Yes, you.
What the fuck, Chris Hedges? Seriously, what the fuck? And you, Salon. What the fuck? It’s bad enough you continue to inflict Camille Paglia on us, you gotta have an interview with this dick, too?
So Chris Hedges has a new book about the “New Athiests.” You know, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. What about them? Well, you see, Mr. Hedges claims that they are “preaching a fundamentalism as dangerous as the religious fundamentalist belief systems they attack.”
Uh, dude? Shut the fuck up. Really.
I’ll believe that these “New Atheists” are as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists when the President holds regular meetings with them, when they speak at political conferences and urge attacks on other countries, when millions of people pledge blind allegiance to atheism, when atheist apocalyptic movements influence military officers and policy, when they hold disproportionate influence on domestic policy, when thousands upon thousands of gullible young people attend “Atheist Camps” each year, when political candidates for high office have to schmooze with atheists to prove their secular bona fides, when atheists are able to designate entire swaths of the population as second-class citizens, when atheists are bombing church facilities and intimidating people coming to and going from services, and when the Congress grandstands and produces a bill–AND the President rushes back from vacation to sign it–to cater to a vocal atheist protest group in Florida. I’m sure you can come up with dozens more examples, but the ghost of William Faulkner appeared to me and told me to end that sentence or he’d break his celestial bourbon bottle over my fuckin’ head.
Until then? Fuck. You.
Hedges’ interview is sloppy and disjointed, to boot. He just makes a lot of assertions, lumps Dawkins in with Hitchens and Harris, and generally doesn’t make a lot of sense. Dawkins has really become a boogeyman for people who like to complain about secular intolerance, hasn’t he?
Also, I’d like to point out that I’m an atheist (I grew up with a Catholic father and a Southern Baptist mother, so I’ve had plenty of exposure to religion). I’d like to think I’m a rather well-informed atheist, too. And I’ve never evenheard of Sam Harris. Some champion of atheism he is.
As for Hitchens, it seems like the general consensus among us evil secularists is that the man is a sad drunk and a contrarian without a cause. Yeah, he provided some cover for the Iraq invasion, but if he’d appeared on TV loudly denouncing the impending war (fat chance, as almost no one who did was allowed in front of a camera from 2002-2003), it would’ve happened anyway. Jeebus himself could have appeared to us all, said “thou shalt not go to war with the Babylonians,” and that wouldn’t have mattered, either. Bush’s religious cronies would’ve come up with some explanation (not really Jeebus, it’s the anti-Jeebus, it’s Bizarro Jeebus, it’s Opposite Day, etc., etc.), everyone would’ve nodded and agreed, and the Very Serious March to War would have continued apace.
And Dawkins? The man’s a biologist, not a US citizen, and not at all involved in American politics. How the fuck did he get thrown in with those other two schmucks?
False equivalence: FAIL.