In Dostoevsky’s famous novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously insisted that without God, everything is permitted.  This, of course, is simply untrue.  Morality is not dependent on the existence of God, and centuries of nontheistic ethical philosophy, from deontology to utilitarianism, has demonstrated this fact.  Indeed, contrary to Ivan Karamazov, it is instead true that with God, everything is permitted.  Because human beings do not have access to the thoughts of their deities, their religious moral systems frequently conflict with and contradict each other.  This has been demonstrated empirically over and over again, as people have at once justified slavery and the abolishment of slavery on religious grounds; they’ve justified indiscriminant killing and the turning of the other cheek on religious grounds; and they’ve justified terrorism and nonviolence for religious reasons.  Even worse, the nature of religious faith, or what amounts to beliefs held to be absolutely certain in the absence of any evidence, allows for the justification of any belief whatsoever.  With faith, everything is permitted.

If a belief is grounded in faith—that is, if the belief has no basis in evidence or reasoning—then there is no means for adequately and objectively determining whether a belief is true or false.  Removed from the irritating responsibility of being shackled to and corresponding to reality, truth becomes whatever one wants it to be.  This, in essence, is the meat of the New Atheist’s criticism of moderate religion.  Clearly, religious fundamentalism and extremism is directly more harmful than more liberal religious interpretations or a vague spirituality, but both the extremists and moderates nevertheless engage in a style of thinking that makes extremism possible.  With faith, everything is permitted, and the religious moderate’s faith-based thinking legitimizes the faith-based thinking that is more extreme, whether it be the religious justifications for terrorism to religious oppression of homosexuals and women.

As WK Clifford once argued in his famous essay The Ethics of Belief: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”  I do not go as far as Clifford in that I do not think it is always wrong to believe something with insufficient evidence, but I do believe it is wrong to legitimize faith-based thinking and even worse to praise it as a virtue.  To believe without evidence can lead to a number of unintended and harmful consequences.  In that sense, the benign religious moderates of the world are not direct dangers, but they harbor a terrifying potential for danger, and they stoke the flames of unreason present in extremists and fundamentalists, unable to criticize their evil deeds adequately with their faith-based criticisms, unmoored from reality, and engaging in exactly the same type of thought that causes and encourages religious extremism.  And not only that, but the moderate’s religious beliefs are also false, which is no small charge.

Of course, I have been generous in assuming religious moderates are not themselves harmful, but this assumption is not correct, and denying it only further bolsters my case.  To use only one example, consider the role liberalized moderate religion and spirituality play in the complementary and alternative medicine movement.  Despite its good intentions, the alternative medicine movement is dangerous and harmful, fostering unwarranted skepticism toward medicine that actually works (as in the antivaccination movement) and promoting medical modalities that do not actually work.  Many of these alternative medical modalities are justified on the basis of appeals to vague spirituality and westernized bastardizations of Eastern religions, as well as on criticisms of scientific study and research in order to emphasize intuition and faith as “other ways of knowing”.  In this way, faith-based thinking can be dangerous, and even the most well-meaning and charitable beliefs can pave the way to destruction if they are not adequately based on evidence and legitimate reasoning.

There is also much to be said for criticizing religious believers, even the moderates, simply because they are wrong.  It is not necessary to demonstrate that a belief is harmful to nevertheless show that it is incorrect.  There is certainly less harm in beliefs concerning big foot and extraterrestial aliens than there is in fundamentalist religion, but I criticize these beliefs, too, on the basis of the lacking evidence and the silly credulity of those who jump to unwarranted to conclusions.  Like religion, though, these beliefs can also become something dangerous in many ways, like when a naive believer in psychics empties her bank account to pay a psychic to cleanse her negative aura, or when believers in extraterrestial life commit mass suicide to join the UFO trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

