Second Thoughts on the Chapel Hill Murders

As is usual on the internet, some of the responses I received to my last post seemed to be missing my point, so I’d like to clarify a few things.

Jumping to Conclusions

One of the most dismaying things I saw online was the number of people castigating the media (always inexplicably seen as some monolithic entity,) for not declaring this to be a hate crime before the police had finished (or barely even begun,) their investigation. In my post I said that there seems to be some evidence that it might have been a hate crime, and that whether it was or not it should be an opportunity for atheists to reflect on the possibility that someone who identifies as an atheist did this and what that might mean for the rest of us. But the scorn people poured on news outlets for being careful and saying that they weren’t yet completely sure of the motive was scandalous. Many people seemed to be of the opinion that if a white man who claimed to hate religion kills three Muslims there can only be one conclusion. This is a terrible precedent. If we were to assume that every time a Muslim is attacked by a non-Muslim it’s because of their religion that would be a complete abandonment of fair-mindedness, and just as ridiculous as assuming that every time a Christian is attacked it’s because of their religion or any time a gay person is attacked it’s because they’re gay. It’s perfectly understandable for individuals to have those suspicions, but to demand that our news outlets report on motives they can’t possibly yet be certain of is awful. People also claimed a double-standard, saying that if a Muslim man had killed three atheist students the media wouldn’t have hesitated to call him a terrorist and declare religious hatred to be the motive. That’s just not true. Mainstream news outlets (with some exceptions, of course,) are usually very circumspect about these things because if they jump the gun and end up being wrong they have egg on their face and lose credibility. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings the media did exactly the same thing they’re doing now: they wrote that there was some suspicion that the suspects may be radicalized Muslims but that it was too soon to confirm. Even in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks western media was impressively fair-minded, reporting that some at the scene had said that the suspects had shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and that based on previous threats and attacks there was reason to believe the magazine was targeted due to their criticism of Islam, but they didn’t confirm it until more facts were in. In the case of Chapel Hill, most of the media did the same thing: reporting that some people (including the victims' father,) suspect it might be a hate crime based on the victims' religion and some of the suspect's previous writings and that the police are investigating that possibility, but that so far the police say that most of the evidence is pointing toward it being the result of an unhinged person involved in a dispute over a parking space.

It just so happens that I have a perfect example of when this kind of speculation goes wrong: the 2005 massacre of the Armanious family in Jersey City, which I took as the topic of my Journalism School Master’s project. The Armanious family - a husband, wife, and two daughters of 8 and 15 years old - were found brutally stabbed to death in their home. The family were Coptic Christians, members of an Egyptian sect of Christianity and one of the oldest surviving churches in the world. Jersey City has a large population of Egyptian immigrants, about equally divided between Copts and Muslims. That’s not the case in Egypt, however, where the Copts are a long-suffering minority, often the target of persecution and religious violence. Many Copts moved to New Jersey to escape that life. For some, the murder of a peaceful family of four Coptic Christians could only lead to one conclusion: the persecution their people had faced living under a Muslim majority in Egypt had followed them to America. The leaders of some Coptic organizations immediately denounced the murders as the obvious acts of Islamic extremists (the Coptic Pope, Shenouda, urged people not to jump to conclusions, which is good advice in general, but probably pragmatic, too, because he knows that the continued existence and relative safety of the Coptic community in Egypt depends on their being rather meek and deferential to the Muslim majority.) Rumors flew that the father, Hossam Armanious, had been warned and threatened for speaking against Islam in the past, that the family had been slaughtered like Halal livestock, that Christian cross tattoos on the families arms had been stabbed and gouged and cut out. The relatively comfortable co-existence between Copts and Muslims in Jersey City (and America at large,) was in serious jeopardy. At the family’s emotional funeral procession through the streets of Jersey City, an Imam and Muslim delegation who had shown up to offer their condolences was attacked by angry mourners.

As it turns out, the family was found to have been murdered by a drug dealer named Edward McDonald, who had rented an apartment from them and seems to have been under the impression that they had lots of money in their home. He broke in to the house wearing a mask and tied the family up. It is believed that while he was searching for valuables, the youngest daughter broke free and saw him with his mask off. His cover blown, he brutally murdered the whole family. Religion had nothing to do with it.

Atheism had nothing to do with it.

I heard this from several people - the killer’s atheism is entirely irrelevant. After all, atheism is just the lack of a belief in god, it isn’t a positive philosophy or moral system at all. Discovering that someone is an atheist doesn’t tell you anything about what they do believe, only what they don’t believe. I had thought I’d been pretty clear that I agree with this in my last post, but apparently people either hadn’t read or hadn’t understood me. There is a distinction between passive atheism (simply not believing in a god,) and active anti-theism (a dislike or hatred of religion, in which camp I absolutely place myself,) and this distinction is not being made or acknowledged. Religion, and particularly its intrusion in public life, is something that I believe needs to be resisted with argument, debate, and reason. There’s no reason why a thoroughly unbalanced person might not take his own hatred of religion to violent extremes. His lack of belief in god doesn’t technically have anything to do with it, but his proactive hatred of religion might. I was somewhat surprised to see that many of the things he’d written on his Facebook page are things I might have said (albeit more eloquently, I hope,) in my own angrier moments. Nothing on his Facebook page advocated violence against religious people, but there were plenty of frustrated and angry denunciations of faith which were not illogical and with which I can more or less agree.

