Arabs and Atheists
A journalist at The Wall Street Journal Online has answered one of the classic puzzles of all time: What do Arabs and Atheists Have in Common? Here’s his answer:
But Does God Believe in Atheists?
The Washington Post reports on a shocking finding from a new Pew Research Center poll: “Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit.”
How can you be an atheist and believe in God? Gregory Smith, a Pew research fellow, speculates that “some people may identify with the term atheist or agnostic without fully understanding the definition.” But maybe the culprit here is the ambiguity of the term believe.
The finding reminded us of a 1980s song, “Dear God38,” by a band called XTC. It’s a petulant protest of suffering in the world:
Dear God,
Hope you got the letter
And I pray you can make it better down here
I don’t mean a big reduction in the price of beer
But all the people that you made in your image,
See them starving on their feet
‘Cause they don’t get enough to eatFrom God
I can’t believe in youThe lyrics also complain of sectarian “fighting in the street,” “disease,” “wars,” the drowning of “babes” and “those lost at sea and never found.” The narrator repeatedly asserts his unbelief in God–but the entire song is in the second person. If he doesn’t believe in God, who’s he talking to?
The obvious answer is that the XTC atheists’ attitude toward God is like the Arabs’ attitude toward Israel. They don’t deny that God exists, but they blame him for all their problems, and they refuse to recognize his right to exist.
Oh my! Isn’t the Journal’s journalist clever? Check out the witty title: But Does God Believe in Atheists? Surely, the reader is in for a good, edifying bit of reading filled with sparkling prose and insightful comments.
After citing the Pew Research Center’s finding, the author dismisses Gregory Smith’s conjecture that some self-identified atheists and agnostics don’t know who they are (Smith may be right; some atheists, just like some theists, are simply stupid) and suggests that “maybe the culprit here is the ambiguity of the term believe.” What is so ambiguous about the term “believe?” If you ask me, it’s a lot less confusing and troublesome than the term “theory” seems to be. Having opened the commentary with the suggestion that atheists – well, 21% of them, at least – are confused and/or stupid, the Journal’s friendly journalist gets downright nasty.
He quotes lyrics from a song that asks an honest-to-goodness question that people have pondered through the ages. Instead of addressing the question raised in the song, the author responds dismissively: If he doesn’t believe in God, who’s he talking to? Clearly, the lesson for aspiring writers and bloggers is that we should never set up hypothetical arguments with hypothetical opponents; we must only posit actual arguments with or against actual beings. Maybe Einstein shouldn’t have performed thought experiments; after all, only physical lab experiments with real, tangible stuff will lead to worthwhile discoveries. Oh, wait. It was a thought experiment, a hypothetical “what-if” flight of fancy, that led to the theories of relativity. Oops. Maybe hypothetical questions do have some value after all.
If readers thought the author of this piece couldn’t get any nastier, they were wrong. How many things are wrong in that final paragraph? Forgive me if I lose count and miss a few.
To begin, I doubt that there is one all-encompassing Arab attitude toward Israel. To suggest that there is trivializes the depth of the political and social issues that plague the Middle East. The statement also implies that the troubles in the Middle East are entirely the fault of the Arabs: if only the Arabs would screw their heads on straight, stop blaming Israel for their problems, and just accept that the existence of Israel is a reality that’s not going away, the situation could be cleared up in no time flat. As my friend, Ric, has noted on more than one occasion, Middle Eastern politics are a tangled mess and there’s plenty of blame to go around for the current state of affairs there. No one knows these things any better than the people who actually live within those circumstances.
Of course, the author needs to present this grossly simplified version of extremist Arab sentiments (I have no idea how many Arabs, if any, hold these ideals) because the reader is supposed to accept, uncritically, the proffered analogy to atheism. Similar to the alleged Arab attitude toward Israel, the atheist attitude – at least, the attitude of the 21% of “believing atheists” – toward god(s) is asserted to be:
a – they actually do believe in god but won’t admit it because
b – they’re angry at him because they hate suffering, which is why
c- they deny his right to exist
Even if 21% of “believing atheists” do believe in God, the author has no foundation, aside from one song composed by one songwriter, for asserting that they are angry and would prefer that God didn’t exist. This is nothing more than a groundless assertion.
Additionally, we should note that the Arab attitude toward Israel is nothing like the atheist attitude toward god(s). Arabs don’t have to believe in Israel, they know that Israel is a reality. They live with that reality every day. In contrast, atheists can’t know that god(s) exist, we can only believe or disbelieve in his existence. God does not live in our homelands; he does not occupy our towns; he does not patrol our streets. The author’s analogy collapses because it relies upon a faulty confusion of the concepts of knowledge and belief. As long as one remembers the distinctions between the terms “knowledge” and “belief” and does not try to use them interchangeably, neither term is ambiguous, as the Journal’s author claimed.
