When reason fails: the New Atheist art of ridicule
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| Paul Kurtz (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
‘seek[ing] to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god’
Things hit rock bottom on 30 September 2009. This was the date chosen by the Center for Inquiry—which promotes itself as the intellectual powerhouse of American secularism and has close links to the New Atheism—to be the first ever ‘Blasphemy Day’. The idea was to use freedom of speech to insult religions and religious people. The Center organized an art exhibition to mark this momentous event and included in the works exhibited a piece entitled Jesus Paints His Nails. It depicted a rather effeminate Jesus applying polish to the nails fixing his hands to the cross.
The CEO of the Center for Inquiry, Ronald A. Lindsay, defended this and the other exhibits as ‘thoughtful, incisive and concise critiques of religion’. His was something of a lone supportive voice. Other atheists were shocked. Stuart Jordan, an advisor to the Center, believed the aggressive approach of the exhibition would backfire against atheism.
What was the point in insulting people for their beliefs?
He wouldn’t want Jesus Paints His Nails on his walls. This episode was an indication of bitter debate within the American atheist movement as a whole over its future direction. It is well worth reflecting on the sad but instructive tale of Paul Kurtz.
Paul Kurtz (born 1925) is one of the USA’s most prominent secular humanists, seen by many as the godfather of the New Atheism. Kurtz was instrumental in reshaping American humanism in a specifically secular direction during the late 1970s and early 1980s, largely by suppressing its historic religious origins and continuing religious associations and commitments.
The original American ‘Humanist Manifesto’ (1933) made specific approving reference to religious humanism. Kurtz vigorously advocated more secular forms of humanism and formed the Council for Secular Humanism to lobby for a change in direction of the American Humanist Association. He was one of the two primary authors of ‘Humanist Manifesto II’ (1973), setting out a vision for a form of humanism that distanced itself from traditional religious possibilities and affirmations. He founded the Center for Inquiry in 1991 to promote this form of humanism.
So how, you might ask, could someone as canny as Paul Kurtz allow a public relations debacle like Blasphemy Day to take place?
The simple answer is that he didn’t. The Center for Inquiry, which had lurched towards increasing militancy earlier in 2009, threw him out three months prior to 30 September. Kurtz’s own account of this development merits reading, especially in the light of the Center’s bland statement that he had ‘resigned’.
I was unceremoniously ousted as Chairman of the Center for Inquiry/Transnational on June 1, 2009. It is totally untruthful to state that I was not. The effort by the CEO [Ronald A. Lindsay] to cover up this deed offends any sense of fairness and I do not wish to be party to that deception. It was a palace coup clear and simple by those who wish to seize immediate power.
Kurtz was appalled by the aggressive new direction that was then taken by his organization under its new leadership. The viciousness of this New Atheism, he declared, was likely to set the cause of atheism back. ‘Angry atheism does not work!’ The New Atheism would just come to be seen as a form of intolerant fundamentalism that ridiculed its opponents rather than seeking to understand and engage them. This ‘atheist fundamentalism’ is, Kurtz suggested, fundamentally ‘mean-spirited’.
The phrase ‘atheist fundamentalism’ refers to the specific form of atheism found in the recent writings of Richard Dawkins. It’s interesting to see a leading atheist explicitly and approvingly employing it against the obvious excesses of the New Atheism. Let me make it clear that one would not dream of applying this phrase to the academically thoughtful and culturally respectful atheism of writers such as Iris Murdoch or the studied neutrality of an ‘atheism of indifference’.
But it’s right on target to describe the dogmatic intolerance of the New Atheism, which resembles the nastier forms of religious fundamentalism at these points.
Kurtz profoundly hoped that this new ‘aggressive and militant phase’ in the history of atheism would fizzle out before it inflicted lasting damage on the movement.
This ‘dogmatic attitude’, he declared, ‘holds that this and only this is true and that anyone who deviates from it is a fool’.It was no wonder, he suggested, that the New Atheism had lost public sympathy and credibility. Most atheists are decent and compassionate folk. What we object to are the militant atheists who are narrow-minded about religious persons and will have nothing to do with agnostics, skeptics, or those who are indifferent to religion, dismissing them as cowardly.
For Mr. Kurtz the viciousness of the New Atheism was damaging the public face of atheism. And it was a self-inflicted wound, not one meted out by its critics. No wonder media reports since then speak openly of a ‘schism’ or ‘rift’ within the secular humanist movement.
Though the debates arising from the New Atheism continue to have some popular appeal, it seems clear that they’ve lost a great deal of their intellectual traction. Will the movement be like the pseudo-scientific notion of the ‘meme’, such a core element of Dawkins’ and Dennett’s defense of atheism—‘a short-lived fad whose effect has been to obscure more than it has been to enlighten’ It will be interesting to see.
McGrath, A. (2011). Why God Won’t Go Away: Engaging with the New Atheism (pp. 93–95). London: SPCK.