The point I had been trying to make is that atheists would be unwise to dismiss out of hand the idea of a madman killing “in the name of” atheism. We might know that atheism means nothing but a lack of belief in a deity, but for plenty of other people who don’t know or care about that distinction, atheists might as well be a religious group of their own, or at least some kind of watered-down religious interest group. The fact that atheist and secularist political groups have become more politically active, vocal, and organized in the past several years is bound to fuel those kinds of misapprehensions. The point is that even if this has nothing to do with the victims’ religion or the killer’s hatred of religion, these days an accusation or correlation is enough to convict people in the court of public opinion, including by association. Whatever the result of the investigation, there will be people who remain unswervingly convinced that it was a hate crime committed by a self-identified atheist and therefore it must be because of his atheism, and that is going to make things very tough for the rest of us who hate, mock, ridicule, and insult religion without resorting to violence. And it may well encourage the people who cry “Islamophobia,” and want to make criticism of Islam hate speech. They’ll have an argument at hand, weak and unfounded though it may be, that there are atheist terrorists, too. We’d be stupid to ignore that. Of course even if this one lunatic did commit these acts because of a hatred of Islam specifically or religion in general, it’s nothing compared to the theocratic government-sanctioned violence and intolerance in many Muslim countries, and it’s much harder to imagine American non-religious school children refusing a moment of silence for the victims as many French Muslim students were reported to have done after the Charlie Hebdo atrocity. People in the West overwhelmingly condemn these horrific acts. In many parts of the world religious murderers are all too often celebrated as heroes and martyrs. My concern is that if some psychopath with a gun who happens to be an atheist slaughters people and it turns out he did it because he hates their religion, then it’s going to be much more difficult for us atheists to say with indignation (as I often have,) that we find religion just as offensive as any cartoons or novels but you don’t see us attacking random believers.

Atheism is not a religion

It is obviously true that atheism is not a religion and I never said anything even remotely suggesting that it was, and yet people seemed to think that that’s what I was implying when I talked about the possibility of someone killing in the name of atheism. Reference was made to Stalin, as though I’d repeated the canard about atheism being responsible for many atrocities of the 20th century. I never said any such thing. The charge of Hitler’s atheism is easily refuted by reference to his speeches, the slogans and language of the Reich, the teutonic mythology of National Socialism, and international fascism’s mutual sympathy and alliance with the Catholic Church. Stalin is a slightly tougher refutation but only slightly. It’s true that the ex-seminarian extensively persecuted religious people and advocated atheism. But rather than any deep atheist conviction this was almost certainly another all-too-typical extension of Stalin’s paranoid and cruel repression of any ideology which might threaten his power or the state’s official ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Stalin was ultimately a pragmatist, if a misguided and brutal one. Kruschev was the first to suggest after Stalin’s death that Soviet Communism and the cult of personality had simply become a religion of its own, with just as much dogma, unwavering faith, and heresy hunts as any other.

Which brings me to my final question and concern. If Stalin made state communism into something so closely resembling a religion, is there a danger that “organized” atheism as it exists today in the West could be vulnerable to such perversions? There are now atheist, secularist, and humanist meetings, clubs, support groups, lobbies, events, specialty magazines, conventions, and a huge market for books and films on related topics, not to mention a thriving online “community.” I’ve participated in all this to varying degrees at different times and I’ve overall seen it as a positive development in the resistance to theocracy, religious power, and faith-based thinking. But the “organized” part of it has always made me slightly uncomfortable. And while I think that most atheists are probably relatively free-thinking and individualistic and broadly skeptical, I was always sure to meet a few people who were a little too sure of their own convictions, people for whom doubt wasn’t a major factor in their worldview, people who, rather than debate, were content to self-satisfyingly quote Dawkins or Hitchens or Harris as incontrovertible authorities rather than intellectual thinkers to engage and possibly disagree with on some things. In fact, I was even more uncomfortable with those who wanted to saddle atheism with some of the outward trappings of religion - that seemed a distinctly creepy impulse to me. People who wanted cringeworthy “un-baptism ceremonies,” or regular sunday non-belief services, or people who wanted atheists to have a table at Mayor Bloomberg’s interfaith breakfast were always missing the point in my eyes. I wanted to avoid everything about religion and I certainly didn’t want atheists to start treating their lack of belief as something doctrinaire or remotely resembling a religion. I didn't want atheism to have the same special status as religious groups, I didn't want religious groups to have special status of any kind.

But I’m beginning to wonder if when any group goes from being merely speculative or philosophical to being actively political it runs the risk of extremism. I think that people of no faith and their religious allies who support secularism absolutely do need to be more political. In fact, I don’t think we should shy away and maybe even encourage more “extreme” and unapologetic ideas in our discourse, and I don’t think we should play nice or water down our own convictions, opinions, or beliefs. But I also think we need to at least consider the troubling possibility that some people who sympathize with our goals may have radically different ideas about methods. 

First Thoughts on the Chapel Hill Murders and "Atheist Extremism."

Three young, attractive, and by all accounts bright, loving, and wonderful students were shot dead last night in Chapel Hill. They were all Muslims. Many online are complaining that that fact isn’t yet mentioned in the headline of the New York Times article on the tragedy. In their defense, the New York Times is probably just doing an ultra-diligent covering-their-ass fact-checking thing where they reserve judgement on the crime’s motive until the police have announced it. If they were to make religion the focus of the article and then for some reason turn out to be wrong they’d be in even more trouble. But for the rest of us, there seems to be compelling evidence that the victims’ religion wasn’t a mere coincidence. My immediate thought was that it was probably a right-wing Christian nut (not very fair-minded of me, perhaps, but I was basing my prejudice on previous cases like that of Anders Breivik.) Then my heart sank when I read that the killer, based on his Facebook postings, appears to be a staunch atheist, even an anti-theist like myself: someone who not only doesn’t believe in god but thinks that religion is overwhelmingly a negative force in the world.

