Over at Faith in Public Life.org, they have reprinted this article from Paul Campos of the Scripps-Howards news agency, and a law professor at the University of Colorado. The title of the column intrigued me - "Why there are almost no genuine atheists" - as I have known several genuine atheists, some with serious religion issues, some more cheery and nonchalant. Reading the column, which I would recommend if for no other reason than to be amazed that someone with such poor reasoning and writing skills is a lawyer, law professor, and columnist, provides a glimpse into one of the most annoying traits among those who seek to defend "religion" in the public sphere. Starting with Mitt Romney's recent statement about needing "a person of faith" in the White House, and poll data suggesting it would be easier to put a camel through the eye of a needle than to elect an atheist President of the United States, Campos goes on to assert that this information is irrelevant because atheism - as he defines it, to which we shall repair in a moment - is almost non-existent. Thus, it would seem, the atheist candidate pool being slim as it is, we need not worry ourselves over much about such obvious bigotry.
What Campos means when he speaks of atheism is (and I kid you not) a sense of some transcendent anchor or ground for a moral order. He even sites Edmund Wilson as "proof" that self-avowed atheists are actually hedging their bets by appealing to certain ethical norms between believers and non-believers. While my own take on Christianity is a deep sense of the centrality of a communal ethic, based upon the sacrifice of Jesus, given hope and new life through the resurrection, I would never claim that my view of ethics or morality is either exhaustive or exclusive. Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, Richard Rorty, and Isaiah Berlin were and are highly concerned with the moral life. Each of them, in their own way, has worked toward understanding what it takes to live out a moral code, to live together as fellow human beings. Each of them, also, are quite cheerfully (or, in Russell's case, hostilely) atheist. I am not necessarily pushing any of these, or other, philosopher's points of view; I am saying that even a cursory understanding of contemporary thought could actually lead one to make a counter-argument to Campos.
More to the point, should one consider only the demands of the moral life as necessitating a belief in a transcendent order rooted in what can be called, for lack of a better word, "god" or "God", that is a thin reed to which to cling. This is exactly the kind of fuzzy, hazy nonsense I find so distasteful; by ignoring the real specifics of genuine religious and theological thought, not just in Christianity, but in any religion one could name, for some transcendent common denominator that can link us all back together in one big, happy, religious whole, we lose touch with the true diversity of human religious thought, and the problems, challenges, limits, and possibilities such thought offers us. To say that, in effect, Wilson isn't an atheist because he believes that we need to work to salvage our common humanity from a variety of threats to its existence isn't just wrong; it's silly, shallow, and offers non-sequiturs and anecdotes as arguments.
I am as deeply suspicious of people who want to salvage "god" from the ashes of contemporary atheist discourse as I am of atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins who would demand we leave religion behind us as so much adolescent baggage. Neither one deals with the realities we face, or offers helpful ways of working within that reality; it offers, instead, comfort and (in the case of Harris and Dawkins) publicity to those who print such nonsense. There are many atheists among us; we need to listen to what they say, and not be condescending to them, insisting that we know what they are really saying because we know that there is no moral order without "god".
Virtual Tin Cup
