President of American Atheists Believes In Bad Civics

SEE Q&A with President of American Atheists where the President of the American Atheists is interviewed. This last Q & A caught by eye.

Q. “Hard-liner” Atheists (or aggressive Atheists as some might say) like Richard Dawkins often don’t just lack a belief in God. They also tend to take issue with/aim at organized religion. In light of that, are Atheists open to learning about religions? Is there something positive to be gained by understanding what religious folk believe?

A. There is no more value in learning about Christianity [for example] than there is in learning about any other Greek mythology, and Greek Mythology is better literature. Once religion is understood, there is nothing more to gain, and no great lessons to learn. Really.

RT Response: I’d first like to thank David for answering these questions so openly and honestly. I think I gasped and chuckled at the same time. In response to this last point, I’d like to add a little rebuttal…I would argue that there is a major difference between learning about Greek mythology in 2010 and learning about contemporary expressions of religious belief. This is a generalization, but today’s religious folk are approaching their religions in a much different way than a contemporary student approaches Kronos or Zeus in a written text (here I’m talking in terms of expressions of belief). To be blunt, I haven’t heard of anyone recently blowing themselves up over Aphrodite. As active members of a volatile society in which people’s religions or non-religions affect the way they relate to one another, learning about religion allows us to understand our neighbor and perhaps be more compassionate toward them (even when we disagree with their beliefs). Readers, I welcome your response.

Oh so much to say.

Lets do a thought experiment. Let us say that a group of American atheists are able to go to the moon and set up a society free of all these religious folks. No doubt in no short time people would be talking about their "rights" and "Injustice" etc etc.

Their views of "rights" and "justice" are tied into a Western Civilization view of those terms. Western Civilization is very tied into Christianity. There is no way around it. Now you might think the whole Deity stuff is nonsense but if you enjoy Western views of these terms then you must know something about Christianity and Judaism to boot and it's history to maintain it.

Back on Earth though this is rather bad civics when we live in a pluralistic society like our own. Even the leading Agnostics and atheists of Europe see the folly that the President of American atheists is talking about.

See this post Jurgen Habermas: A Secular Atheist Changes His Mind on Religion in the Public Sphere. His work should be must reads by both non believers and believers in the USA public square.

He states:

The liberal state must not transform the requisite institutional separation of the religion and politics into an undue mental and psychological burden for those of its citizens who follow a faith. . . . [Citizens should not have to] split their identity into a public and private part the moment they participate in public discourses. They should therefore be allowed to express and justify their convictions in a religious language if they cannot find secular ‘translations’ for them

This requirement of translation must be conceived as a cooperative task in which the non-religious citizens must likewise participate, if their religious fellow citizens are not to be encumbered with an asymmetrical burden. . . . Secular citizens must open their minds to the possible truth content of those presentations and enter dialogues from which religious reasons then might well emerge in the transformed guise of generally accessible arguments...

In the absence of the uniting body of a civic solidarity . . . citizens do not perceive themselves as free and equal participants in the shared practices of democratic opinion and will formation wherein they owe one another reasons [emphasis Habermas’] for their political statements and attitudes. This reciprocity of expectations among citizens is what distinguishes a community integrated by constitutional values from a community segmented along the dividing lines of competing world views....

As long as secular citizens are convinced that religious traditions and religious communities are . . . archaic relics of pre-modern societies that continue to exist in the present, they will understand freedom of religion as the cultural version of the conservation of a species in danger of becoming extinct. From their viewpoint, religion no longer has any intrinsic justification to exist. . . . [Secular citizens] can obviously [not] be expected to take religious contributions to contentious political issues seriously and even to help to assess them for a substance that can possibly be expressed in a secular language and justified by secular arguments.

. . . The admission of religious statements to the political public sphere only makes sense if all citizens can be expected not to deny from the outset any possible cognitive substance to these contributions. . . . [Yet] such an attitude presupposes a mentality that is anything but a matter of course in the secularized societies of the West.....

The polarization of the world views in a community that splits into fundamentalist and secular camps [shows] that an insufficient number of citizens matches up to the yardstick of the public use of reason and thereby endanger political integration..

Read all his thoughts at above link