The Unicorn Delusion
February 23rd, 2009 | Tags: christianity | 14 Comments
Dinesh D’Souza on atheist proselytizers:
I don’t believe in unicorns, so I just go about my life as if there are no unicorns. You’ll notice that I haven’t written any books called The End of the Unicorn, Unicorns Are Not Great, or The Unicorn Delusion, and I don’t spend my time obsessing about unicorns.
February 24th, 2009 at 02:44:31 PM (#)
Sorry, that’s just stupid. Nobody is trying to cram their unicorn agenda into my government and my children’s schools, so they are easy to ignore. Unfortunately, more popular mythology is much more intrusive.
February 24th, 2009 at 02:53:55 PM (#)
I don’t know exactly what you’re referring to, but there are all kinds of agendas in government and education. If you’re interested in excluding a range of “agendas” (or opinions, policies, whatever) based on the beliefs of some of their prominent advocates, then you might want to get re-acquainted with the free exercise clause.
February 24th, 2009 at 03:42:40 PM (#)
Whoa there, I’m not arguing for the exclusion of anybody’s agendas! And I think it’s great that the free exercise clause creates the “wall of separation” between church and state–I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m just saying that the analogy between unicorns and the Christian God is completely inept at best, and possibly intentionally misleading.
February 24th, 2009 at 04:15:33 PM (#)
If neither exists, as atheists who don’t believe in unicorns (you, I suspect?) might claim, then I fail to see what’s wrong with the analogy. It seems to me that your argument that they are different depends on some sort of (implicit) claim about the consequences of belief in different things.
The point of the passage I quoted is that if Dawkins, Harris, et al., really didn’t believe in a god on the merits of certain truth-claims, that they’d simply disregard that god, as one might disregard the prospect of unicorns or the set of all worthwhile Henry Rollins spoken-word albums. Your comment seems to express that belief in (some particular) god is worse than belief in unicorns because people who believe in a god might have particular policy agendas that you find distasteful.
Policies that are advanced strictly because of a particular metaphysical belief are likely to fail in our public sphere, as well they should. But I’ve never seen a serious person advocate such a policy. However, there are a great many policies based on arguments that do not depend on metaphysical presuppositions but nonetheless are likely to inspire sympathies or antipathies in people with certain (positive or negative) beliefs.
Identifying such policies and ideas as mere byproducts of metaphysical belief (typically, in order to raise the specter that such a policy constitutes government establishment of religion) is reductive, dishonest, and, as a matter of law, basically proscribed by our Constitution. As a consequence, convincing people to abandon the metaphysical beliefs putatively behind such policies will not make them go away.
(I’m deliberately not addressing your Jefferson allusion, but we can and should talk about the nature of the establishment and free exercise clauses some other time, if you’d like!)
February 24th, 2009 at 05:05:32 PM (#)
This is an interesting exchange because it pokes the sore spots of both evangelical atheists and ‘separation of church and state’. Hot stuff.
But it seems to me that while Matt has a point when he says that the evangelical atheists are less crazy than someone who started churning out anti-unicorn books in our real world, the emotional/political baggage that came along with his point clouded the issue. If we lived in a world where the vast majority of people DID believe in unicorns but we felt that we had conclusive evidence that unicorns do not exist and that unicorn-belief tended to lead people to do odious things, we might well feel compelled to churn out our very best screeds against unicorn belief. Forget the thing about “my government and my kids’ schools” and Matt does have a reasonable point.
The unfortunate thing is that, being screeds, the books of most evangelical atheists utterly fail to separate out reasonable argumentation from personal animus or political orientation.
Now, I’m a big fan of D’Souza in general (and a holy-rollin’, utterly incorrigible, magisterium-thumpin’, ol’-time apostolic-succession-convicted papist to boot), but I’d have to agree that if we read this as intended merely to say that evangelical atheists are equivalent to unicorn-deniers, on its own this nugget overstates its case — agenda-cramming excluded.
But then that isn’t really the full intent of D’Souza’s discussion, is it? As a pointer to the way in which evangelical atheists’ almost obsessively prolific attempts to discredit theism do reflect something serious is at stake than leprechauns. I’d say that is because they are doing battle against the sea; they’d say it is because they are trying to save humanity from itself and succeeding one brain at a time. In any case, if D’Souza’s point is that we can learn something important about the cultural phenomenon of evangelical atheism from the overwrought tenor of its proponents’ writing, then he is on the mark.
peace
February 24th, 2009 at 05:07:51 PM (#)
… MORE serious then leprechauns, I meant to say.
February 24th, 2009 at 05:09:19 PM (#)
Actually, you’re not really addressing anything I said, so I’ll just let you carry on talking to yourself.
February 24th, 2009 at 05:11:11 PM (#)
To be clear, comment #7 was a response to #4.
February 24th, 2009 at 05:12:16 PM (#)
Matt, I’d say that’s (#8) quite a generous assessment.