Truth should ultimately matter more than appeals to negative consequences.  This is because truth itself can lead to negative consequences.  Some people cannot cope with the realization that there is no God, and may kill themselves.  Some people may be crippled by existential fears of death when realizing that there is no afterlife or no soul.  The truth need not always benefit people.  Similarly, false beliefs can cause amazing acts of goodness and kindness, as in the charitable contributions of churches.  Only by seeking the truth through evidence-based reasoning, however, can we adequately protect against the needless harms of faith-based thinking.  It is often said that there are more ways to be wrong than to be right.  For example, if the length of a ruler is twelve inches, then there is only one correct answer (12 inches), but an infinite number of incorrect answers (-13 inches, 2 inches, pi inches … and so on).  In that sense, one can also say that there are more ways to do wrong through falsehood than to do wrong with reality.  Thus, to guard against the almost-infinite possibilities for faith-based wrongdoings, I value truth.  Of course, it can also be said that there is an infinite possibility to do good with faith-based reasoning.  This is true, but faith-based reasoning does not guarantee this possibility, and in such a world where evidence does not matter, there is no way to guard against or prevent the innumerable potential evils that could crop up.  It is best, then, to simply accept the truth, the good with the bitter.  As such, we should criticize religious moderates and extremists, because both have the potential to do untold harm, and because both can do untold harm for imaginary and false reasons.

Beyond that, I also believe that truth  is an intrinsic value.  Like many atheists, I would prefer to live in a universe in which there is an eternal afterlife, and I often suffer a vague dread and angst at the thought of my inevitable demise.  But I also value this bitter truth, not because it is good or bad, but because it simply is—because it is true.  With that said, I shall close with a poem by Stephen Crane, “In the Desert”, the sentiments of which reflect my personal values concerning truth better than I could ever convey:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Having a degree in English is virtually worthless, though I must confess it has provided me with many skills that—though they are unprofitable—are rather amusing.  In particular, I am quite fond of the skills I learned in my literary theory courses.  After taking these courses, I learned that it is possible to interpret a text in any manner I pleased using absurd pseudo-philosophical ideas like deconstruction, psychoanalysis, or reader-response theory.  These skills allowed me to write papers interpreting virtually any short story or novel as an ode to humanistic or atheistic values, to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as subversively pro-slavery, and to interpret songs like “A Boy Named Sue” as a rumination on the Oedipal complex and Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” as an endorsement of Christian sexual mores and values.  With a little French philosophy under my belt, there was no end to my capacity to spew bullshit.

With this history in mind, I was naturally quite bemused and overjoyed to read this post about misheard lyrics over at the War on Error blog.  In the post, the author laments the dearth of humanistic music after realizing his humanistic/atheistic interpretation of of Kevin Rudolf’s “Let It Rock” was the result of a misunderstood lyric.

Owing to my aforementioned stunning ability to bullshit, of course, I found his lamentations premature.  Virtually all songs have humanistic or atheistic themes if you’re willing to get your hands dirty with a little creative interpretation based on faddish and pretentious French literary criticism!  “Let It Rock” is indeed a humanistic anthem!  Whether he meant it or not, Kevin Rudolf has in fact penned a quite sobering song espousing humanistic values that entail a rejection of the false comforts given by both spirituality and an uncritical, shallow materialism.

The first verse of the song is so openly critical of religion that I wonder how I never noticed it before.  Rudolf sings:

I see your dirty face
High behind your collar

These lines indicate that the person described by the song is a priest.  “High behind your collar” is certainly a reference to a priest’s white clerical collar and his high status within a community.  But this priest clearly has something to hide.  He shelters himself behind his collar, using his religious status to hide his inequities.  The singer, of course, can recognize his wrongdoings, emphasizing that the priest is impure and has a “dirty face,” and notes that the priest uses his religion as a barrier or shield against any recognition of his true nature.

