We should have a thread on secularism. What is secularism to you?

The secularist case against "Atheism 3.0"
By Austin Dacey

A new, milder "Atheism 3.0" is on the market, teaching a more forgiving attitude towards faith. Bruce Sheiman, author of An Atheist Defends Religion, maintains that humanity is better off with it than without it. Although a recent Religion News Service classifies me and my book The Secular Conscience among the 3.0s, I have to say that I'm not all that happy with the taxonomy.

I'll not mention that this "truth-must-lie-somewhere-in-between" narrative trips all too easily off of journalistic fingers. Should we agree that God is half dead? Nor will I dwell on the implicit assumption that Atheisms 1.0 and 2.0 have passed into planned obsolescence and that 3.0 constitutes some kind of scheduled improvement on them both. I'll be damned if I can imagine an upgrade to Hume or Baron d'Holbach, and Hitchens is no slouch either.

For me, the interesting thought is not so much that God does not exist, it is that he need not exist. The pertinent question is not whether we are we better off with or without religion, but whether religion matters quite as much as either answer would have us suppose. To take this stance is neither to correct atheism nor to reject religion. It is to change the subject to secularism.

Finding Hitchens in the religion aisle

To hang this on something concrete: In what section of the bookstore do atheism books belong? You may have noticed the appearance of a new section called Atheism at many booksellers in recent years. Curiously, at least in the case of the Borders Books in Manhattan where I went to get Hitchens' The Portable Atheist, this section comprised a few shelves of books located in the Religion aisle. But, as the saying goes, isn't atheism a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby?

The case for putting atheism in the religion aisle is, I suppose, that it represents a subset of views on religion; namely, the subset of views that say no to it. Undeniably, atheism is what logicians call a negation: it is not the case that God exists. But logical form alone is not enough to tell us whether a claim is merely critical or negative in any pejorative sense. Consider: It is not the case that you have anything to fear. Atheist assertions take place within the context of cultural conversations. Whether a contribution to a conversation is merely negative depends on what the conversation is about.

While directing the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, Colonel Washington Roebling was forced to make the most difficult decision of his career. For several years he and his crew had been digging down towards the bedrock under the East River in order to the lay the foundation for the second of the bridge's towers, and the work was becoming terribly difficult and dangerous. Some observers insisted that unless the excavation continued until reaching bedrock, the tower would be unstable and liable to collapse. Roebling disagreed, and argued that the foundation could be laid safely in the compact sand and gravel above. Roebling's view was critical of an opposing view, and in that sense negative. Yet nevertheless it was in the service of a project that was itself constructive: building a great bridge (it turns out he was right about the foundation).

Today we should ask, what is the proper context of the current conversation about atheism and religion? What is the larger cultural project within which it should be seen? As Charles Taylor has observed, ours is a secular age, an age in which belief is no longer axiomatic but optional. We educated peoples of the rich, industrialized democracies inhabit a disenchanted universe, a world unperturbed by occult powers. It doesn't get to cheat and bring things about by magic, but must resort to some natural, causal mechanism. The remaining anti-secular, anti-naturalistic messages of some contemporary Christians, whether from Saddleback or Vatican City, are not the dictates of a triumphant force but the cries of an animal grown more desperate because it is cornered. After five centuries of surrendering to non-religious institutions the dominion over cosmology, biology, medicine, education, entertainment, the arts, and civil society, they are desperate to retain some sliver of continued relevance.

Relative to this secular conversation, it is the supernatural theists who occupy the subset of naysayers--evolution can't account for living things, physics doesn't explain why the universe exists at all, human kindness and fairness will collapse without transcendent reinforcement, and all the rest. Here it is the believers who are the skeptics, doubters about the foundations of modernity, and it is the atheists who are attempting to rebut their criticisms and shore up the construction project.

The "Atheism 3.0" label may be motivated by a desire for fresh intellectual options, but it confines secular critiques to a conversational agenda set by religion (with a peculiarly Western conception of religion at that).

A secular conversation-starter

In my book I don't go after God. Why go after God when you can come before him? I argue that the free individual conscience comes first, before God, before society. Conscience cannot be found in duty to God, for it is conscience that must judge where one's duty lies. The commitment to the free conscience, and to the open society that makes space for it--this is secularism.

Secularism is neither atheist nor theist, neither religious nor anti-religious. It's orthogonal to God. Rather than dividing up the world's citizens on the basis of putative religious affiliation, it asks, What do they really care about? How do they actually go about making up their minds about how to live? And wherever education and affluence are on the rise, it finds that traditional religions are increasingly irrelevant to the answers.

These are big stories. And, if I may say so, we would do well to be talking about them.

If the secularists were the ones running the bookstore, you might find the religious titles in the philosophy or science aisles, instead of the other way around.

Austin Dacey is former representative to the United Nations for the Center for Inquiry and the author of "The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life."

Hi Ceebs

Hello friend.

Cool story, bro.

black hussein taco

I don't need God...

God needs me.

I really dislike the comma in this.

only zealots believe in commas

the comma indicates separation which is secular

church,state

church,sense

church,sweat balls

mark rothko paintings,things i choose to spend time looking at

this is getting esolc

Good job.

