Which is the problem: dogmatism or religion?

I always feel like there is a group of atheists standing ready to express the most indignant outrage over any mention made by me or my co-bloggers that religion isn’t wholly awful, or that it might in fact have some good things to contribute to the world, or that there are parts of it we can learn from to enrich our secular lives. I stumbled on a really funny and thoughtful and, all things considered, very kind post about our appropriation of a secular Lent, and I think the author captures some of this backlash in a really funny way. The following image and caption from the piece in particular felt very much on point:

Vlad Chituc, AKA The SongSmith of the Devouring Wail, seen here emerging from the realms below (and also giving up trans fats this Lent).

I’ve noticed more and more people, particularly a few friends, expressing some frustration over the state and format of many atheist blogs, and I think that’s definitely something we’re trying to avoid here at NonProphet Status. There is no reason to treat any online disagreement as some kind of arena bloodbath, and we don’t feel the need to demonize some Other when a disagreement pops up. Atheists absolutely aren’t immune from dogmatism or tribal thinking, and I’m trying to do my best to take a slow and measured approach to disagreement. A few Facebook friends can tell you that I’m not always the best at it, but it’s what I’m going for.

All that said, there was a really interesting excerpt from the primatologist Frans de Waal’s upcoming book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, published in Salon. 1 Though I have some small quibbles with the headline—it’s somewhat of a stretch to call an atheist other than Stalin or Mao militant 2 and I always roll my eyes a bit when someone refers to atheism as a religion—I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that it was largely an editorial, rather than authorial, choice.

Though let me play devils advocate for this atheism as religion bit for a second. There’s this misguided tendency I see among some atheists to not only to treat religion as a monolithic entity (e.g. religion is anti-science, religion is anti-woman, religion is anti-gay, etc. etc.), but as also something that captures what we don’t like in other ideologies.

When discussing Stalin, who held specifically anti-religious ideologies and targeted members of the church over and above the general slaughtering going on at the time, 3 many atheists (Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens among others) argue that religion is what’s really to blame—the statist and Marxist ideologies that caused the slaughters of the 20th Century were really just state-sponsored religions worshipping an ideology, government, or whatever figurehead is in power. Fill in these blanks with your regime of choice. But it seems fair to point out, though, that if we want to permit that secular ideologies can be religions, then that leaves atheism as an ideology open to the exact same charge. But this is a digression.

I want to instead draw attention to a quote I rather liked in de Waal’s excerpt (I encourage interested readers to read the whole thing). He writes:

In my interactions with religious and nonreligious people alike, I now draw a sharp line, based not on what exactly they believe but on their level of dogmatism. I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se. I am particularly curious why anyone would drop religion while retaining the blinkers sometimes associated with it.

I think this is a great quote for a few reasons. 4 First, it highlights that the charge that atheism has become a religion—or the sister-notion that new-atheists are fundamentalists of a certain stripe—oftentimes should be read as more metaphorical or analogous than they currently are. Instead of atheism being literally a religion or a certain atheist being literally a fundamentalist, these charges reflect characteristics of religion or fundamentalism that are extremely harmful or off-putting. I think these features are dogmatic fervor, extreme tribal mentalities, and general abstention from nuanced thinking.

The second reason I like this quote is that it draws the party lines differently. 5 Rather than having religion as the main target of our criticism, we ought to have dogmatism, instead. 6

And there are two points I want to make about this. First, it takes the misguided focus away from a false evidence/faith dichotomy—everyone has faith, taken here to mean beliefs without evidence, 7 so we ought to talk instead about what kind of faith is appropriate—and instead shifts to a more flexible and nuanced conceptual space that focuses on dogmatism and open-mindedness. Second, this means that we can acknowledge that believers can be our allies here, 8 and that atheists can be on the wrong side, too. You may disagree about whether the names de Waal mentions are actually dogmatic, but surely you can think of some dogmatic atheists. 9

Thinking about religion in this way, I think, will stop us from falling into many of the the traps that are ultimately harmful to our religious discourse and thinking.

“O Zarathustra, with such disbelief you are more pious than you believe. Some god in you must have converted you to your godlessness. Is it not your piety itself that no longer lets you believe in a god?”

— Nietzsche

Vlad Chituc 10 is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Notes:

h/t to friend of the blog Paul Fidalgo at The Morning Heresy ↩though it is worth noting that we sometimes use the word in a less radical way to mean something like extreme (e.g. militant veganism) ↩if you’re feeling morbid and want to feel terrible for an hour or so, skim this Wikipedia article ↩I don’t always agree with Frans de Waal, and I don’t know if I’d go as far as he does, particularly in the headline. That being said, he has occasional moments of extreme lucidity and this, I think, is one of them. ↩It’s also worth noting that, no matter what we do really, we’re going to have some kind of group division. It’s up to us then to first, set up these divisions as accurately and fairly as possible and, second, treat these group divisions as thoughtfully and carefully as possible. This seems like the best way to avoid some of these tribalist traps that can be so harmful. ↩And this, of course, may overlap with religion. The important distinction to me, though, is are we criticizing something insofar as it’s religious, or insofar as it’s dogmatic? I think a focus on the latter is much more justifiable and amenable to life outside the somewhat insular atheist blogging community ↩for what might seem to be a trivial example but I swear it’s not: what evidence can we possibly use to justify the position that evidence matters in a way that doesn’t beg the question? ↩If you can’t figure out how a believer can be nondogmatic, semantic ambiguities aside, just imagine someone who is willing to consider whether they are wrong. Someone who looks at evidence from different angles. I think all readers can imagine believers like this, if they don’t know one personally ↩A few bloggers and the particularly horrendous anti-feminists like The Amazing Atheist come to mind. ↩has been reading too much David Foster Wallace ↩