What is done in vain
Truth is hard to swallow
So you pray to God
To justify the way you live a lie, live a lie, live a lie

Here the singer is emphasizing the wrongs of the priest on two levels.  On one level, the priest is living a lie for devoting his life to a falsehood.  His prayers to God are “done in vain,” most notably because God does not exist, and this is a truth that is “hard to swallow,” or difficult to accept.  Thus, the priest has devoted himself to a lie.  But on another level, the priest is only praying to God to justify his moral depravities.  That is, the priest is an immoral man, and he tries to use his religion and faith as a justification for his wrongdoings.  He lives a lie because he portrays himself as godly and moral when he is anything but.

And you take your time
And you do your crime
Well you made your bed
I’m in mine

These lyrics further show that the priest has done something wrong, this time blatantly.  The singer directly states that the priest has committed a crime.  He chastises the priest with the line, “you made your bed,” as in the common criticism “you made your bed; now lie in it,” thereby implying that the priest must accept the consequences of his wrongdoing.  In essence, then, the first verse describes religious hypocrisy, and the use of religion to veil wrongdoing.  The singer, as we’ll see, espouses humanistic values that are not seeped in hypocrisy or the factual inaccuracy of belief in a higher power, and he claims the moral high ground here, noting that he contentedly sleeps in the bed he has made for himself; he exclaims, “Well you made your bed / I’m in mine.”

The second verse expands on these themes, explaining that the origin of the priest’s faith stemmed from a rejection of the world, from a false dichotomy between meaningless materialism and false religion:

Now the son’s disgraced
He, who knew his father
When he cursed his name
Turned, and chased the dollar

Here we can see that the priest came to religion from a position of materialistic values and moral emptiness.  “The son,” an obvious reference to Jesus, is disgraced by the priest’s current abuse of his faith and his moral hypocrisy, but the priest has always been a disgrace.  In the past, the priest knew his father (that is, he believed in God, the father) and cursed His name by chasing material wealth, possessions, and money.  The next lines explain that he would later come to reject the pursual of material wealth:

But it broke his heart
So he stuck his middle finger
To the world
To the world
To the world

As can be seen, the priest’s past decisions to chase money and material wealth “broke his heart.”  He didn’t find any satisfaction in meaningless consumption and hedonism.  This, in turn, led to his denial of the world, to his becoming a priest.  He denied reality, sticking his middle finger to the physical world, and instead immersed himself in an unreal world of superstition and religion, abandoning an extreme of empty materialism for an extreme of religious hypocrisy.  The priest who came to God after rejecting a meaningless hedonism is still living a lie, for neither worldview is correct or ultimately satisfying.

And you take your time
And you stand in line
Well you’ll get what’s yours
I got mine

Here we see the result of the priest’s turn to religion.  His denial of the world, indeed, his contempt for it, allow him to “take his time” with life, to not seek to live each moment to its fullest, and to instead merely “wait in line” for a judgment from God that will never come.  The singer, naturally, recognizes that the priest will get nothing from a rejection of the world and a turn to religion, noting that his own humanistic perspective on the world allows him to get the most out of life.  In that sense, the priest will wait to get what’s his, and receive nothing, while the singer proclaims, using the past tense to emphasize its fulfillment, “I got mine,” as he has already seized his opportunities and lives life to the fullest and need not wait for a fictional savior.  There is also a double meaning at work when the singer tells the priest, “you’ll get what’s yours,” as the singer is implying that his own humanistic ethical principles are more than capable of cutting through his religious hypocrisy and judging him as morally depraved, as we will see from the chorus.

The chorus, then, is where the humanistic values truly shine.  The singer loudly yells:

Because when I arrive
I, I’ll bring the fire

Thus, the singer recognizes that there is no God, no hell, and no divine punishment.  Instead, judgment must be meted out on humanistic principles, by individuals.  There is no hellfire awaiting the priest for his sins, but humanistic values and ethical principles can judge the priest.  In that sense, then, the humanistic singer “brings the fire”; not literal fires as in hell, but figurative fire as in moral condemnation and judgment from a humanist who can see through the priest’s attempts to hide behind religion.  The singer himself will judge the priest for his moral wrongdoing, based upon his humanistic ethical principles.