Houston now sports a nice new CFI billboard on the southwest freeway. I'm actually very excited to see what kinf of backlash in the editorials this may or may not cause.

Yep, it's part of a new national multimedia campaign. Not so much about secularism, though -- just about dispelling some myths about secular people.

http://livingwithoutreligion.org/

Nice. It's the first billboard of it's kind that I've ever seen in Houston.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/us/19beliefs.html?_r=3

A Place on the Right for a Few Godless Conservatives
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Published: February 18, 2011

As a child, Razib Khan spent several weeks studying in a Bangladeshi madrasa. Heather Mac Donald once studied literary deconstructionism and clerked for a left-wing judge. In neither case did the education take. They are atheist conservatives — Mr. Khan an apostate to his family’s Islamic faith, Ms. Mac Donald to her left-wing education.

They are part of a small faction on the right: conservatives with no use for religion. Since 2008, they have been contributors to the blog Secular Right, where they argue that conservative values like small government, self-reliance and liberty can be defended without recourse to invisible deities or the religions that exalt them.

And they serve as public proof that an irreligious conservative can exist.

“A lot of religious conservatives say, ‘You can’t be conservative because you don’t believe in God,’ ” said Mr. Khan, 34, who was raised in New York and Oregon but whose grandfather was an imam in Bangladesh. “They say I am logically impossible, and I say, ‘Well I am possible because I am.’

“They assert your nonexistence, and you have to assert your existence.”

Neither Mr. Khan nor Ms. Mac Donald gainsays the historical connection between conservatism and religiosity. Influential conservatives, like the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, have been sympathetic toward religion in part because it endures.

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, noted that conservatives throughout history have esteemed “mediating institutions” like schools and churches, sources of authority other than the state. “If that’s the way you’re thinking, concern for the strength of organized religion follows pretty naturally,” Mr. Ponnuru said.

After the French Revolution, opposition to clergy became identified with revolutionaries and, as in communist countries, the political left. Veneration of clergy, as by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, was a marker of the right.

But only in the 1970s did the Republican Party became more identified with religiosity than the Democrats. In recent years, conservative magazines and talk radio have increased their cheerleading for religion, while two magazines with religious roots, First Things and Commentary, have become more conservative in their politics.

In 2008, feeling the absence of irreligious voices on the right, Mr. Khan, who also blogs about science for Discover magazine’s Web site, started SecularRight.org. Today, the site usually gets 500 to 1,000 hits a day, Mr. Khan said, although there are spikes as high as 10,000.

For many, the conjunction of conservatism and atheism is embodied by the novelist Ayn Rand, whose thought blended free-market absolutism and human-worshiping atheism. She is influential — her cultic following included the young Alan Greenspan — but she is contemned by many intellectuals and is no patron saint to the bloggers at Secular Right.

The five bloggers are like the dramatis personae of a drawing-room comedy about irascible conservatives — written by Alan Bennett but set at the Heritage Foundation.

There’s the urban pragmatist (Ms. Mac Donald, who clerked for the liberal federal Judge Stephen Reinhardt but now writes conservative essays about homelessness and policing), the data-driven scientist (Mr. Khan), and the libertarian enthusiast for tort reform (Walter Olson, also founder of the blog Overlawyered).

And because conservatives are Anglophiles, there are two Englishmen: John Derbyshire, the popular mathematics writer and opponent of liberal immigration policy, and Andrew Stuttaford.

Of the group, Ms. Mac Donald is the one best known for atheism. She has written scathingly of the Christian instinct to give God credit for our good fortune while absolving him of our misfortunes.

“God’s mercy was supposedly manifest when children were saved” from the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, Ms. Mac Donald wrote in The American Conservative in 2007. “But why did the prayers for 5-year-old Samantha Runnion go unheeded when she was taken from her Southern California home in 2002 and later sexually assaulted and asphyxiated?

“If you ask a believer, you will be told that the human mind cannot fathom God’s ways. It would seem as if God benefits from double standards of a kind that would make even affirmative action look just.”

Few liberals would use “affirmative action” as a byword for injustice — but very few conservatives would refer to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin as members of “the knee-jerk venom squad,” as Ms. Mac Donald did a week ago on her blog.

Mr. Derbyshire retains affection for his Anglican schooling — “I sing hymns in my car,” he said — and Ms. Mac Donald respects many religious people she knows. But she suspects that they can embrace religion only because it has been so altered by secular values.

“We live with a religion that has been tamed, told to mind its manners and told to speak when asked to speak,” she said in an interview this week. “I won’t dwell on those outmoded religious activities that one is not supposed to remind religious advocates about, such as the burning of heretics and books, pitchforking the wrong type of Christian and opposition to liberal political reform.”

For Ms. Mac Donald, some politicians — those beneficiaries of liberal political reform — can be as bad as the radio talkers.

“I am puzzled,” Ms. Mac Donald said, “by the logic of a John Ashcroft saying that while the wonderful people of the Justice Department contributed to keeping America safe, that really the ultimate gratitude is due to God.

“If that is true, why did God leave us vulnerable on 9/11?”