I myself
am inclined to bestow ethnocentric honors from time to time, and insofar as I
feel my faith should compel courage for the sake of truth I can find many
"honorary Christians" among atheists. One of my favorite modern
stories of courage for the sake of truth [5]
is that of Ron Ridenhour. Ridenhour was a green beret during the Vietnam
War whose Mormon friend Mike Terry told him about his first hand experience of
the My Lai Massacre. Terry had silently disobeyed orders after being commanded
by Lieutenant William Calley to murder the approximately 500 villagers at My
Lai. Terry did not, however, stand between the guns and the villagers or
rebuke Lieutenant Calley's command. In fact Terry later took part in
something between mercy killing and mass murder when the screams of the
survivors became too much for him to bear. Ridenhour found other testimonies
that confirmed Terry's and he then distributed news of the atrocity widely in
the hope of finding someone who would listen. Eventually the New Yorker's Seymour Hersch
picked up the story and it has been a bracing historical corrective to American
moral self-congratulation ever since.
In
Ridenhour's description
of how he came to know about My Lai, he notes at one point that he is an
atheist. It is not clear, of course, what role Ridenhour's atheism played in
his determination to spread the bad news of the My Lai Massacre. But certainly
both his atheism and his horror at war's propensity for mass murder of
noncombatants were psychologically compatible with the extremely low authoritarianism
he manifested by his whistle-blowing [6] .
Unfortunately,
atheists in the mould of Ridenhour seem less capable of writing bestsellers or
setting the tone for emergent atheist movements. After 9/11, as our
military-industrial complex has busied itself with spying on, stealing from,
torturing and killing Muslims, atheists who can work with, rather than against,
the Western upsurge in authoritarian hatred of Muslims are more likely to draw
media attention and have their work reviewed and promoted by establishment
media outlets.
I would
imagine that if the key power brokers in the publishing establishment promoted
atheists who had the wit, writing skills and name recognition of Harris and
Hitchens but who shunned all their militaristic Islamophobic nonsense, atheists
would buy up their books at warp speeds also--though perhaps the rest of the
population would not. Atheists who purchase New Atheist bestsellers are
not deliberately trying to soil their own collective reputation. The most
charitable interpretation of the popularity of Harris and Hitchens among
atheists is that atheists have long been hungry for some prominent media
representatives--any media representatives--to bring recognition of their perspectives
into national and international discourse. Hawkish and/or torture-loving
Islamophobia with a dose of Dr. Strangelove cannot be logically deduced from the
basic axiom of atheism, of course. Sadly,
though, hawkish torture-loving Islamophobia appears to be effective packaging when marketing atheism
post-9/11.
End of part 2.
[1] The construction as of 2012 should read "wrote", but as mentioned in Part 1, the original version of this piece was written in 2007, so I have kept the edited version dated this way also. Thoughts based on updated historical events are in footnotes.
[2] In light of the recent replay of the Ron Paul racist-homophobic newsletter controversy, Paul's "ghostwriters" (as well as his admirers in Stormfront and the John Birch Society) seem to be relatively clear examples of fascists with anti-fascist blind spots (insofar as it is fascist to peddle racism and homophobia, and anti-fascist to oppose torture, imperial wars, the War on Drugs, indefinite military detention without trial, etc.).
[4] Some might also note that the New
Testament only uses the phrase "the Word" when referring to Jesus,
and uses "the scriptures" when referring to the Tanakh or Old
Testament. And New Testament statements on the scriptures are generally
pretty anodyne, not what any reasonable person would consider commanding of
literalist worship.
[5]
Today I would choose
the-person-who-is-actually-guilty-of-the-"crimes"-of-which-Bradley-Manning-is-accused,
though the religious affiliation of that individual remains unknown.
[6]
Coincidentally, a student who refused
to administer even the lowest shock in a Princeton replication of psychologist Stanley
Milgram's well-known obedience experiment was also named Ron Ridenhour.
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