Make you come alive
I can take you higher

With these lines, the singer emphasizes further his humanistic perspective.  Humanistic principles can give life and meaning and purpose; they can make you “come alive” and embrace life, living for truth instead of falsity.  And they can take one beyond an empty materialism.  Humanistic principles can “take you higher” than that.

What this is, forgot?
I must now remind you
Let It Rock (rock!)
Let It Rock (rock!)
Let It Rock

With this final rejoinder, the singer reminds us all that life should not be negated through religion or a shallow materialism.  Morality and judgment are possible through humanistic principles (they allow you to “bring the fire” of judgment) while embracing reality as it is rather than inventing an unknowable spiritual realm to hide within.  The singer encourages us in the end not to reject life but to enjoy it for what it is: in other words, to let it rock!  Life can have the joys of hedonistic materialism and the meaning of religion—all that is required are humanistic values.

So far in the song, we’ve seen a materialistic priest reject the world after being unable to find happiness in a shallow materialism and a meaningless search for wealth.  We’ve seen this person become a man of faith, a priest, and yet still succumb to his inner demons, to commit crimes and live a life of hypocrisy, his depravity hidden underneath his religious status.  In this way, the song is both a criticism of religious values and the sort of materialistic nihilism often posited as the only other alternative to religion.  In the end, though, the song is critical of both views, seeking a middle ground of secular humanism, a naturalistic philosophy that rejects the supernatural and unknowable and gives us purpose and meaning through rational principles.  The first verses clearly chastise religious hypocrisy and the inability to find answers in the spiritual, but the next verses are just as critical of rampant materialism, mostly by letting the inanity of the purely materialistic perspective speak for itself.

Thus, Lil’ Wayne embodies the spirit of empty, meaningless materialism with his lyrics in the song, in which he raps about accumulating wealth, “my jewelry is louder than an engine sound,” and sexual hedonism.  At one point, he lists off a string of girls names, implying that he’ll make them remove their tops and have their “panties drop.”  These rap lyrics, though, are likewise followed by singer Kevin Rudolf’s fiery rejoinder of a chorus, in which he reminds Lil’ Wayne that humanistic values reject his empty hedonism as much as they reject religion.  His own humanism allows him to “let it rock” and enjoy life while still maintaining meaning and value, allowing people to truly “come alive” and take things “higher.”  It is obvious that Kevin Rudolf is attacking both views, the false values of religion and the meaninglessness of hedonism, because only at this point—when the song has presented both the religious priest and the materialistic rapper—does Rudolf sing the chorus twice, once for each worldview his humanism rejects.

In a final rejoinder to both the empty materialism embodied by Lil’ Wayne and the religious hypocrisy of the priest who rejected the world, Kevin Rudolf sings a plaintive cry to end the song:

I wish I could be
As cool as you
And I wish I could say
The things you do
But I can’t and I won’t live a lie
No not this time

Essentially, the singer admits that he wishes he could enjoy the shallow materialism of a Lil’ Wayne when he says “I wish I could be / as cool as you”; likewise, he wishes he could make pretenses at moral certainty and purity, like the hypocritical priest, when he croons, “I wish I could say / the things you do.”  In the end, though, the singer recognizes that both the priest and the shallow materialist are living in bad faith, seeped in a world without meaning or a world with false meaning, and he rejects both the unyielding hedonism of Lil’ Wayne and the unfounded asceticism and hypocrisy of religion.  As a humanist, he can both enjoy the world for what it really is (let it rock) and live a life of purpose and meaning (bringing the fire and taking you higher).  He refuses to live either lie, and accepts reality for what it is.

Despite the obvious commonalities between the two groups, the atheist movement has always had a rather strained relationship with the more generalized skeptical movement.  In part this is the fault of organized atheism, as many atheists endorse mystical crap like acupuncture and other alternative medicines while pretending to be reasonable just because they reject religion.  However, the real schism between the two groups is a result of the unfounded idea that atheism, at least in some forms, is not sufficiently scientific.  Those skeptical movements that disassociate themselves from atheism tend to see atheism as a philosophical outlook rather than a scientific or empirically justified stance.  The arguments in support of this claim, though, tend to be rather unconvincing.

