Is the Right Good for Atheism?

[rug]

August 21, 2014
By Robert Tracinski

I recently argued that atheists such as myself can be good for the right by decoupling a political agenda of liberty and constitutionalism from association with any kind of narrower religious base—in effect, telling people that they don’t have to embrace creationism or foreswear birth control to join the cause. Instead, the religious and the non-religious of all stripes can meet on a common ground of secular arguments.

Then I came across an article that looks at the issue from the opposite perspective. Nick Spencer asks: “Why Aren’t More Americans Atheists?” His answer, which I think is largely correct, is that it has less to do with science than with politics. While I disagree with his analysis of the history of science—which glosses over some big philosophical and theological issues—he is largely correct that European atheism often gained credibility as a protest against the collusion of religion with tyrannical political systems, which the established church used to coerce heretics and dissenters. By contrast, he points out, the comparatively more tolerant religious views that (eventually) took hold in Britain and America drove fewer people to regard religion as an evil to be suppressed.

In short, it’s harder to hate the Church if it’s not persecuting you. More recently, this is what I call the Catholic School Effect: some of the most militant atheists I know are people who had religion shoved down their throats by cheerless nuns when they were children. Those of us who grew up in more latitudinarian circumstances tend to be mellower.

Spencer then points out that in the 20th century, the shoe was on the other foot. It was atheism that came to be associated with tyranny: “atheism’s greatest tragedy was to gain political power, first in Russia in 1917 and then elsewhere throughout the communist world.”

http://thefederalist.com/2014/08/21/is-the-right-good-for-atheism/

http://thefederalist.com/2014/08/05/what-atheists-have-to-offer-the-right/

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/why-arent-more-americans-atheists-109732.html#.U_csbE7D_3h

Robert Tracinski, the Randian, is striving mightily to reconcile his political opinions with his opinions on religion.

[cbayer]

1. Ugh, what convoluted thinking...

and he's boring to boot.

[Jim__]

2. Based on his argument, no, it isn't.

His argument appears to be largely based on his claim:

... The New Atheists largely perpetuate the notion that being an atheist means adopting a philosophy of materialism, determinism, subjectivism, government planning, and social engineering—despite the abundant rational evidence against these notions. I’m not the first to observe that this kind of atheism recreates many of the same characteristics of religion, with its own dogmas and catechisms and clerisy, but with society or the state in the place of God.

Out of the list of philosophies he claims that New Atheists embrace: materialism, determinism, subjectivism, government planning, and social engineering; the only one I think they universally embrace would be materialism, with some of them embracing determinism. I'm not sure which of them he claims embrace: subjectivism, government planning, and social engineering; but he really needs to mak a specificc argument.

Most of what he says is just horseshit.