I thought that I was done with this, but I just realized that I had failed to take on the fundamental statement of A+. I maintain that this is simply a codification of the pathologies of Myers and Watson on display, but since my colleague Ed Clint has done us all a sterling service and devastated one of Watson’s speeches in the finest traditions of critical reason. If you haven’t read it yet, do so now.
Back? Okay, this is an excellent opportunity to elbow in on some of the well-deserved attention, and also address the following issue. The A+ crowd are getting away with more than they deserve to because they are not just trying to appropriate and wreck the anti-religious struggle, but also a number of other important struggles too. I notice that my colleague John Loftus wrote a heartfelt appeal to the A+ crowd to stop their temper tantrums and calm down (do read it, not just because he is terribly sweet and cites yours truly). In’t, he writes the following, re: the statement of A+ beliefs,
Now you should know that I agree with the ideals of Atheism Plus most emphatically
The statement of A+ beliefs you can read here, courtesy of Jen McCreight:
“We are…
Atheists PLUS we care about social justice,
Atheists PLUS we support women’s rights,
Atheists PLUS we protest racism,
Atheists PLUS we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists PLUS we use critical thinking and skepticism.”[…]
“It’s time for a new wave of atheism … that cares about how religion affects everyone and that applies skepticism to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, politics, poverty, and crime.
Gorgeously, McCreight added:
I don’t think it needs to be an official name – I want to improve the atheist movement, not create a splinter faction or something.
Take another look at that list. To quote the Hitch, I never know if McCreight is as ignorant as she looks or even if that would be humanly possible, but the plain reading of this is that she thinks that this is the first time such ideas have been combined with atheism.
Well, here’s a newsflash: as regards women’s rights, Condorcet wrote The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women in 1798, taking positions on women’s emancipation that would later be echoed by Victor Hugo in Ninety Three (1874). Anti-racism has been part of the defence of Reason since at least the first enlightenment of ancient Greece, and Darwin himself wrote polemics against racism and slavery over a century ago. More recently, I invite you to watch the following, which has Miss Rand’s comments on the subject. Gay rights? Old Fritz was writing steamy love poetry to Voltaire when he wasn’t reigning in censorship, abolishing torture, or reading philosophy on the front lines of battle.
So the big, magical “new wave of atheism” is rather old hat. The Enlightenment philosophes have been fighting this for centuries; it is not my problem that McCreight and the people she hangs out with spend all their time “patting themselves on the back for debunking homeopathy for the 983258th time or thinking up yet another great zinger to use against Young Earth Creationists. ”
Ah, but that’s all in the past, right? These were all positions magically dropped and abandoned until plucky McCreight came by and reinvigorated the poor, floundering atheist movement, right?
Well, that would be true if you ignored all the things written by Ibn Warraq or Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Wafa Sultan on the subject (which I’m sure that McCreight does), or miss the polemics on those subjects authored by the four horsemen, or… well, you get the idea. Take the example of women’s rights, I invite you to look at the Penn & Teller expose on the racket of cheerleading in the US, how it is the most dangerous high-school sport and denied the most basic protections.
Of course, Penn Jillette is on the list of known sexists (duh!), as is Dawkins (naturally), the Hitch (ditto)… All of these have been placed there by people who have achieved – what, exactly? But, of course, they don’t need to have achieved anything. They just need to hold the right opinions.
This is the codification I was talking about. The undercurrent of Myers’ posts has been, consistently, that you don’t need to actually use reason to be a “skeptic”, you don’t need to bother thinking, researching, studying, you just need to be a brainless bigmouth proponent of a bunch of set views and ideas (vide his utter unwillingness to do the most elementary research on Lomborg).
Ditto A+. In opposing racism, it doesn’t actually require any attempt to do an expose of, say, the neo-fascist movements or whatever. It simply requires that one be a sheet-sniffer and pecksniff about those with the “wrong” political opinions, while naturally giving a free pass to racism of people with the “right” political opinions (anyone hear a word of complaint from this crowd against the race-baiter Clinton?).
But there is worse still in this. Since they lack the guts to struggle for any of their professed beliefs, they need a substitute. And that one is the wretched evil of “identity politics”, which is an actual negation of these ideals. Witness the following complaint of McCreight’s, that atheism is just a buch of: “middle-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men”.
First of all, as I keep banging on, that’s crap. But what if it were true? Would someone’s physical structure be a reason to dismiss his ideas? Are these people seriously suggesting that a man’s opinions should be treated differently because of his skin colour?
Well, yes, yes, they are. A+ isn’t just a splinter group or a trend of atheism, it is actually in direct opposition to Reason and everything the Enlightenment stood for. I wrote in my first post that identity politics is fantastically dangerous; its opens the door to those who really, truly mean it . The nouvelle droite, whom I have referred to before, refer to themselves as identitarians, and they are right to do so.
I will do another piece on the irrational menace of identity politics, but for now I will let the foregoing stand as an additional proof that the A+ nonsense is actively a menace.
