Posted on April 19, 2008

What Atheism Offers: How Should the Atheist Act?

Mormons believe the North American continent was once populated by a race of white Christians, emigrants from Israel who built an advanced civilization in the new world over a thousand years before Columbus. These Christians eventually split into two warring factions, with the “bad guys” slaughtering entirely the “good guys.” God cursed the former, darkening their skin, thereby creating the race who would come to be known as Native Americans.

This conflicts with history, has no supporting archeological evidence, and is contradicted by modern DNA testing. Yet Mormons continue to believe it because the Book of Mormon tells them too, that book was written by Joseph Smith, and Smith was a prophet of God. Should we—should anyone who isn’t a Mormon—respect these beliefs? Are they different from, say, holocaust denial (another form of grossly unsubstantiated historical revisionism) because they’re rooted in religious faith instead of racial hatred?

Of course they aren’t. The Mormon belief structure is profoundly silly, as are the Catholic notions of transubstantiation and the vile sinfulness of covering a penis in rubber. Muslims hold fast to the idea that a millennium and a half ago a man rode a horse to heaven and conversed with angels in a desert filled by djinn. And evangelicals throughout the US teach their children that the earth was made at roughly the same time the Sumerians developed writing.

We are taught to respect these beliefs, to pay them deference even while we acknowledge how wrong they are. The holocaust denier is scorned not only because his theory is preposterous but also because it derives from hate. But a man who denies contraceptives to a continent ravaged by AIDS should be nodded kindly at because his views are based on a book a third of the world’s population takes as sacred.

How is the atheist to react to all this? Should he continue the capitulation that is considered right and proper when faith is at issue? Or should he rail against untrue and unjust ideas and the people who hold them? Christians are told to hate the sin but love the sinner, to separate beliefs and actions from the people who carry them out. Yet what is a person but the sum total of thoughts and conceptions he holds and choses to live his life by? Do we look down upon racists—or merely racism? Do we scorn bigots—or limit ourselves to bigotry?

No one owes respect to bad ideas and no one should blindly respect the people who hold them. Instead, we should work to relieve a world encumbered by these dangerous and untrue convictions, even if that means offending their pallbearers.

Religious believers have long recognized this and so fill Sunday television with proselytizing prayer displays, flood whole sections of bookstores—and frequently entire stores themselves—with evangelical texts. They go door to door handing out repetitive pamphlets and lean in close to whisper quiet suggestions to unsaved friends. The world is a cacophony of religious marketing, and yet any attempts by secularists to project their reasoned voices into the fray are inevitably met by calls for respectful silence. It’s okay, many theists say, for you to not believe in god, but do you have to convince other people too? Why can’t you keep your beliefs, or lack of belief, to yourself?

As America’s fastest growing belief category, it is time for atheists to recognize the hollowness and hypocrisy of these religious calls for moderation. The future of civilization—a civilization that has painfully been clawing its way out from under the smothering sack of unreason—is at stake. Meek voices and undue respect must be abandoned in favor of a rigorous clash of ideas.