February 24th, 2009 at 08:45:58 PM (#)
@dannyboy, you’re right, that inflammatory bit seems to have thrown Will off my actual point, and onto this free exercise clause/separation of church and state stuff. In my defense, I’ll say it came as a knee-jerk reaction to the linked article, which vastly misrepresents the positions of basically every atheist I am aware of. I will try to restate my point (paraphrasing a previous offline interchange):
I think that D’Souza uses the unicorn analogy because it’s innocuous, and if these hypothetical unicorn believers existed, they would likely have little impact on my existence as a unicorn-nonbeliever. But Christianity is pervasive and hardly innocuous (and I mean this in both a positive and negative way), and it absolutely has an impact on my life as a non-believer. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me that some atheist might want to write a book about why they don’t believe in God. Because God isn’t a unicorn. I’m not saying I agree with Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris etc. because I haven’t read their stuff. I’m just saying they have a perfectly valid reason to write those books. Christianity gets all up in my business all the time, and if I were so inclined, that would be a perfectly good excuse for me to write about why I don’t believe in God.
Back @dannyboy: I don’t know what other stuff D’Souza writes, but based on the single article linked above, he’s either very ignorant, or very disingenuous, with regards to the beliefs and motivations of atheists. No atheist I know ended up there to justify their morality, sexuality, etc. They end up there the same way I assume you guys arrive at your religious beliefs–after a lot of soul-searching and reflection about the origins of the universe and meaning of our existence.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:19:51 PM (#)
Matt, I was indeed confused by what appeared to be a value judgement in your initial post. If your claim is simply an objective statement about the relative prevalence and cultural impact of unicorn belief vs. Christianity, then I will happily concede that Christianity is not only more popular than unicorn belief, but it is also responsible for almost everything good about Western civilization, whereas unicorn belief has had almost no impact outside of the plastic-toy and airbrushed-shirt spheres.
It seems like your argument is actually in line with the way D’Souza’s article uses the unicorn riff: his claim is that the militant pop atheism is motivated by an animus against religion in general (or Christianity in particular) and not merely by reasoned unbelief. This animus may come from what you perceive as the pervasive Christianity in our culture or from, as D’Souza mentions, frustration that the juggernaut of progress towards secular materialism seems to be less unstoppable than, say, Nietzsche or Marx might have hoped.
(As an aside, I’m fascinated by how one person can perceive that a culture is deeply soaked in Christianity and how another can perceive that culture as deeply hostile to Christianity!)
As far as the traditional morality issue, this is absolutely one of Hitchens’ stated motivations for his beliefs; it also comes up in Nietzsche. (By the way, both are authors I generally enjoy even when I disagree with their claims.) I don’t suspect that people literally wake up one morning and say “Hey, I don’t live my life according to principle X that I putatively subscribe to, so I will invent a new system in which X doesn’t matter,” but human willingness to make things easier on oneself (and capacity for the same) is well-documented.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:24:01 PM (#)
I guess I should also note that much of my initial responses are directed to your (implicit at first and later explicit) claim that “Christianity gets all up in [your] business all the time.”
February 24th, 2009 at 10:42:59 PM (#)
At this point, all I can say is this:
http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF103-Nice_Shirt.gif
February 25th, 2009 at 12:14:45 AM (#)
Matt: I have to say that honestly I do not believe Will deserves the level of nastiness you have directed at him today. He posted a link to a criticism (and a fanciful and humorous one at that) of people who devote their entire lives and energies to writing books and giving public lectures about something they hate. As far as I know, you have not written any such books or given any such presentations lately and thus are not implicated in this criticism. Will made no comment about atheist belief in general.
And why shouldn’t we poke a little fun at these folks who spend so much time and energy violently denigrating the beliefs of others? There are so many more pressing needs, so many positive causes, that they could be devoting time and energy to if improving the world or some aspect of it were actually their goal.
For his part and mine, Will and I have many friends and family members of a variety of different religious, non-religious, and anti-religious persuasions. We love them all dearly, and we feel blessed to know them all. We do not “get up in their business” about their lives or their religious choices. We do not use their religious beliefs as a basis to judge their worth as human beings and contributors to our society. We do not make stereotyped, reductive, and completely unfounded assumptions about their attitudes towards hot-button topics or traditionally oppressed social groups. Which is more than I can say for the “evangelist atheists” that Will’s original post alluded to.
And as sad as I am to say it, it is also more than I can say for many of the supposed “liberal” “open-minded” and “non-judgmental” people I interact with on a daily basis in Madison. It appears that in Madison, it is perfectly acceptable to belittle people, to accuse them of bigotry, to assert their lack of intelligence, and in general to pass judgment on their moral stature and their human worth, as long as one is basing one’s judgment on their Christian beliefs (which, unlike other categories of “difference,” are exempt from liberal calls for “tolerance.”).