As you may well have noticed, the past several days have seen yet another flare-up in the argument between faithful and faithless on Daily Kos. For what is not the first--and assuredly will not be the last--time, one faction decries the negative consequences of atheist attacks on religious beliefs and/or people, while another argues that criticisms of religion are an unavoidable part of atheists' mere openness about who they are.
But an article published last week in the online version of Wall Street Journal suggests that there is at least one other way to come at the issue: the author, a Catholic professor of literature, argues that the current spate of atheist "attacks" on religion are good for religion, because they demonstrate a serious and public engagement with religious ideas that otherwise get too little play and interest in modern America.
I for one found the essay inspiring; perhaps you would too.
The opinion piece in question, "How I Learned Not to Fear the Anti-God Squad," was posted on the WSJ site last Thursday. The author is Rollins College literature professor and proud Catholic Maurice O'Sullivan.
Importantly, O'Sullivan is not directing his positive sentiments at atheists who have worked hard to stay off of religious believers' toes; to the contrary, he centrally concentrates on Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, three authors of recent books criticizing religion that have raised widespread ire among the faithful:
The somewhat aging enfant terrible Christopher Hitchens, author of an oddly dyspeptic attack on Mother Teresa ("The Missionary Position") and the recent bestseller "[g]od Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," is simply the most public face of American atheism. Also on the bestseller list in the past have been Sam Harris's "Letter to a Christian Nation" and Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion." And now, behind the scenes, groups like American Atheists, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Council for Secular Humanism have been busy publishing journals, funding college scholarships and establishing Web sites.
But unlike many faithful believers who have responded to Dawkins, Hitchens and company, O'Sullivan is honestly and genuinely pleased by the entry of the outspoken infidel faction into the religious conversation:
Now that [Dawkins et al.] have broken the ice, in fact, we should only hope that even more thoughtful atheists will follow them into the pool.
Why should believers welcome this emergence of unbelief? Why not? We should be glad that there are people, even the devil's disciples, who take religion seriously enough to attack it, especially in these days when God seems to appear only in quarrels over holiday displays, during political campaigns or on the self-help shelves of Barnes & Noble. Should the primary goal of religion really be to fund municipal crèches, allow politicians to end every speech with the tag "And God bless America," or inspire works like "Tea With God: A Divinely Inspired Self-Help Book" and "The Christian Entrepreneur: How to Profit From Your God-Given Idea"?
This strikes me as a pleasing and potentially very constructive reaction to the burgeoning trend of open atheist critique of religious ideas--and a reaction that I haven't quite seen yet on Daily Kos. (Though I guess this comment, from Catholic Kossack mijita, was nicely close.)
O'Sullivan provides one other justification for considering atheist critiques of religion--including the harsher critiques--to be a positive development:
In attacking the cloistered monks and nuns of my Roman Catholic Church, the brilliant, if occasionally logorrheic, John Milton wrote in his defense of free speech, "Areopagitica," that "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed." And what will possibly make us exercise and breathe more fully than challenges by intelligent, thoughtful opponents? [...] And if we truly believe that an open, vigorous marketplace of ideas will establish value and truth as clearly as honest and open economic markets, shouldn't we encourage everyone to enter that market?
That's a nice point, It's also one that (I think a literature professor like O'Sullivan might recognize) harmonizes very well with the Enlightenment ideals of philosopher John Stuart Mill, whom many of us revere. Mill wrote a lot of wonderful stuff along similar lines:
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
- from "On Liberty"
Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme"; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.
- ibid.
To many of us, these are inspiring words--and it seems to me that Prof. O'Sullivan has taken them to heart. His essay is the best thing I've ever read from the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal.
--Er ... not that that's ... saying very much.
I invite you to read O'Sullivan's entire essay. (And I baselessly presume that the repeated misspelling of Madalyn Murray-O'Hair's surname is the Journal's fault, not O'Sullivan's.)
(A big hat tip to Hemant Mehta's Friendly Atheism, and through Hemant to his correspondent "Lexi.")