Chris Stedman on the Problem with Atheist Activism

Chris Stedman has written an article criticising his fellow atheist activists. It feels nice to read an atheist who sees the same problem with the atheist movement as I do—namely the xenophobia and the unfair attacks on reformers:

Indiscriminate attacks on “religion,” as if it were a single note to be demolished instead of a complex spectrum to be reformed, are a very real problem because they obscure what are, in my mind, much more important aims—making the world a better, more rational place—with a distracting, destructive and alienating narrative that doesn’t account for differences in belief and practice.

He lists four examples of hateful attacks on Muslims and Islam:

American Atheists No God Blog: “One thing we need to keep in mind is that Muslims are particularly barbaric and primitive, even more so than their competitive mythologies.”

PZ Myers: “Come on, Islam… It’s bad enough to be the religion of hate, but to be the religion of cowardice ought to leave you feeling ashamed.”

JT Eberhard: “Islam is a shitty religion (more shitty than most, and try me if you don’t think we can defend that statement) and Muhammad was a pedophile, which has resulted in several Muslims continuing the practice.”

Al Stefanelli: “[Islam] is a virus of the mind, a form of psychosis and when interpreted literally it produces a believer that can be very dangerous. When you add ideologies that support violence and the call for world domination, the only logical conclusion is a physical manifestation of unconditional obedience to a twisted, barbaric philosophy that we know as terrorism.”

I recognise all this from the Swedish debate. Angry atheists often behave like traditional xenophobes. They pick something really extreme and horrific from a certain religion and make all religious people responsible for it. All Muslims are said to promote paedophile because Muhammad had a 9-year-old wife, all Jews are selfishly ruthless because the Torah teaches violence, and all Christians are homophobes because the biblical writer Paul, ostensibly, condemns homosexuality in the Book of Romans. When confronted with a religious person who doesn’t fit the prejudice, the atheist activist says that this person is not really religious.

The reality is that devoutly religious people are often found on both sides of the arguments. In my two decades of fighting homophobia, some of my most reliable support has come from religious people who consider the oppression of gay people a sin against God.

Read it at Huffington Post.