctably to murder. There are those who, for instance, see belief in the paranormal as harmless, and those who see it as harmful and inimical to a rational worldview. Do we call the former “a-paranormalists” and the latter “anti-paranormalists”? The distinction is drawn for one reason only: to discredit unbelief by making it seem strident, unreasonable, and even a cause of violence.

NPR does quote Asra Nomani, a Muslim writer who says that Muslims shouldn’t use the killings as an excuse to create a “culture of fear”, but that doesn’t stop the show giving its own slant on the crime.

But right now the feeling among Muslim Americans seems to be that the North Carolina killings were clearly a hate crime.

President Obama on Friday released a statement, saying no one in America should be targeted because of who they are or how they worship. That statement followed a decision by the FBI to launch its own hate crime investigation in North Carolina.

Yes, of course many Muslims may see this as a hate crime, but they have their own viewpoint that doesn’t necessarily represent what really happened. Right now there is in fact a “hate crime” investigation that will determine if this act falls under the legal specifications of such a crime. Until that happens, we should reserve judgment. NPR doesn’t want to, and if they were responsible journalists, they’d present an opposing view, both to the notion that “anti-theism” is young and a “small fringe element of atheism”, and to the implication that anti-theism played some role in the killings. Or, if they were truly responsible, they’d stop fanning these flames and just shut up.

h/t: Jeff

This old question is of course being discussed again now that three Muslims have been murdered in North Carolina by an atheist. It’s not really an question that’s germane to the killing, for, after all, Hicks acted on his own, and we sure don’t have an atheist government. Nevertheless, this is one of the main criticisms leveled at atheists who themselves accuse Christianity, Islam, and other faiths of promoting dreadful behavior. “What about Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao?”, the believers and faitheists say? They perpetrated some of the worst genocides of our time, and they were explicitly atheist governments!

We’ve heard many of the responses, and my view is that yes, atheist governments can certainly do bad things, but usually not explicitly in the name of atheism. In that way they’re unlike the murders and terrorism committed explicitly in the name of faith: the Inquisition, the perfidies of ISIS, the killing of Shiites by Sunnis (and vice versa), the persecution of the Jews, and so on. But what’s important here is not religion per se, I think, but the problem of faith: those governments or movements weren’t operating on Enlightenment values or on the institutionalization of reason, doubt, and considered examination, but rather on unquestioning obedience to an infallible leader and ideology.

I discuss the issue of faith in The Albatross, and say that religion is only one form of misguided faith, though it’s the world’s most pervasive form. The clash between religion versus atheism, is one battle in the war between faith and reason. When I discuss the Lysenko affair, for instance, and describe how a misguided agronomist, supported by Stalin, ruined Soviet genetics and agriculture, there is a definite faith-like element in the whole mess. Stalin was the father, Lysenko his anointed son—here we do have a strong parallel to religion!—and neither could do any wrong. Soviet geneticists even fudged their data so it could conform to Lysenko’s bogus theory that environmental exposure of seedlings to cold would change their genetic constitution. And so, because questioning was prohibited and faith encouraged, in the face of evidence, the Russians lost decades of scientific advances and thousands starved. (The Soviets also killed many of their “blasphemous” scientists who questioned Lysenko, notably Nikolai Vavilov.) Real genetics was denigrated as a Western corruption.

While looking at a YouTube video today, another one, featuring Christopher Hitchens, was called to my attention in the margins. (YouTube, of course, monitors our usage and makes “suggestions” of what we might like. This is one I did like.). Here, in 2007, Hitchens is asked The Question about Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler, and so on.

I’d suggest watching it.  At times Hitch seems to be reaching, trying to blame religion or distortions of religion for these atheist-regime genocides, as when he imputes the aggression of the Japanese in World War II on “ancient ethnic (Buddhist) pseudoconfessional mystical nationalism”.

But then, toward the end, he zeroes in on the real problem: not religion but faith. (I discuss what I mean by “faith” in The Albatross as well, but a short version is “strong belief without sufficient evidence to support that belief, or belief even in the face of the evidence”. I don’t want to argue about that here, as I discuss all the ramifications in my book.) As Hitchens says, these totalitarian societies asked their citizens to “surrender your mind and put your trust in faith.”

As I watched the video, this question came to me, “What would it take to convince people that atheism was responsible for state genocide?” That’s a good question to ask ourselves, too, about the Chapel Hill killings. Before we call it a “hate crime,” or a crime motivated by Hicks’s atheism, we should ask ourselves these questions (and try to think about how we would have answered before the Chapel Hill killings): “What would it take to convince rational people that a murder was caused by atheism?” Or, “How would we decide whether a crime was a ‘hate crime’ motivated by animus toward a religion or ethnic group?”

And then—mirabile dictu!—Hitchens answers that question, at least for whole societies, beginning at 11:44 in the video. His answer redeems the whole discursive 20-minute discussion, and is characteristically eloquent.  (God, I miss that man!) I’ll let you listen to the answer yourself (go to 11:40 or so), but there’s one sentence I will reproduce from Hitchens’s discussion of his ideal: the secular and rational society:

 “If you wanted the transcendent you’d have love and sex and music you wouldn’t need any supernatural permission for any of this nonsense.”

Have a watch:

Note that Hitchens’s “water” seems suspiciously amber-colored. Could it be tainted by Mr. Walker’s amber restorative?