This whole article is interesting, but one point in particular provided a new perspective for me to consider. Frank Furedi is a British sociologist and author.
The claim that religion scars children for life is symptomatic of the tendency of New Atheists to express themselves through the language of victimhood and therapeutic culture. Time and again, they use the idiom of therapy to pathologise religion. Their use of terms such as ‘toxic faith’ and ‘religious virus’ are symptomatic of their medicalisation of strong religious commitment….
The New Atheism is very selective about who it targets. So although it claims to challenge irrationalism and anti-scientific prejudice, it tends to confine its anger to the dogma of the three Abrahamic religions. So it rightly criticises creationism and ‘intelligent design’, yet it rarely challenges the mystifications of deep environmentalist thinking, such as Gaia theory, or the numerous varieties of Eastern mysticism that are so fashionable in Hollywood. Since the New Atheism is culturally wedded to the contemporary therapeutic imagination, it is not surprising that it has adopted a double standard towards spiritualism.
[From How atheism became a religion in all but name | Frank Furedi | spiked]
February 10th, 2012 | 4:04 pm | #1
I appreciate Furedi’s honesty, particularly when he’s a secular humanist.
It gives lie to the claim that secularists are the only ones who can speak faith-free in and to the Public Square.
February 14th, 2012 | 3:13 pm | #2
TUAD,
Secular humanists can’t be honest?
February 14th, 2012 | 3:22 pm | #3
I appreciate secular humanists who honestly admit that secular humanism is a religion.
February 14th, 2012 | 10:20 pm | #4
Okay… that makes more sense! I was confused there for a moment…
Everyone has faith. It can be in a God, in nature, or in nothing. But it’s always faith.
February 18th, 2012 | 11:01 am | #5
The idea of treating atheism as a kind of religion makes me uneasy. Our social and political traditions rightly respect religions. We grant them special protections and privileges. Does atheism or any of its particular forms deserve the same respect?
February 22nd, 2012 | 10:42 pm | #6
The idea of treating atheism as a kind of religion makes me uneasy. Our social and political traditions rightly respect religions.
It seems to me that atheism involves nothing but rejection, whereas true religion requires positive thought.
I believe humanism qualifies as a religion, but atheism is only capable of negation.
I also believe it is important to recognize that humanists rely heavily on disease metaphors to pathologize everything they view as wrong or immoral. The deceptive nature of this metaphor is necessary considering the arguments they have built up regarding “tolerance” and the evils of being “judgmental”. The scientific language is a reflection of their beliefs – that science is the one true way to know about all things, including right and wrong.
February 23rd, 2012 | 7:54 pm | #7
Blake and Ancius,
First of all, I don’t think that atheism is based solely on negation. It seems that way, because atheism goes against many deeply held beliefs that people have held for a long time. But atheism, at least nowadays, does assert things: Sam Harris’ book The Moral Landscape, for instance, argues that through atheistic science we can come to conclusions about how to live ethically. Atheists do make positive statements about the world. For them, the world is what we see: the natural existence. Plants are real. Humans are real. The landscape is real. They do reject God, but in doing so they are making positive assertions.
But even more than that, even though atheism isn’t a religion with a defined orthodoxy, I think the claim most Christians are making isn’t that atheism is a religion (as Christians think of it), but rather that atheistic people act an awful lot like religious people, even though they claim they aren’t. There’s a fine line between fundamentalist evangelists and the type of preaching the New Atheist crowd does. Some might say there isn’t even a line at all.
February 23rd, 2012 | 11:28 pm | #8
First of all, I don’t think that atheism is based solely on negation.
Well, insofar as atheists are also humanists, I would agree.
But atheists claim to be different from humanists. Except when they’re not.
What does it mean to be an atheist? It seems to depend on who you ask. Ironically, though, atheists as a group seem to me to be far more uniform and conventional than any religious denomination I have ever heard of. You simply don’t go to an atheist convention and say that you’ve been rethinking some of the core assumptions. (Not even if you’re Sam Harris.)
But “atheist” is just one of many words people slip on and off, as it suits them. That’s why I prefer the term “humanist” – it is IMO the most honest word to describe the set of beliefs descended from the assumptions of the Enlightenment.
I personally view atheists as a subset of humanists. But – depending on which definition you accept – it could be the other way around.
Whatever you call it, this set of beliefs, when accepted as representing “truth”, has all the elements of a religion:
- it is built on assumptions that have to be taken on faith (articles of faith)
- it explains the universe (and our place within it)
- it has stories and imagery that serves the same explanatory and authority-making functions as the stories and images we traditionally call “myth” (in the “mythology” sense, not the sense of “making up lies”)
- it provides everything one needs to live by, including the assumptions necessary to construct a moral code
- it provides a framework (“the scientific method”) by which knowledge can be legitimized and disputes resolved
This set of beliefs goes by many names, and this is because being cagey about names and definitions serves a practical function: retaining its ability work around restrictions and limits that acknowledged religions are expected to abide by.
Humanists are in an enviable if dishonest position: by confusing faith with fact – and avoiding the label “religion” – they can freely proselytize even as they complain about how intrusive it is when other people proselytize; they can demand their beliefs be imposed on and over other peoples’ belief systems even as they use projections of this monopoly-making desire onto others as the motive for why other peoples’ beliefs must be restricted legally; they can and do position themselves as “neutral”, the center of society by which other peoples’ beliefs are measured (the further you are from them, the greater your level of “irrationality” or “superstition”).
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