I remember on September 11th my mother said that the first thing that went through her head was “I hope it was a white guy like Timothy McVeigh who did this.” I’ve also heard Muslims say that when news of a violent terrorist act breaks they fervently hope that it doesn’t turn out to have been committed by Muslims. They’re tired of evil people committing acts in the name of their shared faith and afraid of a backlash. Aside from the fact that the backlash (in the United States, at least,) was usually limited to a few redneck idiots shooting at convenience stores or calling people racist names, I’d always found this thinking strange and oddly solipsistic - why would the first thing you think of in the face of horror and atrocity be about you and people like you? I confess, that’s the way I’m feeling right now. And I feel slightly embarrassed that some of my first thoughts were immediately about what this might mean for atheists.

The police are currently saying that the triple murder might have been over a dispute about a parking space. Maybe that’s true. But even if it is, an atheist murdering three Muslims is not going to be dismissed so easily. This will likely be considered in the court of public opinion to have been a hate crime even if it is found to technically not be. Whatever the final case, the very possibility of an atheist killing people over faith is something we need to consider.

The thought of an atheist murdering three innocent people because of their religion sickens me to the core of my being. I’ve always been quick to point out that atheists weren’t blowing up mosques or churches or temples or shrines in the name of atheism - what a laughable idea! - other religionists were committing those crimes in the name of their competing faith claims. But now there’s a chance that one of us has and it’s probably going to be flung in our face and held against us for a long time to come. Many polls show that atheists are already one of the most mistrusted (if not the most mistrusted,) groups in the United States. People are far more likely to vote for a Muslim or a gay person than an atheist. Although we’ve been vocal of late, we’ve usually been on our best behavior and not committed atrocities. Leave it to the Christian fanatic to attack Gurdwaras (betraying his ignorance along the way by conflating Sikhs and Muslims.) Leave it to the lone wolf Islamic radical to behead his elderly Christian co-worker. Atheists use words, reason, and argument to prove their point. Possibly not this time.

Some people have defensively pointed out that atheists can’t be considered ideologically similar in the same way that religionists can - we don’t have codified dogmas, clergy, or creeds. Someone said that collectively blaming atheists for the act of one atheist is like blaming the act of one person who doesn’t like baseball on everyone who doesn’t like baseball. This might on the face of it be logically true, but there are some of us who are committed and active secularists, who push back on the influence of religion in the public sphere - and that’s not a shared ideological commitment to be taken lightly. It appears that the killer may have identified as one of us, and that’s something we need to reckon with.

I’ve received criticism for saying that the people who need to combat Islamic extremism are, first and foremost, Muslims. Radicalization is something which arises all too often within their communities so they need to take some responsibility in stopping it. Some people have ironically asked for all atheists to condemn the atrocity last night, in the same way that people ask Muslim leaders to condemn any act of Islamic terrorism. We atheists should, and we will. Richard Dawkins already has. I think it’s important that those of us who are involved in the fight against theocracy, unreason, and superstition, speak up and say that a killer of innocent people in no way speaks for the rest of us. I happen to be at the less friendly and respectful end of the atheist spectrum. I think religion is wicked, and I think it causes far more harm than it does good in the world. I also think that at this time in history Islam is the most problematic religion on the planet and to pretend otherwise is to be willfully ignorant. I’ll even admit that when I read about the horrors committed by groups like Boko Haram and ISIS I think it would be a rather good (possibly even quite satisfying,) act to kill one of their fighter-rapists. But killing innocent people because of their beliefs is the opposite of secularism. It’s what religions have done throughout their history and its one of the reasons I’ve proudly called myself an atheist: we don’t do that. This time one of us may have. And we need to face that and show that a killer - atheist though he may be - who murders innocents for their beliefs is not the face of unbelief. He would be a perfect example of the unreasoning mind and a traitor to the secular ideals of the enlightenment.

Recently I responded to the fatuous argument from religious apologists who, referring to extremist Muslim groups say, “you wouldn’t claim that the KKK represents all Christians, would you?” Of course not. But just because the KKK wasn’t representative of mainstream or majority Christianity doesn’t mean they weren’t a Christian organization. They “self-identified” as Christians, and they justified their actions with fairly straightforward interpretations of scripture. In the same way, those who say ISIS don’t represent all Muslims are missing the point. Of course they don’t. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t an Islamic group. They justify their acts with rather uncomplicated interpretations of scripture and doctrine. Who gets to decide that they aren’t true Muslims? I now find myself in an unexpected position. I’ve laughed off charges of atheist “fundamentalism” and atheist “extremism” in the past. Maybe we can’t afford to do that anymore. Even if this does turn out to be a one-off and incredibly rare example of an atheist taking their hatred of religion to a violent extreme, it goes to show that atheists, secularists, and anti-theists like myself have no reason to expect to be immune from extremist tendencies. It’s something we need to accept, confront, and fight just as strongly as we fight the violent excesses of religious radicals.

My sincerest condolences are for the families of the three victims, whatever the killer’s motive. When innocents are hurt, humanity itself suffers. There's no question that #muslimlivesmatter just as much as anybody else's.  

