When I was young, I was active in the Libertarian Party. I ended up spending months travelling across the state of Montana visiting with a fair number of people who called themselves Libertarians.
Because of the writings of Ayn Rand, many Libertarians were also atheists.
And some of them were frightening. They would, in fact, talk freely about acts of violence against their perceived enemies – against the state and, for some of them, against religion.
One person I remember showed me a shotgun he had made in his garage. We met him in a small town in western Montana where he showed up carrying a pair of revolvers that he carried around, like some cowboy out of a western movie. He bragged about his guns and showed us that they were real and that they were loaded.
The shotgun came out when he spoke about gun control. His rant included a comment about how he would use that home-made weapon if the government ever took away his pistols.
He held that the church was as evil as the state, and accepted all sorts of conspiracy theories about how church and state collude to control the people. He reported that he would have as little trouble walking into a church and killing the priest as he would walking into a courtroom and killing a judge.
I think about him, from time to time, as I write this blog.
He goes on to discuss the inevitability of an atheist nut killing someone for their religious beliefs.
As atheists convince more and more people to adopt atheism, their words are going to reach more and more people who are like this person that I met in Montana. People like this are not made evil by religion, or by the writings of Ayn Rand. They are mentally unbalanced to start with, and they then twist whatever philosophy that appeals to them into one that suits their interests.
Sooner or later, somebody like this, who has cultivated a sufficiently strong hatred of religion, will kill a priest just because he is a priest, or perhaps shoot up or blow up a whole congregation.
Atheism is not, in and of itself, a basis for a moral code or societal restraint. I’ve often suggested that the troubles attributed to Christianity are in large part extensible to any ideology, any set of ideas that guide one’s thoughts and actions, especially one that asks its adherents to check their brains at the door. Thus we can see the ideology of the Maoists and Stalinists historically committing atrocities and showing a disregard for freedom and human life as great as (though no greater than) the persecutions and pogroms and wars performed under the Cross (or the Crescent, or the White Sheet, or a national Flag).
The uncritical adoption of an ideology, and following that ideology’s leadership no matter what, makes for eventual injustice, blood, and tragedy. It’s not that some ideologies are more or less evil. It’s being an ideologue rather than being a thoughtful adherent to a belief system. It’s becoming willing to sacrifice lives — others’ lives — for The Cause (and/or The Cause’s leadership), because one is told to do so. Whether you’re doing it for Jesus or the Proletariat makes little difference to the victims, or to the moral and intellectual abandonment that makes you guilty.
Atheists — most of the vocal and “militant” ones — assert that their way is superior because it rejects the irrational superstition of religion and the antiquated recorded diktats of a Middle Eastern tribe some thousands of years ago, and instead evaluates morality, ethics, how we work together as a society, our values, in a more rational, thoughtful way. It discards dogma for deliberation.
To the extent those premises are correct, there’s some truth in what’s said. But the case of the Man in Montana shows that the ideology behind a choice of atheism (in this case as inspired and shaped by Ayn Rand) can be just as unthoughtful, irrational, or dogmatic as the choice of theism. People are often not terribly thoughtful in their worldviews — they inherit their religion, their nation, their class standards, and only tend to think about them when there’s a serious change in their circumstances. Promoting thoughtfulness and deliberation in one’s moral choices and code — even if that includes theistic elements — is better than drawing the simplistic (and, at times, dogmatic) “religion bad, atheism good” distinction.
Or, put another way, if people choose atheism after consideration of their beliefs and the beliefs of those around them, making a studied, rational decision about it, then more power to them. That applies to a number of the atheists I know online, and because atheism isn’t the “easy” thing to do in our society, it tends to be true of quite a few atheists.
But not all of them. Folks who come to atheism out of anger (there are some, more properly anti-theists), or who come to it simply following with only minimal thought another authority or demagogue or “scripture” (the Man from Montana above), or who simply laze into it (doing it because those around them are doing it) — they aren’t being any more rational or considered or morally solid than the guy who’s a Christian simply because his whole family is or was, or because Reverend Fred gets his blood churning on a Sunday morning, or because the thought of questioning one’s Christianity is too scary, or socially / politically fraught with risk.
As Alonzo notes, as atheism continues to spread (as it is doing), more people will become (or remain) atheists for not-so-good reasons. And some of them will have enough screws loose that they’ll take that cause to a far bloodier extreme than the most outspoken atheists of today would ever want or support.
And when it does (inevitably) happen, as Alonzo notes, absolutely there will be a sizeable contingent that will go apeshit. They will seize upon it as proof that all those goofy AnswersInGenesis billboards were correct, and atheists are all a bunch of amoral murderers out to kill Good Christians. They will fail to notice that, in the case of the Man from Montana, there are bushelsfull of seriously Right-wing Christianist up in those same mountains with those same sorts of gun collections. They will fail to remember the killings done by ostensible Christians, such as the murder of Tiller. They will fail to recognize that the murderer probably bears far more resemblance to Theodore Kaczynski than Christopher Hitchens.
I think about that man that I met in the mountains of Montana, and I make sure to include in virtually every post in which I am critical of religion the claim that the only legitimate response in an open society to words are words and private actions (non-violent actions that require no special justification such as deciding where to shop and who to vote for). Furthermore, in an open society, the only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign.
I do this to hope to deter and delay, as much as possible, the violence that somebody such as that man in Montana might otherwise come to see as justified.
Furthermore, when writing about such things as the murder of a physician who provides abortions or the hijacking of airplanes and flying them into sky scrapers, I try to engage in some of this “doing unto others” business – or, in desire utilitarian terms – acting as of motivated by those desires that people generally have reason to promote as universal desires.
I think it would indeed be valuable, just for intellectual consistency, for some outspoken atheists to be careful of their knee-jerk reaction to the Tiller murder as being a blanket condemnation of all Christians or religionists. That won’t stop some on the Christian Right from making similar knee-jerk blanket condemnations when some identified atheist commits a hate killing — but it will at least help atheists avoid having their own words thrown back at them.
Keeping the general rhetoric level to what one would reasonably hope the opposition keep it is polite, civil, and a way to avoid having to eat one’s words later. Just because Bill O’Reilly, or Randall Terry, or Pat Buchanan are asshats doesn’t justify (or even make it wise) to be an asshat in return.
(via Les)