Charlotte Allen spews anti-atheist bigotry in the LA Times

In the Los Angeles Times today, Charlotte Allen (author of The Human Christ) opens her op-ed with the following sentence:

I can’t stand atheists—but it’s not because they don’t believe in God. It’s because they’re crashing bores.

And thus begins a mind-numbingly bigoted harangue, the likes of which are usually reserved for fringe wingnut sites like Townhall.com and WorldNetDaily. It is a piece that Sam Harris has already labeled, "without a doubt, one of the most embarrassingly stupid attacks on the 'new atheists' to be published in a major newspaper." And he's right.

Allen's article is an astonishingly unrelenting piece of work, not only in its frothing ferocity, but in its juvenility. She accuses atheists of capable of no more than "lame jokes" and of basing their disbelief on whether or not God has made them rich. She calls us "excruciating snoozes" (you're welcome to tune us out, ma'am), and actually sums up the atheist plight thusly:

Boohoo, everybody hates us ‘cuz we don’t believe in God.

And this was actually printed in a major American newspaper by someone posing as a serious thinker.

Not surprisingly, she does what many who are maniacally opposed to atheism do; she cherry picks snippets of writings from various high-profile atheists, and takes them wildly out of context (or simply invents new context) in order to show how dreadfully unpleasant they all are, and how mean they are to Jesus in particular. For example, she takes Richard Dawkins' humorously unflattering characterization of the God of the Bible, and presents it as evidence of atheists' intellectual inconsistency:

Dawkins, writing in “The God Delusion,” accuses the deity of being a “petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak” as well as a “misogynistic, homophobic, racist ... bully.” If there is no God—and you’d be way beyond stupid to think differently—why does it matter whether he’s good or evil?

She knows the answer to this (assuming she's read the book beyond this clipping), that Dawkins is making a point about how odd it is that billions of people would treat with such reverence a being who is so clearly written as despotic. Dawkins doesn't think God is evil because Dawkins doesn't think God exists at all. He is remarking on the literary character in the context of its worship by real life humans. Indeed, Dawkins writes specifically in The God Delusion immediately following this passage (p. 31) that his case against theism "should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh . . ." I'm guessing Allen did not get that far, all of four inches or so down the page.

Almost every other example she raises is similarly distorted and disingenuously presented. Read the entire piece, if your constitution can handle it. I think even non-atheists will find it nauseating in its crass bigotry and ham-fistedness. But put aside her insipid attacks against particular atheist celebrities. Make no mistake that her potshots are aimed at all atheists -- at no point does she even allow for the possibility that any nonbeliever might not possess the grotesque traits she attributes to them. 

This piece underlines the very reason that atheists feel what Allen calls a sense of "victimhood." Were a similar piece written about almost any other group this would never have even been considered for publication in a major paper. Indeed, even if an identical attack was leveled at a political group, let alone religious or ethnic, it would have been laughed off of the editorial desk. But because atheists remain unjustifiably despised by so many, it is somehow allowed to pass as an example of civil intellectual discourse. So Charlotte Allen is not the only problem here (she is one bigot among many). The Los Angeles Times editorial board is, too. Why would they lend credibility to this swill?

Of course, sometimes when your opponent espouses such foolery and nonsense, one can take heart that they do so in public so as to expose their willful ignorance to the world. Unfortunately, because few will take the time to educate themselves on the real positions of the atheists she mentions or to understand the actual contexts of her samplings, far too many will read the piece at face value and further entrench whatever prejudices they may already have.

My best hope for this hateful piece is that it awakens more closeted and silent atheists, and spurs them to stand up and make their true, good selves known so her awful stereotyping does not calcify in the American mind. For these atheists, one can hope, this might be a last straw. And that is all the good something like this can ever do.

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Updates: By the way, this isn't at all the first time she's written something stupid in a national paper. Will this latest piece be universally derided in the same way?

I also wanted to point out a clever rejoinder I noticed on the Richard Dawkins website. Allen accuses atheists of...

. . . indulging in a philosophically primitive opposition of faith and reason that assumes that if science can’t prove something, it doesn’t exist.

To which RDF commenter Born Again Atheist responds:

Actually it's: "if science can't prove something, it open-mindedly continues to investigate."

Exactly.

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