Most forms of atheism address conceptions of God that are explicitly amenable to scientific tests.  The bulk of religious believers, for instance, do not believe in obscure deistic entities that never interact in the physical world.  They believe in a God that can manifest itself as a human being, perform miracles, heal sickness, control the vocal cords of those filled with the holy spirit (though God seems to take some perverse joy out of using those vocal cords just to speak in jibberish), and so on.  Even those deities that are a bit more remote and do not perform miracles of this sort are nevertheless testable, as they are said to be creators of the universe and to have placed humanity on top of some sort of cosmic hierarchy of importance.  These are all characteristics that yield testable hypotheses, and when our observations do not support these hypotheses, we have scientific grounds for rejecting these religious claims.  When we see that humanity is the product of random forces whose existence is not probable, much less logically necessary, that throws serious doubt on any conceptions of God who created the universe with humanity as its pinnacle achievement.

In that sense, then, atheism is indeed scientific.  Most forms of God can be ruled out on a purely evidentiary basis, in much the same way a scientist would rule out similar scientific hypotheses in other fields.  This is generally accepted, even among those skeptics who feel atheism is a philosophical stance rather than a scientific one.  The problem, naturally, is that some forms of God cannot be ruled out in this manner.  These versions of God are so remote and deistic that they yield no testable predictions or observations of any sort, and thus, the skeptics would argue, they are not susceptible to scientific investigation.  Massimo Pigliucci recently made an argument of this sort in a blog post titled “On the Scope of Skeptical Inquiry“.

Pigliucci acknowledges that some religious claims about God are scientifically testable, but in the end maintains that atheism is primarily a philosophical position because it addresses claims that can’t be assessed scientifically through the process of observation.  One of the examples he gives is the claim by some creationists that God designed the world to look as if it were billions of years old when it is in fact only 6,000 years old.  No evidence could contradict this kind of statement, obviously, and as such Pigliucci claims that it can only be assessed on philosophical, not scientific, grounds.

The problem, of course, is that this could extend to any realm of inquiry traditionally seen as within the scope of skeptical inquiry.  If believers in cryptofauna like bigfoot and Nessie protected their claims from inquiry by saying, such as they do, that we would not expect to see evidence of their existence even if we looked, clearly we cannot scientifically address such a claim.  Nevertheless, no skeptical organization is thus busy rewriting its mission statement to exclude cryptozoological investigations from its scope of inquiry; atheism, on the other hand, is singled out for just this reason.  If the basis for rejecting atheism as a form of scientific skepticism rests on the unfalsifiability of religious claims, then any other field of skeptical inquiry is open to the same sort of criticism, as those who believe in alternative medicine, creationism, psychic powers, and ghosts frequently make claims that are unfalsifiable.

With that said, the other problematic aspect of rejecting religion as a field of skeptical inquiry concerns the overly narrow conception of “science” endorsed by such skeptics.  Science isn’t just a process of simple falsification of claims.  It is much more nuanced and much scientific activity is philosophical.  Pigliucci tries to differentiate science from philosophy in noting that scientific knowledge seems to progress whereas philosophical knowledge seems to stagnate on the same unanswered questions.  This is an uncharitable characterization of philosophy, though.  Science itself is one of the ultimate successes of the progress of philosophy!  The early Greek philosophers weren’t simply asking questions about souls and free will, but were addressing questions of the natural sciences.  The scientific method is merely an epistemological and philosophical framework.  The reason philosophy doesn’t seem to progress isn’t because it is not successful, but because when it is successful it becomes renamed as science!

