Cohen: Why Militant Atheism Is Moral and Harmless

Nick Cohen writes, at the Guardian/Observer, that Atheists don’t bomb people. He subtitles his article, ” Non-believers never harmed anyone in the west. Which is more than you can say for cowardly 'intellectuals'”. (Note the caveat, "in the west").

Cohen’s memory is very short to nonexistent. With England still embroiled in the Rotherham Rape Enablement scandal, it should be difficult to make such a blatantly false assertion. Cohen is not deterred.

” If you were foolish enough to take the west's religious apologists at their word, you'd think that atheists were proposing the same pogroms here. Their victimhood takes two malign forms. First and most prominently, the Christian right is rallying opposition to equality with the cry that the "intolerance of aggressive secularism", in the words of the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, is threatening faith. You get a taste of the hysteria on the right when you discover that the cause of the anger was a court ruling that a local council could not include Church of England prayers in its formal meetings. (As a public body, it had to respect the views of councillors and voters of other faiths or none.)”

The formal installation of pure and exclusive Secularism/Atheism as the worldview of the state is the issue here, one to which Cohen, being Atheist, certainly does not object. But formally requiring the lack of a principled moral worldview is an attack on the entire social fabric, an attack far worse than a terrorist bomb. It is the unprincipled attempt to decommission existing institutions and their hated antique moral foundations, followed by installation of utopian, New Man, totalitarian institutions. These are, not coincidentally, just like the ones to which Cohen refers, in an early attempt to steer the article into a false image of Atheist progressivism as a fantasy of innocent purity which is non-Marxist. Except that there is no ideology more class-based or more Atheist than the Progressive Ideology.

” To a large element in modern conservatism, equal treatment for all is nothing less than the "aggressive intolerance" of Christianity, as is the legal requirement that hotel owners cannot ban gay couples from their rooms just as landlords once banned blacks, dogs and Irish from theirs. Do not underestimate the danger of their wails. One day, they could encourage a future Conservative government to repeal the Human Rights Act.” [emphasis added] [ignore the inverted sense of the first phrase of the first sentence]

By “equal treatment for all” the Leftist means that no moral judgment can be made on ANY behaviors, except for their own moral judgment that moral judgment and application is evil. Application of moral judgment is “aggressive intolerance”, which cannot be tolerated, especially in private businesses such as hotels and apartments. (Internal non-coherence is no issue for Leftists).

” An intellectual climate, which is so pervasive that you can be forgiven for not noticing its strangeness, reinforces the persecution complex. Across left and right, in the BBC, academia and the supposedly serious press, atheism and "aggressive secularism" are attacked as a matter of course. When they are at their crudest, intellectuals (and I am using that term crudely too) uphold moral equivalence by claiming that atheists and humanists mirror the behaviour of religious believers. As atheists have nothing in common beyond an inability to believe in a god or an assortment of gods, the argument comes down to a critique of the minority of atheists who decided that, what with 9/11, Hindu nationalism and genuinely militant strains of Christianity and Judaism, the times required us to dispense with politeness.

The occasional dogmatism that followed apparently makes atheism "like a religion". It's not a charge I'd throw around if I were seeking to defend faith. When people say of dozens of political and cultural movements from monetarism to Marxism that their followers treat their cause "like a religion", they never mean it as a compliment. They mean that dumb obedience to higher authority and an obstinate attachment to dogma mark its adherents.”

Anyone knowing anything about Atheism and Atheists does not assert “moral equivalence” of Atheism with Christianity, in terms of morality. While Atheism actually has the characteristics of a religion, it is the religion of antimorality, aka “universal tolerance”. Thus there is no moral equivalence at all, any more than an antiquark is equivalent to a quark.

The antithesis of morality is tolerance of immorality, which is the antimorality position of Atheism. Antimorality is the polar opposite of morality, and the antimoralist insists upon the moral equivalence of all behaviors, which are valued the same: without moral content. So the antimoralists declare, paradoxically, that it is universally Wrong to attach moral content to any behavior (except behaviors for which they decide otherwise).

Case in point: the Rotherham pedophilic child rape culture that emerged out of Leftist tolerance. The horrors of masses of continual child rapes proved no match for the Leftist moral tolerance of “multiculturism”. The Leftists were not deterred.

Common decency did not deter.

Empathy did not deter.

Historical cultural morality did not deter.

Leftist humanism did not deter.

All behaviors by a protected minority were protected from moral assessment, by those who were afflicted with the antimoral, antidiscrimination, Leftist and Atheist dogma of Universal Tolerance. The results are completely predictable: where there are no rules, no accountability, no consequences, there is moral chaos. Where there is moral chaos there are enablers for the predators and apathy – even disdain – for their victims, however vulnerable and innocent.

It is worth repeating: Atheists have no “unified moral theory” other than the rejection of prevailing religious moral theories. Because Atheists are both amoral in that regard as well as antimoral in demeanor, their antithetical positioning in society makes them morally suspect. But they insist that they are “Good Without God” (despite having a philosophy in which objective moral “good” does not exist).

Atheists are therefore either,

(a) tautologically good under their own personal, do-it-yourself, moral positioning, or
(b) they are tautologically amoral as a class.

But this has the irrational consequence that, if (a), then ALL behaviors are moral; if (b), then NO behaviors are immoral.

The obvious consequence of Atheism, then, is that moral chaos must ensue within any culture which is afflicted with either amorality or antimorality, and that Atheism tautologically produces one or the other or both.

Further, just as when particles and antiparticles destroy each other upon contact, so it is with moral cultures and antimoral cultures. There is no common ground, no synthesis which is not at its root merely an increasing degree of antimorality. So either the moral must destroy (or successfully disable) the antimoral, or the antimoral will absolutely destroy the moral culture.

Unfortunately, much of western culture has already been seized by the antimoral. If chaos is to be avoided, the antimoral Left will require restraining, a pursuit that might be too late in coming, and if not, it will at least be uncomfortable. But it is necessary because under the antimoralist creed of total tolerance, the Left can never restrain itself, nor the chaos it engenders and enables.

And a primary location of the resulting chaos is the AtheoLeftist mind. Witness:

” Few dare maintain that immorality has increased as religious observance has collapsed. Instead, they say that everyone's morality, whether they are religious or not, is rooted in our common Christian culture, or our common Judaeo-Christian culture or, as an opponent in debate told me last year, our common Judaeo-Christian-Islamic culture. Forget if you can that there is much in religious culture that is immoral, not least a willingness to slaughter each other, and consider that if everyone is religious then no one is religious; religion is emptied of meaning and just becomes a vague cultural inheritance, like driving on the left or letting off fireworks on bonfire night.”

It is absurd to the maximum to claim that immorality has not increased in the past half century. Only a chaotic mind could make such a claim.

While Atheism is the antimoral antithesis of morality, Islam is the anti-Christian antithesis. To make the conflation and declare “immorality” in “religion” based on that cartoon is irrational and the result of either a chaotic mind, or at least one willing to lie for the pursuit of an ideology.

And this:

“if everyone is religious then no one is religious; religion is emptied of meaning and just becomes a vague cultural inheritance…”

Really? If everyone is X, then no one is X? Because X no longer has meaning? As in “if everyone is human, then no one is human, because being human is emptied of its meaning”? Absolute intellectual chaos.

The chaotic mind still gets published in Leftist journals, like the Guardian.