The Secular Life

Last week David Brooks wrote a breathtakingly condescending op-Ed in the New York Times about the Sisyphean struggle we poor secularists have to face in order to find meaning and morality in the world. The Times published some responses from secularists, but they didn't publish the one I sent them, which you can read below.

When I was involved in secular activism I noticed a split. Those of us raised religion-free didn’t crave the comforts of faith, didn’t hunger for the community of a church, and were perfectly capable of finding meaning and making moral decisions without divine guidance. Those who had left religion, however, occasionally looked like David Brooks’ idea of a secular person – unmoored, seeking the community they’d lost, saddled with “unprecedented moral burdens.” Their lives as believers had stunted them and ill-prepared them to stand unaided by faith. For those of us not lucky enough to be raised fearing a vengeful god, this usually isn’t an issue.

Brooks is right that secularism can’t rest on rationalism alone. Fortunately, it is ably buttressed by humanism, another enlightenment value. We faithless have countless sources of morality and transcendence (most religions only have one.) Our scriptures are the stories humans tell, the ideas and histories we record, the art people make. All of these can inspire, warn, and provoke debate and reflection. The holy books are full of stories, too (written by men as well,) but the only reasons to exalt the questionable moral examples of prophets and patriarchs over the ideas, struggles, and choices of say, Sydney Carton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Huckleberry Finn, or Thomas Jefferson are faith, dogma, and the easy comfort of consensus.

"Militant" Atheists Aren't Militant Enough

I don't always write about dandies or menswear, although I seem to have better luck getting published when I do. One might suspect that magazines and websites are hesitant to publish opinion pieces by people who don't specialize in specific fields, but a brief survey of many websites will show that expertise is rarely the standard, avowing allegiance to a particular group - biological or ideological - is often mistaken for something like a credential, and rational argument is valued less than the ability to use phrases like "I can't even," "so many feels," and "because ____." So I've decided to use this blog to publish those essays I can't help but write whether anyone publishes them or not. I write them partly to stay in practice as a writer, and partly to focus and organize my own thoughts about particular issues. If anybody reads them I hope they get some pleasure out of doing so and recognize that argument, disagreement, and dissent can be very good things. 

“Militant” Atheists Aren’t Militant Enough

My life among the nonbelievers of the “new atheism.”

Thanks to the rise of ISIS, one of the most savage religious groups of the modern era, the so-called “new atheists” are back in the news and, once again, they’re being criticized for their stridency, their intolerance, and their militancy. But if anything, atheists have toned their message down far too much in the past few years (certainly since the death of Christopher Hitchens, who spectacularly threw the “willing to compromise” curve of the atheist movement way off,) and the only thing more troubling than the fact that it took something as extreme as the Islamic State to bring atheists back out swinging is the fact that all too many of them still seem reluctant to join the fight.

I was raised in a very secular household in the heart of Greenwich Village. My parents are both liberal college professors. My mother’s rather Anglicized Indian family was half-Hindu, half-Sikh, and she had attended Church of England boarding schools in India. My father came from a nominally Methodist family from Texas, but his subsequent career as a clinical psychoanalyst seems to have superseded all other forms of mumbo-jumbo. The variety of my religious experience growing up began and ended at friends’ Bar Mitzvahs, and the only time I ever felt jealous for not having a faith was when I saw the congratulatory stuffed envelopes from grandmothers. Of course, the most cursory reflection on a deity who was anti-bacon but pro-circumcision easily disabused me of any envy I felt at not having been one of God’s chosen people.

Religion had so little impact on my life that atheism seemed like the natural way of things, the obvious default position. In September 2001, during my first week of classes in my freshman year at NYU, when religious hatred and violence was visited upon my hometown in cataclysmic fashion, simply not believing was no longer enough. I soon realized that battle had been joined whether I wanted it or not, I and everyone I knew was fair game for religious violence, and the only right thing to do was to push back. My unlikely year-long stint as a clerk in a gift shop at a Catholic Church brought me into contact with priests and true-believer parishioners alike and what I saw overwhelmingly pointed to a lot of otherwise kind and caring people (and some genuine rotters,) embracing ignorance, superstition, tribalism, hatred, and the most arbitrary and capricious moral system imaginable. My parents had read bible stories to me alongside world mythology, but now I turned to the original scriptures with a critical eye for the first time and found - whether in the Old or New Testament or the Koran - a heap of nonsense seasoned with a large helping of viciousness. I soon came to the conclusion that if such a god did exist (and we should all be very glad that there’s no evidence that he does,) it would be the moral duty of any decent person to rise up and resist such a tyrant. I concluded that the very premise of most religions - of a watchful, judgmental, guardian creator god, no matter how loving - is an insult to humanity, not least because it almost always denies humanity’s rather canny role in its creation.

Fortunately, my change from passive atheist to passionate anti-theist came at a very opportune time. In the mid-2000’s atheism was a rising force, something exciting, urgent, and important. I was an early and enthusiastic participant in what then seemed very much like a movement. I had signed copies of books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I subscribed to both Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines. I watched Penn and Teller’s TV show and traded links to youtube videos with like-minded friends. I had friendly email exchanges with Hitchens, started a petition (that ultimately went nowhere,) to ask the US Government to pay for Hirsi Ali’s bodyguards, and eventually worked as a volunteer for the non-profit Science Debate, a campaign to encourage a science policy debate for that year’s presidential candidates, and was thrilled to take notes for conference calls with the likes of Bill Nye, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil Degrasse Tyson.

