Humanists distancing from atheists

I’ve posted something on this before, and actually Hitchens has been all over the place lately and looking angrier each time, but here’s a WaPo piece that has some good quotes about the atheists battle against religion, and the humanists problems with atheists.

At a recent conference marking the 30th anniversary of Harvard’s humanist chaplaincy, organizers sought to distance the “new humanism” from the “new atheism.”

Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein went so far as to use the (other) f-word in describing his unbelieving brethren.

“At times they’ve made statements that sound really problematic, and when Sam Harris says science must destroy religion, to me that sounds dangerously close to fundamentalism,” Epstein said in an interview after the meeting. “What we need now is a voice that says, ‘That is not all there is to atheism.’ ”

Although the two can overlap, atheism represents a statement about the absence of belief and is thus defined by what it is not.

This is refreshing clarity.

“Atheists are somewhat focused on the one issue of atheism, not looking at how to move forward,” said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the Washington-based American Humanist Association. While he appreciates the way the new atheists have raised the profile of nonbelievers, he said humanists differ by their willingness to collaborate with religious leaders on various issues. “Working with religion,” he said, “is not what [atheists] are about.”

So, atheism is about..nothing, being defined by the absence of belief. But the humanists pulling away from atheism want to have a cause.

The Harvard event linked via video to a conference on global warming at the Baptist-affiliated Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. Addressing both meetings was biologist E.O. Wilson, whose book, “The Creation,” urges the faith community to join the environmental movement.

Even as he complimented the “military wing of secularism” for combating the intrusion of dogma into political and private life, he told his audience that religious people “are more likely to pay attention to that hand of friendship offered to them . . . than to have suggested to them, let us say, Richard Dawkins’s ‘The God Delusion,’ which sets out to carpet-bomb all religion.”

Good description.

“We’re not a unified group,” said Christopher Hitchens, author of the latest atheist bestseller, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

“But we’re of one mind on this: The only thing that counts is free inquiry, science, research, the testing of evidence, the uses of reason, irony, humor and literature, things of this kind. Just because we hold these convictions rather strongly does not mean this attitude can be classified as fundamentalist,” Hitchens said.

Now that’s an interesting turn of semantics for big media, because from about the time of Bush’s election to the presidency — especially the second time around when that whole red state/blue state divide became Topic A — the media used the code “people of strongly held convictions” as a pejorative in referring to…usually…Christians, and certainly people of traditional faith. Now Hitchens, one of the carpet bombers, is claiming the atheists are people of strongly held convictions. So, it’s good to ask some questions here about intellectual honesty.

“Atheists don’t really ask the question, what are the vital needs that religion meets? They give you the sense that religion is the enemy, which is absurd,” said Ronald Aronson, professor of humanities at Wayne State University in Detroit.

“There are some questions we secularists have to answer: Who am I, what am I, what can I know? Unless we can answer these questions adequately for ourselves and for others, we can’t expect people to even begin to be interested in living without God.”