So, in a sense, the demarcation between science and philosophy is not clear.  Nevertheless, even if we accept the demarcation, it is clear that scientists do entertain and reject untestable hypotheses all the time.  Science isn’t simply a matter of testing reality against observation, but it also puts into practice epistemological principles like Ockham’s razor.  For example, basic philosophy of science shows that theories are always underdetermined by the data.  That is, for any set of data, an unlimited number of potential explanations exist that would also fit the data.  Evolution explains the data we see for the origin of human beings, for instance, but so does a hypothesis stating that the universe and human beings popped into existence two seconds ago with only the appearance of age.  Scientists reject all the other potential explanations, even though they can cohere with scientific observations, because they are untestable or not parsimonious.  Notice that scientists do not reject these alternative explanations after observing evidence that the additional elements of these hypotheses do not exist!  They are rejected for epistemological, and hence philosophical, reasons.  In this case the principle of rejecting untestable claims serves as a check against the tendency of human beings to make mistakes and err.  The more you assume, the more likely you are to be wrong, and thus scientists assume the least that is justified by the evidence.  As can be seen, the principle of parsimony is essential to science, because it cuts through problems of underdetermination by requiring evidence for additional explanatory entities.  As such, scientists do not claim the origin of humanity is not within the scope of skeptical inquiry merely because untestable hypotheses can be generated to “explain” our origin.  Scientific inquiry is not so constrained or feeble and frail that it cannot overcome untestable hypotheses.  This includes untestable hypotheses of a religious nature.

In short, the attempt to form ghettos of critical inquiry that exclude atheism from skepticism are misguided.  It would be as misguided as randomly excluding cryptozoology or alternative medicine merely because their supporters also make untestable claims.  Scientific analysis is always dealing with untestable claims.  Any theory accepted by scientists entails the rejection of countless untestable claims compatible with the underdetermined data set.  As such, rejecting untestable claims, whether they be religious in nature or not, is thoroughly scientific.  For the skeptical community to attempt singling out atheism for this reason thus seems silly and disheartening, especially knowing that it is likely motivated by the unfounded respect (which entails a lack of criticism) traditionally accorded to the religious.  I suspect that had we evolved in a parallel universe where cryptozoology was the reigning belief system, and we were all socialized to respect claims about Bigfoot and never criticize them, then we’d be seeing skeptical movements decrying the inclusion of cryptozoology within its scope.  Luckily, we do not live in that universe.  And hopefully we can change our current universe from one in which the skeptical community attempts to exclude atheism to one in which skepticism of religion is just as acceptable as any other area of inquiry..

The Anthropic Principle has had a long and sordid history among cosmologists and others.  In essence, the principle asserts that the fine-tuning of the physical constants that allow for the formation of conscious life requires some sort of explanation.  As an example, some physicists try to argue for the existence of multiple universes in order to account for the precise values of physical laws, like the cosmological constant.  However, this reasoning seems to be a bit flawed.

Many writers who invoke the Anthropic Principle speak of the principle as if it somehow demonstrates some sort of strange fact about the universe.  But the Anthropic Principle doesn’t really demonstrate anything.  It merely presents a problem, not an explanation.  The principle can’t be used to justify a hypothesis if there is no other additional evidence for the hypothesis in question.  As such, I don’t quite understand the fascination with the Anthropic Principle exhibited by many physicists.

Consider someone who has won a lottery.  Such an event is quite improbable.  According to anthropic reasoning, this improbable event would require some sort of explanation.  Suppose a cosmologist argued that he could explain this event by invoking multiple universes where the person plays the lottery.  The person loses in most of the universes, but happens to have won in our own.  In this sense, the improbability is explained away.  The cosmologist can further argue that the mathematical model of this multiverse is consistent and trumpet this as some saving grace of his hypothesis.  But in the end, if there is no additional evidence of these multiple universes, mere mathematical consistency is not enough to support such a hypothesis, nor is the improbability of winning the lottery reason enough to assert such a bizarre hypothesis.