I attended book readings by Ibn Warraq, Salman Rushdie, and Austin Dacey. I blogged and spoke out in support of the Danish cartoonists. I attended every debate Christopher Hitchens had in New York City and watched with delight when he eloquently eviscerated the opposition every time - like a lion boxing a jellyfish. I went to a conference hosted by the Center for Inquiry called “Secular Society and its Enemies,” in a building overlooking the crater where the Twin Towers once stood and heard presentations by Peter Singer, Ann Druyan, and Fouad Ajami. Atheism was my intellectual awakening – as Hitch had pointed out, the argument against god was the fons et origo of all arguments worth having. 

I also spoke up about my own atheism. I didn’t go picking fights, mind you, but when my opinion was asked I didn’t lie or water things down in an attempt to avoid offense or make nice. I made a conscious decision that honesty about my own beliefs (or lack thereof,) was not only the right policy, but it meant that I respected the people I was speaking with enough to not condescend to sugarcoat my ideas. I recall arguing with one Rabbi shortly after the 2008 Mumbai attacks and saying that the men who carried out the assault on the Jewish center there were by all accounts just as pious and devout in their faith as he was in his. “How can you call these men pious when they killed and tortured people?” he kept saying, over and over again. His repeated inability to separate the concepts of piety and morality comes to mind when religious people and fellow travellers like Ben Affleck seem hell-bent on missing the point and mischaracterizing the arguments of atheists.

In one circumstance, a devout Christian co-worker at one of my jobs began talking with me about religion. I gave her my opinions unvarnished and she seemed genuinely interested. For several weeks we had a friendly debate about the matter, and it seemed like she was, for the first time in her life, genuinely questioning the faith she’d been raised in, or at least approaching it critically. Then one day she came in looking sullen. I said hello. She grunted. I asked her if everything was ok. She muttered that she’d told her brother about our conversations and he’d told her to stop talking to me about these things or he’d come in and speak to me about it himself. The threat was immodestly unveiled, and she stopped speaking to me after that, whether more for the safety of my body or her soul I’ll never know.

Some encounters were less tense. At one point, Richard Dawkins had come up with a debatably useful way of having atheists “come out of the closet:” red letter “A” pins to signify one’s philosophical stance and reference the intolerant religious branding of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. The idea was that atheists would proudly wear their heresy on their sleeves (or lapel, rather.) The result was mixed. At a drugstore in midtown, a clerk pointed at my pin and said “You an Atlanta Braves fan?”
I was confused for a moment then laughed and said “Oh, no, I’m an atheist.”
He stared at me.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It means I don’t believe in god.”
He recoiled in shock, then, because the situation couldn’t possibly be as dire as he imagined, he asked: “But you believe in the Bible, right?”
“No, not really.”
He looked for all the world like I’d just sprouted a tail and spoken in tongues. He called the other clerk over and the line of cross-armed people waiting behind me fumed and tapped their toes as one.
“He says he doesn’t believe in god. Or the bible,” he informed his co-worker.
She squinted, as though her contact lenses had trouble focusing on such an unfathomable creature.
“They other people like you?” she asked.
“Yes, lots of them.” I replied.
Their eyes widened. She let out a sigh and shook her head.
“Well,” she said, “good luck.”

But the biggest test of my newfound openness about my disbelief in and dislike of religion involved my girlfriend at the time. She had been raised Catholic, and one day she mentioned to me that she still prayed every night before bed, and even included me in her prayers. I was surprised, taken aback, and a little uncomfortable. I never liked the idea of people praying for me. I’d always found it condescending and presumptuous. But I loved her very much, and I wasn’t sure if it was right of me to try to disabuse her of a faith which clearly gave her comfort and was, for the most part, genuinely benign and mild. She wasn’t any sort of fundamentalist zealot, she and I pretty much agreed politically, she’d simply never really spent much time examining or questioning her faith until she began a serious relationship with someone who took his disbelief more seriously than she seemed to take her belief. I didn’t go out of my way to change her mind, I didn’t insult her for praying or disparage her beliefs directly, but I did continue to write and talk about my own uncompromising thoughts about religion. Eventually, she told me that she’d stopped praying. My mother quipped that any girl who dated me was bound to lose faith in something, but I get the impression that she’d just decided it wasn’t necessary, and she didn’t seem any less happy, content, or ethically grounded for having stopped.

Her family was a more delicate matter. They were no more zealous or intolerant than she was, but their faith seemed more firmly rooted. One year I was invited to their beautiful home for Wigilia, a traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner (I’ve never had a problem participating in the symbolic or traditional cultural rituals nominally associated with particular religions, as long as they require no false oaths or superstitious activity on my part - I thoroughly enjoy a good Diwali celebration, Seder dinner, or Christmas party.) The big news that year was that one of the cousins was bringing her new fiancé to the table for the first time, and it was clearly going to be an opportunity for the extended family to give him the once over. They subjected him to a friendly but thorough grilling, and I was glad I wasn’t in his seat. The occasion being what it was, they asked him about church - whether he currently attends, whether he’d attended as a child, whether he thought it was important. He deftly and diplomatically dealt with the questions. He admitted that he didn’t currently attend church, but then he said that he thought it was very important to raise children in a faith so that they’d have a proper moral grounding. This met with approval all around. The motion was seconded by family members, who concurred that the best, if not the only, way to ensure a moral child is to give her proper Christian instruction. I sat quietly, prepared to hold my peace, reflecting on the miracle that decent peoples’ faith in the moral standing of the Catholic church could remain so unshaken in the wake of recent revelations about the industrial scale of child rape and cover-up by members of its protected clergy.

