Could it be that militant atheism, in its religiosity, pure ideology, anger, lack of empathy, and anthropocentric hubris, is simply a new manifestation of the same neurophysiological patterning that leads to fundamentalism of all stripes?
Could it be that militant atheism is a fundamentalist philosophy with characteristics no different, say, than the Middle East movement known as ISIL, which purports to be a religious movement, but is really just a haven for human beings who have damaged their brains and turned themselves into the Four Horsemen of the Dark Psychological Tetrad (Psychopathy, Narcissism, Sadism, and Machiavellianism)?
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| Black Beauty T. Rex at Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller, Alberta. Photo JAT 2015. Sure, it's unrealistic and unscientific for Creationists to deny the evidence of the fossil record and claim that Planet Earth is only a few thousand years old. No argument there. But it's also unrealistic and unscientific for militant atheists to deny the evidence of the quantum record, which speaks of weird phenomena such as non-locality, the conscious observer, bosons, fermions, and magnetism, not to mention all the dark matter and dark energy we know almost nothing about. From my perspective, the atheist belief that "dumb luck" led to the evolution of the universe requires a much higher degree of sanctimonious denial than the Creationist position could ever muster. Are we humans really so incredibly amazing that the entire universe evolved just so we could have consciousness with all the rights and privileges of the conscious observer effect? Really? We can't even manage our own bank accounts, let alone act as wise custodians of Planet Earth, so why would the universe evolve to give humankind the unique right to mess with the laws of physics? |
The militant atheists I've known (and I've known quite a few) strut and preen in exactly the same harsh way as the spiritual and theological narcissists I've known. They're certain of their rightness, certain of their objective intellect, certain they have all the facts. They're quick to judge and even quicker to punish. They have no empathy (though they rush to claim they live by the laws of empathy's hobbled cousins "compassion" and "mercy"). They rely almost exclusively on the brain's System 2 thinking processes (linear thinking) and pour contempt on the brain's much older and more adaptive System 1 thinking processes (creative and intuitive thinking). They're slow to learn from their mistakes and even slower to admit they made any mistakes in the first place.
Here's something else I've noticed about militant atheists and other fundamentalist philosophers: they're really, really poor at constructing a whole and complete argument. In fact, most of them couldn't argue their way out of a wet paper bag. But don't say this to their face, because they'll go into a rage -- maybe even erupt in a narcissistic rage reaction -- and they'll make you pay BIG for pointing out they're not really as smart as they think they are.
I take issue with militant atheist philosophies on the following fronts:
- They use restricted data sets and then claim they're using a complete data set. One example is an extreme reliance on Materialist cause-and-effect "Law" without regard or deference to the non-Materialist laws that govern most of the universe. Why is it "wrong" for religious leaders to ignore the actual laws of physics but "right" for atheists to do it when it suits them?
- Another example, taken from the field of religious studies, is a tendency for atheists to conflate many different topics into a single "bugaboo" called religion. Sure, religious fundamentalists conflate stuff all the time -- but why is it okay for atheists to fall back on conflation, over-simplification, literalism, and myth-making of their own?
- Atheists, in my experience, rely heavily on "revelation" to an extent that rivals the worst abuses of "religious revelation" from major world religions. Under the category of "revelation" you find "proofs" such as "Because I said so," "Because I'm smarter than you," "Because I cherry-picked one small fact from an entire body of knowledge and used it out of context to show how smart I am," and "I just know it's true."
- Atheism has its own set of gods, though it likes to pretend otherwise. Top on the list of atheism's idols are "The Perfect Human Mind," followed closely by scientism, algorithmic solutions, and variations on the "it's not my fault I'm a scumbag because my genes made me do it" argument (which is really no different than the ancient religious argument that says "it's not my fault I'm a scumbag because my demons made me do it").
- Atheism is marked by a petulant, narcissistic refusal to examine the enormous and interconnected questions of scale, time, peripheral vision, alternating current, bonding, probability wave currents, and other non-linear, non-Materialist questions related to God and consciousness and Creation. They use their own personal human limits as proof that God can't actually exist! (as if God has ever understood questions of scale, time, etc. in the way a human brain does!)
How are these philosophical approaches any different, characterologically speaking, from those used by religious fundamentalists?
How can you expect to become a happier, healthier person who understands patience and love and forgiveness and calmness and flexibility and healing and scale and time and bonding and breadth of knowledge and self-directed morality when you've made the choice to turn yourself into an "iceberg thinker" who refuses to look at anything except the small percentage of data floating above the surface of your System 2 thinking?
And why do you think it's wrong for religious teachers to do this but okay for you to do exactly the same thing?
In my view, militant atheism is hypocrisy in as pure a form as one can get.
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March 2, 2016 addendum: A recent piece by Brian Bethune in Macleans highlights some interesting research by social scientists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog into the unusual percentage of Islamist terrorists who have engineering degrees: http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/why-do-so-many-jihadis-have-engineering-degrees/. Bethune says: "That takes Hertog and Gambetta to the thorny question of “mindsets for extremists.” Different types of people are attracted to different kinds of extremism—engineers mostly on one side, social scientists and humanities grads on the other—and the authors went in search of traits found in both secular and jihadi extremists as well as among engineers. Three stand out among conservatives in general in recent psychological research: disgust (or the felt need to keep one’s environment pure, which can underpin everything from homophobia to xenophobia); the “need for cognitive closure” (a preference for order and certainty that can support authoritarianism); a very high in-group/out-group distinction."
