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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Fucking Athiests
Classic Gin
Sunday, 2005-12-11 | Classic Gin
I've almost completely lost my patience for sad-sack lefties and their petulant haranguing of the Christian hermeneutic.
For a few years there, probably starting some time during high school, if I was in a good mood, I was sympathetic to this cause. If it was a tough day, I was probably simply indifferent to it. Hell, malcontent that I am, there may have even been a moment or two when I got so caught up in someone else's righteous indignation that I too may have been seen to forcefully decry the oppressive, theologically justified interpretive practices of Christianity and the manner in which an easily deconstructed set of substantive or doctrinal commitments rode rough-shod over this or that victimized group.
But not any more.
"Oh, you went to college? You learned some words? You told someone at a some party that 'Christianity is a totalizing metaphor supported by only the empirically unverifiable boasts of a handful of mystics that has held the scientific, artistic and political destiny of Western civilization in its rapacious clutches for hundreds of years' and you liked the way it sounded? Get over it.
"It might have been a revelatory experience--to have learned that this automaton has bestrode the world like a colossus, casting a shadow so long and so obfuscating that only a truly heroic band of misfits have been bright enough to make sense of the world in spite of it--but this revelatory experience, like your taste in music or how nothing ever seems to work out for you, is of no interest to anyone but you.
"The veil was lifted and the reality behind the world you thought you knew was unpleasant to behold? Well holy shit! You came to terms with your own lamentable ignorance and the reviling complacency of the ruling, political majority in contemporary America all in one fell swoop. You went through the looking glass?
"How was it? Was it more fun that miniature golf?"
I've been a student of the history of Christianity for only a short time now and, believe me when I say this, there are few things that are more irrelevant and tiring than the vociferous protestations of those who insist that the most efficacious means of curing this or that social or political malaise is to first throw off the million-ton yoke of the Christian regime. There is this running joke among students of religion in the academy that goes something like this: "why are there so few jobs in the various departments of religion? because there are no good atheists anymore."
For those of you who aren't in the know, the reason that this particular wisecrack always garners a chuckle or two is because it alludes to the fact that there is little or no call to defend the world's religions in the contemporary world milieu. Most atheists are simply disinterested in the historical study of religion or too busy with some other facet of their professional life to waste time hoisting and waving the notoriously cumbersome atheist banner. A smaller percentage of atheists are political agitators who, as a matter of occupational necessity, aren't nearly as interested in debating the possibility that there is some entity that answers to the name "god" as it doesn't pertain directly to their career or professional ambitions. The handful of remaining atheists are much more interested in writing emotive, unpleasantly ad hominem invective and then insisting that their inarticulate mewling is actually a philosophical treatise, tract or editorial and not merely an expression of their grudge against who or whatever it was that first convinced them that "religious" people were the source of their boundless unhappiness.
The fact of the matter is that there is almost nothing at stake in attacking the veneration of the supernatural or magical. Strutting into the place and boldly proclaiming that you are an atheist or working yourself into an outrage over the fact that such and such a person expressed religious affinities or commitments that compromise his ability to perform his office doesn't say a thing about the gods, the fact that certain people invoke their various names from t
ime to time or the men who burn incense for them. It does, however, say something about you. And what it says isn't flattering.
And the old saw, the one about there being no good atheists anymore, cracks a joke at your expense if you are this hypothetical, cocktail party or water-cooler atheist. Most people who make the veneration of the gods their primary occupation in this life will be the first to tell you that the gods don't exist: existence isn't even an attribute of divinity, so far as most of history's learned defenders of religion are concerned. If a divinity existed, then it probably wouldn't make any sense to call him or her divine, would it?
But I'm beating a dead horse here. Everyone in my line of work knows that atheism is deader than God. Most of us who are interested in debating the presence or purpose of a supernatural or transcendent will have spent most of their lives on a Diogenic quest: for as long as they can remember they've been "looking for one honest man," trying to invent a suitable interlocutor because, in their experience, a suitable interlocutor is not likely to occur naturally.
"Ah," the hypothetical atheist says, "but doesn't that prove that these people aren't willing to engage atheist criticisms and arguments on even ground? Doesn't that prove that those who see themselves as clients of a divinity are refusing to play by the rules of empiricism and intellectual honesty?"
No, hypothetical atheist, it does not. All it proves is that you're not fit to enter into conversation with a person of faith because you're still bleary-eyed with excitement at having recognized that the affirmation of the supernatural and the denial of the supernatural indicate what substantive commitments a person has made and that you can really stick it to them if you are able to undermine these substantive commitments in some way. The only thing you prove when you criticize a person of faith's refusal to debate whether or not there is some thing that answers to the name "god" is that you don't like them as a person and you've found a way to impugn their individuality that seems, to you, like it will utterly devastate them.
And again, all you've shown is that you're afraid of some jackass sauntering up to you and undermining the substantive commitments that you've made via your hard-won opinion about X, Y or Z.