Then, in a move to his credit, and for which I will always be very grateful, my girlfriend’s father decided to include me in the conversation, knowing full well that I was an active and vocal atheist, and aware that I might say something others disagree with. To this day I hope that my response to his question didn’t hurt his personal feelings too much, and I hope that he appreciates my candor as a sign of respect.
“Natty, did your parents take you to any sort of church or service when you were growing up?”
I was surprised at being asked, and I answered with something like a reflex:
“No, my family has never been religious and we don’t believe in anything supernatural.”

When I recount this story to people today, even non-religious people, they gasp and say that my response was the height of rudeness. I’d dismissed and insulted the beliefs of everyone at the table. I’ll admit that I surprised myself, and I still feel a little bit of that initial shock that comes with the sense of a line being suddenly crossed. But I couldn’t have given a more honest answer. Some might argue that both decorum and honesty would have been satisfied if I’d left it at the first clause, but there was a reason that wouldn’t have been enough: I’d sat silently for several minutes while most of the adults at the table had repeatedly implied that a person who wasn’t raised in the church couldn’t be morally sound. With every measure of confidence and self-assuredness they’d asserted that morality was impossible outside the context of not just any religion, but their religion specifically. I had been prepared to let this insulting and untrue concept go, but then I’d been asked about my own experience, and I’d felt obliged to give it as honestly and fully as I could.

People were a bit taken aback, and there was a pregnant silence before my girlfriend’s father deftly maneuvered the conversation elsewhere. By the end of the dinner it seemed to have been more or less forgotten, and when we broke the traditional opłatek wafers and told each other our wishes for the New Year, my girlfriend’s parents said they looked forward to seeing more of me in the future. At first, their genuine kindness made me feel a little guilty for having so abruptly punctured the consensus, but after dinner an aunt and uncle took me aside and said “are you an atheist?”
I told them I was.
“So are we, but we were always too afraid to tell anybody,” they confessed.

After that, I was very glad for what I’d said, and I tried to imagine being so afraid of one’s own family’s opprobrium as to constantly lie and hide one’s own deepest thoughts and beliefs from them, something which atheists around the world often have to do, in some places for fear of murder at the hands of their own relatives. The thing I learned that night was that when people say you shouldn’t bring up religion at the dinner table they usually mean that you shouldn’t disagree with the religious consensus, and that most moderate religious people are probably unaware of just how insulting and intolerant some of their most basic core beliefs are.

2007 was a big year for atheism. The Atheist Alliance International convention was held in Washington DC and it featured an impressive lineup: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens were all speakers, and the quartet met for drinks at Hitchens’s apartment that week to record the now-famous “Four Horsemen” video. I attended the convention, met fellow atheists from around the world, shook hands with the icons of the movement, got my books signed, and even, after handing over my bag to a bodyguard, met Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose appearance hadn’t been announced in advance for obvious security reasons. The speeches were all exciting, although to be fair the speakers couldn’t have been preaching to a more sympathetic choir, but the speech which caused the most discussion - and controversy - was Sam Harris’s.

Harris’s speech, which can be viewed on Youtube with the title “The Problem with Atheism,” immediately divided the attendees. Part of the speech was about his belief in the value of meditation and “spiritual” practice without superstition or dogma, which is the subject of his excellent new book Waking Up. That met with skepticism from many in attendance, but the really controversial part of Harris’s speech was his argument that atheism, as a non-belief, was a very strange thing to have a convention about. After all, he said, people don’t have conventions about their common lack of belief in astrology. Not only was it strange, said Harris, but it was harmful to the project of a world governed less by faith and more by reason, because it allowed peoples’ arguments about specific beliefs to be dismissed by virtue of their belonging to a particular group. Harris argued that atheists should stop calling themselves atheists, agnostics, secularists, secular humanists, or (shudder) “brights.” Instead, they should not call themselves anything, taking their lack of belief as the reasonable default, as it were, and committing themselves to advocating for reason and against bad ideas in any form. Predictably, Harris’s contention that atheists shouldn’t call themselves atheists was frustrating to many of the atheists attending the atheist convention, who were presumably feeling pretty good about being atheists at that moment. But it was one of the most important moments of the convention for me, because it illuminated the limiting edges of atheism as a movement.

At the time I was a member of the New York City Atheists. I had joined in my first burst of enthusiasm for the subject and I’ll forever be grateful that they, seeing some sort of potential in me as a young and semi-eloquent champion of the cause, asked me to be the host and moderator of their monthly meet-ups. On one Tuesday of every month, several dozen nonbelievers of different ages, races, occupations, genders, sexual orientations, and styles would meet in the back room of a Murray Hill bar. I would lead a discussion for about an hour and a half and then people would socialize. For me, the meetings were an opportunity to bring up and discuss issues which I thought were of vital interest to people opposed to religion. I soon realized that for many of the other attendees that wasn’t the point of the group.

To many people the meet-up was simply a social event, a good way to meet like-minded people. Friendships, romances, and at least one marriage that I know of, resulted from the meetings. I understood the social value of the meetings, but I had hoped they would have the potential to be more. I was dismayed to see the number of people who were content to sit around quoting Richard Dawkins and patting themselves on the back for being so much more enlightened than their religious neighbors. I soon noticed another divide among the atheists: those who had been brought up in a faith saw the group as a potential replacement for the social functions of a church, whereas those of us, like me, who had been brought up in an entirely secular environment felt no such need. I already had friends, and I was relatively competent at meeting people without recourse to first discussing all the things we didn’t believe in.

