The Atheist's Ire

 Yes, I am a theist, and more than that a Christion. Not that I go to church. I wish I could find a church I could in good conscience attend and get some spiritual benefit from. Still, I have no problem with atheists. No categorical problem that is. A lot of atheists are much better people than a lot of people who claim to be Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or anything else that involves a deity or otherwise spiritual or religious sensibility. Atheists are no better or worse than anyone else, or, just as good and just as evil and just as right and just as wrong as anyone else on most issues. 

But I'm taken aback by the ire of certain prominent atheists--also the smugness, but that's no worse than the smugness of the most ignorant of professed Christians. You'll catch on Youtube a video of Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or even Salmon Rushdie or Ricky Gervais ranting about faith, clearly angry that anyone would be so stupid as to believe in God, assured that all reason and evidence is on their side, when in fact when they say reason they mean science, and when they say evidence, they mean the stuff that science counts as evidence.

Behind this is, always, the marked annoyance at the political effectiveness of the religious right. From slave owners, to creationists, to the Moral Majority to the Evangelical hoards that support Donald Fucking Trump--they hate them. They hate the way that they use religion to bolster their appeal and their power and their effectiveness. Of course they do. But then they make the idiotic move of blaming religion: if only we could show you that there obviously is no God, then we could take away their power. 

That would not take anything from their power even if you could. And the means by which you are working this corner is sysiphisian. The problem with religious people is that they are hypocrites. It's not that they're religious. And if you could manage to wrest God from them, they'd still be hypocrites. Yes, religion is an easy grab. Having God behind you gives your cause among the ignorant a jot of gravitas that other discourses can't easily match. But if these hypocrites couldn't shackle God to their cause, they'll have nationalism and they'll have science too. You say "but science doesn't support them." What has that stopped them? Christ doesn't support them either. They'll lie about anything. They'll deceive themselves into believing anything that will grant them power. 

You can't stop them by attacking religion. You can't even slow them down. The best I can say is that you're wasting your time. You're probably also damaging the people whose sincere belief--supported by the evidence of experience and silence and prayer, and the logic that human perception is grossly limited and has always been sure of itself and never right about its model of the universe, and has behind it any number of good people and great minds.

Scientists are essential if we're going to save the world from some of the threats it faces--global warming most obviously. We need caring people no less. Science can't make you care about anything. Faith can. Don't burn down the shelter to punish the criminals it harbors. You'll find yourself out in the cold.