Hedges Panders to the Moderatly Religious…

I heard Thom Hartmann interview Chris Hedges about his book I Don’t Believe in Atheists. It was excruciating. Hedges started with a disclaimer that religious people can be evil and atheists can be good so morality is not an issue, but once he got that out of the way he made it quite clear that he thought the “New Atheists” ™ were, in fact, evil. His thesis is the tired old trope that atheism is itself a kind of religion, and that the New Atheists are its fundamentalists. This is, of course, ridiculous. An atheist is religious exactly the same way a person who doesn’t smoke is addicted to not ingesting nicotine.

He goes on to make more of a fool of himself by arguing that as fundamentalists, the New Atheists are necessarily neo-conservative hawks in favor of invading the Muslim countries. While this is a completely original line of attack, his only evidence for it is in the writings of Christopher Hitchens, Iraq war booster and one of the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse. As PZ also notes, not only is there no such thing as a typical atheist (or even a typical New Atheist), but Hitchens would be an outlier in any group you tried to put him in.

The infuriating thing about the interview was how Hartmann seemed to buy into the whole argument. It’s sometimes hard to tell with him, as even when he has right wingers on he lets them get away with some outrageous statements that we know that he disagrees with, but in this case I think the idea appealed to him. Liberal Christians like to think of themselves as bastions of moderation and reasonableness, and they tend to dislike atheists just as much as Christian fundamentalists. Our crime is being impolite, speaking about what we believe to be true in public even if it offends the religious. The “atheists are fundamentalist” line is tailored to salve the feelings we bruise when we express our atheism.

As I have tried to explain before, disagreement is not intolerance. While Christian fundamentalists work to enshrine their religious doctrines in schoolbooks, law and the Constitution, atheists never try to coerce anyone in any way (except maybe Christopher Hitchens, but that’s because he’s a kook not because he’s an atheist). You will not find better allies for fighting intolerance, but we really do think you’re wrong about the whole God thing.

- jack*