RSS
Home
Atheist hater invents data to conclude atheism is 'flickering out'
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Don't blink, folks, because you might miss the extinction of atheism!
Or so believes Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, a columnist for the On Faith blog at WashingtonPost.com, where he writes on Catholicism in America. He's just seen Watchmen (which I have not, so I won't be making any claims about it), from which he extrapolates that humankind's need for "transcendence" can never be fulfilled without the supernatural. This spiritual yearning, he believes, is evident in much of science fiction. He writes:
Consider the themes of "Watchmen" and other products of popular imagination. TV shows and films like Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and the "Stars" (Stargate, Star Wars and especially Star Trek in its various incarnations) exhibit the search for transcendence and escape. Mysticism, scriptural revelation, shamanism, miracles, prophecy and the like feature hugely in such popular entertainment.
Stevens-Arroyo thinks that traditional, organized religion needs to "watch out" because the heroes of these science fiction epics easily rival their counterparts in religion for the attention and awe of real people. No argument there. I bet Admiral Adama could totally take Moses in a brawl.
Suddenly, though, Stevens-Arroyo makes this alarming claim:
Often presented in its Enlightenment phase as the culmination of human freedom, the premise that Atheism is our human future is simply wrong. People today are moving away from Atheism, not towards it. Moreover, when screening out secularists (= tolerance for all) and agnostics (= doubt about God), Atheism is revealed to be a movement with a tiny number of members. Atheism began sometime in the 17th century and is now flickering out. When looked at through the prism of human experience that begins 40,000 years ago, Atheism is a blip on the radar screen of humanity.
Ouch! For a blip, we sure do seem to have a lot of people worried about our dangerous influence.
But his aspersion aside, the preceding paragraph is so full of factual inaccuracies and misunderstanding of history, that I'm surprised the editors at the Washington Post allowed it to be published. I mean, they've been so on the ball lately.
I don't know if "Atheism is our human future" (note the capitalization of atheism, as though it were a formal, practiced religion), since I don't have psychic powers, but I'm going to assume that Stevens-Arroyo doesn't either, so we'll call that one a draw. But let's take a look at his claim that "people are moving away from Atheism." While out-and-out atheists' numbers are indeed small (according to Pew they amount to as little as 1.6 percent of the American population), there is little indication that their numbers are dwindling. According to Gallup, which asks the question in terms of whether someone believes in God, an unnamed force to the universe, or none of the above, the percentage of "atheists" has been stable since 2000, ranging between 5 and 7 percent in Gallup's surveys. And those percentages somewhat increase the younger the respondents, though all within the margin of error. If Stevens-Arroyo has any numbers that show atheism on the decline, he has yet to provide them.
And as for the tiny-ness of atheists' numbers, they almost exactly match those of Jews and Mormons, according to Pew, and I do not think I'm going out on a limb to say that Stevens-Arroyo would not describe their influence as a "blip."
Next, let's look at the assertion that atheism began in the 17th century. There is no other way to say this: Stevens-Arroyo just made that up. He should pick up a copy of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History, in which he'll learn about atheists and doubters from millennia past, including a passage about Anaxagoras (p. 10), the first person we know if in history to have been indicted for atheism, in 467 BCE. That's right, not only did atheism exist almost 500 years before Jesus and 2100 years before the 17th century, but by then it was already a crime.
Finally, we have to deal with the assertion that atheism is "flickering out." I struggle to understand why he believes this to be true, considering that more atheists are coming out of the theological closet, that they are stirring a burgeoning movement in favor of rationalism and freedom from superstition, that they even have a lobbying organization that is taken seriously by the new administration! The president of that new administration has sent atheists shout-outs at two crucially important events: the inauguration and the National Prayer Breakfast. Atheists are better organized, we're heard more often in the culture (despite resistance), and more people feel free to admit their atheism. We're apparently even responsible for full-scale Wars on Christmas! Perhaps the flicker he perceives is that of a fire being ignited.
So where is this coming from? Other than his understandable bias toward his own faith, can we better understand why the broadside against atheists?
Of course, Atheists will stay with us, and they are welcomed by me as long as they don't try to impose on the rest of us their belief that God doesn't exist.
Well, that's a relief. We can feel free to crash on his couch.
I know that religion, including Catholicism, has had to learn that rule of live-and-let-live to overcome past offenses, but that is not an excuse for Atheists to continually whine about past injustices or to deny the real world of today in which the world's majority believes in God.
Uh oh. No whining? I wonder if he would feel so comfortable with that phrase were he to substitute "Atheists" with any other maligned minority group. Is there something particular about atheists that might, say, color his feelings? Let's take a look at one of his previous columns, in which his first sentence is:
I never met an atheist I could like.
Ah.
The atheists who have crossed my path are obnoxious.
Oh?
You can’t have a dialogue with dogmatic atheists.
Not like with dogmatic, say, Mormons? Or Muslims? Or Catholics?
They are mirror images of the religious fundamentalists, who -- despite their dogmatism -- at least have their enthusiasms in the right place.
There we go. It's okay to be irrationally convinced of the divine nature of the universe to the point of zealotry, as long as it's his brand of zealotry.
Actually, Austin Cline at About.com took the liberty of taking Stevens-Arroyo apart when this column first came up, and invites the reader to do some similar Mad-Libbing, replacing the name of other minorities for atheists:
This is why Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, is an anti-atheist bigot. Anti-atheist bigotry is no better than anti-Semitic or anti-Latino bigotry. Imagine if Stevens-Arroyo had written:
- I never met a Jew I could like. [ . . . ]
- The Jews who have crossed my path are obnoxious.
- You can’t have a dialogue with dogmatic Jews.
And Cline is right. Perhaps Stevens-Arroyo is an excellent resource for perspective on Catholic America. But he knows nothing about atheism, and is grossly blinded by intolerant bias against nonbelievers. Free to hold and express opinions, he should keep his facts straight and refrain from inventing data out of whole cloth to support his prejudice. He may be an authority on his particular sect's brand of theism, but not on reality.
So, my fellow nonbelievers, flicker on.
Related Articles:
Comments