One of the common criticisms leveled at atheism, and especially the “new atheism,” is that it’s just like a religion. It seemed to me that some members of the NYCA were determined to prove this true. People suggested “un-baptisms” and I cringed. People wanted some kind of Sunday meeting to counteract church services and I was left wondering why. Worst of all, the New York City Atheists proudly boasted that they’d been invited to attend Mayor Bloomberg’s inter-faith breakfast for the first time. I found this counter-productive - surely the right course of action is to protest the very idea of an inter-faith breakfast rather than participate and further encourage the image of atheists as just another religion-like special interest group. I didn’t want a seat at the table with priests, rabbis, and imams, I wanted to smash the table and say that politicians shouldn’t be taking advice or guidance from people who spend their days lying to children (especially since this was the same mayor who, faced with a scandal involving Brooklyn Rabbis giving fatal cases of herpes to several infants whose freshly-mutilated penises they’d placed in their mouths to suck away the blood after a circumcision, had said that the most important thing in that case was to respect religious sensitivities.)

But the people who came to the New York City Atheists meet-ups didn’t seem to have the same concerns as me. They were unsurprisingly partisan, most of them being staunch Democrats, and many seemed incredulous when I suggested that atheist organizations should be resolutely non-partisan and instead focus on specific issues. When I tried to discuss activism, they pointed to the ads they had placed on city buses and the street tabling in which they advertised their organization and invited people to join (to be fair, that’s how I found out about them,) although I was always a big fan of the blood drive they organized on the ridiculous “National Day of Prayer,” with the slogan “While religious people are on their knees, we atheists will be on our feet, giving a part of ourselves for the benefit of humanity.” Some members scoffed at the intelligence of religious people, and were dismissive when I argued that they’d be mistaken to underestimate people of faith, and that there were plenty of perfectly capable and intelligent people who believed highly unlikely and even absurd things. And unlike many other atheists I met, I wasn’t convinced that the simple solution to religious belief was a more scientifically-literate society. I had read about too many engineers and doctors in suicide vests to think that a technical or scientific education was an easy antidote to religious indoctrination.

My biggest split with the New York City Atheists and my subsequent exit from the group was in one sense sparked by Sam Harris’s speech. I began to argue that congregating as atheists was fine, and that atheism as a personal philosophical stance was both necessary and worth defending, but that atheism itself was a terrible political cause to rally around. I said that we should organize politically as secularists, and find common cause with religious people who believe in the separation of church and state and who resist theocracy. I was very clear that we shouldn’t hide or adulterate or compromise our personal views about religion, but that when it came to politics, we should support the rights of persecuted religious groups around the world - Copts in Egypt, Muslims in India, Rohingyas in Myanmar. After all, what philosophical minority group was more persecuted around the world than the atheists, the apostates, the infidels and heretics? Ok, maybe the Jews, but the point is that as people who were against religious bullying it seemed perfectly natural to me that atheists should support freedom of belief and conscience in all its forms, even those we disagree with, with the political goal being the guarantee of the right of free thought around the world. The people fighting theocracy are often religious moderates and reformers who needed support, and I saw no reason not to give it to them as long as they equally respected our right to not believe, to disagree, and to express our non-belief, even if they found it offensive.

This proved too much - or too confusing - for many of the people in the group. The idea of rallying under the banner of secularism in support of the rights of religious minorities wasn’t something most members could get behind, and wasn’t nearly so appealing as watching The Life of Brian again and complaining about “In God We Trust” being on the money (stupid though that may be.) The other major problem was the same one we seem to be facing today: plenty of Western atheists are willing to condemn Christianity, but they fail to subject Islam to the same level of scrutiny, or they at least make some tenuous equivalency to assuage their liberal conscience, saying that American evangelicals trying (and failing spectacularly,) to stop gay people from getting married through ballot measures is somehow as bad as Muslim theocracies criminalizing homosexuality, sometimes calling for the execution of anyone accused of it. It seemed like too many of my fellow atheists had assumed that an opposition to George Bush’s foreign policy was enough to identify someone as a liberal, and they never bothered to explore mainstream American Muslim websites like muslimmatters.org where there was recently a blog post arguing that women in “immodest” clothing are guilty of a more insidious sexual harassment than the men who catcall them and another about hating the sin of homosexuality but loving the sinner that could have been written by someone from the Catholic league if you replaced the word “Allah,” with “God.” The usual excuse for this double-standard was a vague “we need to focus on our own problems.” I don’t know when secularism or human rights became so provincial, or when morality was so wedded to geography, but it depressed me that some atheists didn’t take as internationalist a stance as they could have.

In the years since I became somewhat disillusioned with atheism as a movement and stopped actively participating in it, I attended journalism school. I made new friends from all over the world, some of them religious, and I had two professors, Gershom Gorenberg and Samuel Freedman, who wrote regularly (and brilliantly,) on topics of faith. I stepped out of the “new atheist” bubble and saw how petty, nerdy, and myopic many aspects of the movement looked to outsiders. I avoided talking about religion, and I started to keep my still-uncompromising views to myself in the service of social harmony. For a while I even managed to convince myself that atheism was becoming so accepted (the oft-cited polls showing a rise in the number of Americans who check “none” for religion seemed to confirm it,) that the ideological battle against the worst elements of religion had been, although not won, at least shifted in favor of reason (or at the very least moderation.) The Christian right in America had seemingly been gelded at the polls, creationism was getting struck down in whichever courtroom it reared its pathetic head, Islamic-inspired terrorist attacks in the West were regularly thwarted and seemed to be becoming more infrequent, even if there were dismaying examples of religious groups bullying institutions like Yale and Comedy Central into self-censorship. And in 2009 Barack Obama even mentioned “non-believers” in his inauguration speech.