The Journal’s author also failed to recognize that the 79% of atheists who don’t believe in God actually don’t believe in him. It’s really that simple. They’re not angry at God. People don’t get angry at something or someone they don’t believe in. Furthermore, atheists do not deny God’s right to exist. Some atheists deny his existence, but that is an entirely different thing from deny any being’s right to exist. This latter idea is a straw man argument derived from trying to push a flawed analogy far beyond its limits. Most atheists simply don’t believe that God exists, which is a different thing from denying his existence. The denial of God’s existence is an ontological question. The refusal to believe without sufficient evidence is an epistemological question.
What do Arabs and atheists have in common? They do not share, as the Wall Street Journal’s author claimed, analogous loathings for Israel and God. No. What Arabs and atheists have in common are the needs to be taken seriously and to be treated with more respect than journalists like James Taranto have given either of them.
– the chaplain
Once again, if they have to resort to tricks, lies and deception, they’re all but admitting weakness and vulnerability.
Mr. Tarant of the WSJ seems to be a clever and astute observer of the world. Perhaps that’s why the WSJ hired him? [/sarcasm]
I thought we atheists had already concluded that the reason why 21% of us claim to believe in gods is because at least 21% of us actually have a wicked sense of humor and love to fuck with pollsters.
Actually, the other 79% have a good sense of humor too, but feel pity for the idiot that feels compelled to ask a follow-up question to an avowed atheist, like “Do you believe in god?”, and answer the question seriously. Wouldn’t want the pollster to lose his job. Imagine if he came back to PEW with this result: “100% of atheists claim belief in god”
What an ass. It’s the little things like this that really piss me off.
One other thing that atheists and Arabs (and I have to assume that by ‘Arabs’, Tarant is referring to Muslims, be they Arabs, Eqyptians, Turks, Persians, Uzbeks (but I doubt it would matter to him that not all Muslims are Arabs, and that there are many nationalities and ethnicities under any of the blanket terms) have in common: an easy target for any columnist who wishes to form, in the reader’s mind, an amorphous ‘they’ who can be vilified, castigated, scapegoated, and hated without fear of retribution. Were the writer speaking of Catholics, or Mormons, or snake handling Pentacostals, a blanket comparison to the reviled ‘Arab’ would bring swift condemnation and would possibly get the writer fired. But hey, atheists? You could compair them to baby-rapers and no one would complain. Well, no one whom the MSM listens to, anyway.
Here’s what Atheists and Arabs have in common: the letter A at the beginning and the letter s at the end.
Oh, and most of them are knee-jerkily vilified by the MSM, who understand neither Arabs nor atheists.
Notice, too, that the author says nothing about Arab atheists.
Oh, my. That was wonderfully snarky. The original article clearly suffers from too much knee-jerk stereotyping and an unwillingness to progress beyond that into the actual thought.
Great post. =]
http://howtosmile.wordpress.com
It would be interesting to see how many people who claimed to be Christians (or whatever) didn’t believe in God.
I bet most of the “atheists” who weren’t joking when they said they believed in god were people too dumb to know what atheist meant and too proud to admit it.
Unless the poll responses were taken from old XTC songs, it’s really hard to see how the song even connects to the topic.
The journalist is clearly too stupid to recognise poetic imagery, which implies he’s in the wrong profession. In any case, I’ll follow his lead – in interpreting whatever I choose in any way I want – and say that, in a sample poll, 100% of Wall Street journalists believed Israel is God.
(Though, perhaps, you could forgive them for assuming that, given Israel’s power over US foreign policy)
Heather said, “It would be interesting to see how many people who claimed to be Christians (or whatever) didn’t believe in God.”
It would be. John Evo wrote a post recently about that very question. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a specific statistic about how many people are involved in religious communities even though they don’t believe.
Depending on the actual questions asked, I could end up being counted in either group. When I participate in online surveys, etc., I count myself as an atheist. I do not claim to be a believing Christian. Still, I can conceive of surveys that would ask about church affiliation – but not actual belief-state – to which I would possibly admit that, yes, I am still affiliated with a church. The reasons for that are professional, social and familial. So, I could easily be counted among the nonbelievers sitting in the pews – on the rare occasions when that still occurs.
The key, in my case, is distinguishing between belief and church affiliation. That may well be the case for many others.
Thanks! Really amazing. Big ups!