The problem with such anthropic reasoning, as I see it, is that there are a variety of other potential explanations, and without additional evidentiary support they can’t be ruled out.  Beyond that, it doesn’t even seem as if improbable events necessarily require explanations beyond chance.  By definition, even very unlikely events can still occur, as they are only unlikely, not impossible.  Aside from chance occurences and multiverses, there are a number of other possible explanations, ranging from benevolent deities creating things in this way to “evolutionary” mechanisms that select for universes that promote life or perhaps universe characteristics that correlate with the formation of life.  Without any sort of additional evidence for benevolent deities, or multiple universes, or evolutionary selection mechanisms for universes, though, such explanations are only baseless conjecture.  I don’t think it is enough for String Theorists to talk as if the precise values of the physical constants, in tandem with the mathematical consistency of their models, is evidence for such a conjecture.

Of course, I am not terribly well-read on the subject, and if anyone has any resources that present any additional evidence for such explanations, I’d gladly look into it.  But it seems to me that the Anthropic Principle is highly questionable as a “scientific” principle.

As a skeptic, one of the most grating words I can ever hear is intolerance.  Any skeptic, upon hearing this word uttered, is hit with instant paranoid dread and disgust, knowing that there is an almost infinitely likely probability that its sense is being mangled and distorted in such a way as to imply that one is equivalent to the Nazis for, say, ridiculing homeopathy or satirizing religion.  Of course, mocking ridiculous beliefs is not necessarily intolerant;  whenever I mock peddlers of alternative medicine, or insult the religious, or rape creationists with my rhetorical skill, I am nevertheless tolerating the rights of these fools to exist and to believe whatever silly shit they wish to believe.  I tolerate their presence; but I will not be forced to respect these morons.

Given my hatred of the way the word intolerance is frequently misused, naturally I was a bit disgusted to read a recent column by Paul Kurtz at the Center for Inquiry’s blog in which he criticized Blasphemy Day for encouraging intolerance, even going so far as to invoke the image of those rhetorically overworked swastika-laden Germans to argue his point.  Basically, Blasphemy Day was a response to those who insist that religion must be protected from criticism, either through laws against blasphemy or threats of violence.  The goal was to encourage the ridicule and criticism of religion and the preservation of free speech.  No one is arguing that religion should be destroyed by force, or that religious beliefs won’t be tolerated.  Contrary to Kurtz’s argument, those who would wish to suppress the right to criticize religion are those practicing a form of intolerance, working as they do to criminalize blasphemy or threatening violence against those who do things as harmless as publishing satirical cartoons and drawings.

Of course, Kurtz seems to miss the point completely.  He writes, “What would humanists and skeptics say if religious believers insulted them in the same way?”  The problem, of course, is that religious believers can’t insult skeptics in the same way.  There is no analog for “blasphemy” in skeptical circles.  We don’t threaten to murder people if they publish cartoons mocking science-based medicine.  We don’t explode in rage if people draw little insulting Hitler mustaches on skeptical leaders like Paul Kurtz.  Nor do we attempt to pass legislation that legally prevents the criticism of our beliefs.  Now, would a skeptic be offended if a religious person mocked or satirized a skeptical viewpoint?  If he had thin skin, perhaps he would.  But that mockery of the skeptical viewpoint does not constitute intolerance.  As I skeptic, I reserve the right to mock whoever I want, and in turn I would not be surprised to be mocked in return by those who believe otherwise.  That’s how the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work.

The issue in question here does not concern tolerance.  Rather, it is a much more benign question of manners.  Ridiculing the religious and causing fundamentalists great offense is certainly not a very nice thing to do, but that doesn’t make it intolerant.  In the grand scheme of things, causing offense to the religious is justified if it is done in an effort to bring down unfair blasphemy laws and the undue influence of religious violence.  However, even if I were to rage against the religious and insult them without some deeper symbolic purpose at hand, this would hardly be so terrible.  There is no great moral imperative to be nice to people who believe in idiotic things.  It  is my moral duty to respect people’s rights to speak their minds, to let others live freely, and so on, but no one has a right to demand that others be nice.  Is it still tolerance when we no longer tolerate the free expression of justified anger, of satire, and of mockery?  A tolerance that is spread so thin is in fact no longer tolerant at all.