But it’s clear that things are no better now, and possibly even worse. According to a Pew report, religious hostility is at its highest point in six years. We’ve seen the rise of ISIS and Boko Haram, the advances of Al-Shabab, the persecution of Pussy Riot and the crackdown on homosexuality by the Russian Orthodox Christian establishment, the resurgence of Islamist parties in the wake of the Arab Spring, the ascendance to power of a Hindu fundamentalist with a history of (at least tacit) approval of anti-Muslim pogroms in India, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali being bullied into silence by American campus groups (including atheist groups - for shame!) and suddenly it seems like being polite and giving religion the benefit of the doubt and hoping it becomes more moderate and less divisive if we tolerate its more troubling claims under the guise of “respect” is not only no longer possible but no longer moral. In what could be an ironic headline from the Onion, The Guardian published an article called “Religious extremism main cause of terrorism, according to report.” Although studies show encouraging signs that support for religious violence and Islamist groups is down, Pew’s report on the Muslim world last year showed wide support for Sharia law, the execution of apostates, and a desire for more religious influence in politics. In a troubling parallel, apparently many Americans are lamenting the decline of religion in politics, too. For all the evidence and testimony that Muslim’s aren’t liked or trusted by their fellow Americans, a recent Pew poll shows that atheists are just as disliked. Another recent poll, this one conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, found the same thing: Atheists and Muslims are almost equally disliked, and held in lower esteem than immigrants, gays and lesbians, Catholics, and Jews - everyone but Communists. And yet atheist student groups don’t seem to cry foul and complain about hurt feelings and offended sensibilities nearly as much as faith-based ones do whenever someone who disagrees with them speaks on campus. This despite the fact that there’s plenty of anti-atheist rhetoric to be found in the holy books on every pulpit of every church, synagogue, or mosque. And still one doesn’t see many atheists seeking to ban scripture on the grounds that it contains hate speech, or silence preachers with whom they don’t agree. The tolerance of nonbelievers for speech they disagree with (and which consistently insults them,) should be lauded - we’ve certainly had to put up with it for long enough.

In the years since I ended my public involvement in the “new atheism,” I’ve made some religious friends, as well as non-religious friends who follow the Ben Affleck example of apologetics (and insist, despite video evidence to the contrary, that he actually won anything resembling a debate rather than shouted down an opposing view without listening to it,) and I’ve more or less kept my opposition to religion to myself. I see friends who I respect and admire using the term “Islamophobia,” with a straight face and reposting articles on Facebook automatically calling any criticism of Islamic doctrine, dogma, or scripture racist and bigoted (this despite the fact that they seem perfectly able to understand, quite rightly, that criticism of Israeli government and policy doesn’t automatically equate with anti-Semitism.) And I hope that they’ll listen to what I have to say and engage me in debate rather than ignore me, slander me, misrepresent my views, or try to shut me up. If the current climate is any indication, I don’t have high hopes for this. But things are getting worse and well-meaning people are allying themselves with and making excuses for the most reactionary and oppressive (and patently absurd,) ideologies ever committed to papyrus.

People often describe “new atheists” as militant, despite the fact that atheists aren’t currently blowing up mosques and churches or executing non-atheists in the name of disbelief. This was most absurdly put by Karen Armstrong in a recent Salon interview in which she said that the ideas of Sam Harris and Bill Maher “is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps.” Apparently Ms. Armstrong thinks that Harris’ and Maher’s criticism of Islamic ideology is more reminiscent of Nazism than state-sanctioned Hindu nationalist educators in India saying things like “the truth is that historically we have been a far superior race," and advocating the burning of books they disagree with or Muslim protesters in Germany chanting “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”

If the “militancy” that critics are referring to is the unvarnished and unapologetic opposition to faith-based belief on an individual level and religious power on a political level, than we could do with a lot more militancy. Religious hatred, violence, power, and bullying need to be resisted, and our side needs as many voices as it can get. We must be unafraid and true to our own consciences and we need to make no apologies and refuse to compromise with abhorrent ideologies. The discourse is calling out for a heaping dose of honesty, and we nonbelievers need to hold the line and not give in to hypocrisy and wishful thinking.

We should by all means encourage and support religious moderates and reformers, but only as long as they recognize our right to exist and speak our minds as nonbelievers without fear of censorship or reprisal. The holy books and doctrines of the world’s major religions all take a condescending, insulting, and sometimes actively hateful and violent view of non-believers. We are continually maligned in their pages as, at best, fools who live in ignorance of god’s grace and are destined to be judged at the end of time or, at worst, dangerous people who god (who presumably created them and made them atheists, for some reason,) would be very pleased at the destruction and torture of. We shouldn’t be so quick to shut up in the name of a “respect” that has never been reciprocated. This issue is far too important to ignore or sugarcoat, and atheists, agnostics, and other nonbelievers need to be more vocal and politically active on secular issues globally, not simply ending their commitment at the borders of their own countries. Religion will probably never be eradicated, but the fight against it must never cease if there’s to be any hope for a future of less psychological tyranny, theocratic repression, and sectarianism based on a thin but spreading tissue of ancient lies.