Sixteen Volts

It's kind of funny that some atheists who are normally snarky and outspoken against Christianity fold like folding chairs when it's time to confront Islam in a similar fashion. You might think that they would happily join the war against a medieval religion whose excesses in woman-hating, gay-hating and science-hating are about hundred times worse than those of the mainstream Christianity that they so love to deride. But surprise, you'd be thinking incorrectly. Instead of giving such religion a well-deserved fish-in-the-barrel pounding, we mysteriously get only silence, appeasement and a strange double standard according to which, for example, a Western Christian who says that gay marriage is not a 100% positive thing is a bigoted and disgusting piece of scum, but a culture that says that gays shouldn't have the right to even live, is really an exciting alternative culture that must be endlessly defended, understood and learned from.

For yet another example of an atheist suddenly putting his tail between the legs when it comes to Islam, consider the postings "Pox-ridden houses" and "One more time" that appeared in Pharyngula, which is normally a very critical site against religion. Money quote:

Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!

Now, I challenge anybody to go though the archives of Pharyngula, which routinely taunts and flips off Christians, and there find even one posting that is anywhere near as diplomatic and appeasing as these ones, when the topic is something that American fundy Christians did. And especially when that something involved violence. I am happy to bet that you won't find a single posting that, for example, meekly reminds the readers that angry and violent Christians are people and just need to be understood better and we must stop oppressing them.

Fortunately, I noticed in the comments a link to posting "Myers on the Muslim Caricatures" in the fellow blog "Dispatches from the Culture Wars". This posting says everything that I was thinking of saying when I was sketching it in my mind, but much better. The author nails the hypocrisy, evasion and double standard of the original posting perfectly with the paragraphs

I would also note that I simply don't believe him when he says, "I don't have any sympathy for a newspaper carrying out an exercise in pointless provocation." If a newspaper prints cartoons critical of Christian leaders, we hear no outrage from him (nor should we, of course). So what he really means here is, "I have no sympathy for a newspaper carrying out an exercise in pointless provocation unless it is of groups to whom I have a strong opposition." And this is hardly an objective perspective on the situation.

He also takes the position that publishing the caricatures amounts to an "affront to their dignity as human beings and citizens", yet he has no problem mocking Christians far more severely than those caricatures mocked Muslims. It seems to me that if one is going to object to satirizing a belief, then it shouldn't matter whether the people who hold that belief are a "poor minority" or a rich majority.

The more general problem here is that many atheists are leftists, so instead of religious irrationality they embrace leftist irrationality. For example, the utterly silly belief that all "oppressed" people and minorities are inherently virtuous and really want the same things that the Western leftist himself wants, so if Western leftists could unite them under the banner of enlightened leftist leadership, they would rise and overthrow the oppressors (and we all know who they are) to create an utopia. Or that any real criticism of third-world cultures (or anybody who is poor, for that matter) would be so... bad and imperialistic and it just isn't done.

As a non-leftist atheist, I delight in observing that it must be a strange time to be a leftist atheist, when his whole worldview is slowly coming under such a massive stress that it drives him to a ridiculous cognitive dissonance. All that just because it is impossible for him to believe his own eyes and explicitly point out the real enemy of everything that he holds dear. And of course, there is also that little issue that Muslims tend to hit back when angered, whereas modern Christians just turn the other cheek and quietly drop out into their own enclaves. So if an atheist just wants to pose as a rebel thinker instead of actually being one, the choice of who to mock is really not that hard. I would otherwise hope that you get your dhimmitude, except that I would also end up living in it.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 5:17 PM