Atheists As Fundamentalists: A False Equation

I’m a big fan of columnist Leonard Pitts.  But when he’s wrong, he’s wrong.  In his latest column he takes up the issue of atheism after some atheist objected to a column in which he said that Lara Logan (the CBS reporter sexually attacked in Egypt) “is deserving of our compassion, our empathy and our prayers.”

This is not the kind of thing that would prompt me to write a comment.  It’s so common in our discourse that I usually just ignore it.  I also hear it much more than other non-believers do.  Quite often people who do not know that I am a secular humanistic rabbi will ask me to pray for someone.  When it’s contextually appropriate, I might engage them in conversation.  Usually I’ll just say something to the effect of, “I will keep him or her in my thoughts.”

Okay, so this particular atheist was moved to scold Mr. Pitts when many of us would not.  His response, however, was over the top:

Indeed, I find myself struck by the similarity between certain atheists and fundamentalists. Meaning the ones who can always tell you exactly what’s on God’s mind and even what He had for breakfast this morning. God did this, they say, because He didn’t like those people, did that because that country ticked Him off. Funnily enough, God’s likes and dislikes always seem to exactly match theirs.

There is a certain hubris in them that is mirrored in the declaration that God does not exist because our telescopes cannot see Him nor our equations prove Him. It was only a minute ago, as the universe measures time, that our kind was scared of fire, so our faith in our tools to now definitively disprove God is as arrogant as it is amusing.

The declaration that God does not exist, which is better stated as the claim that God is an unprovable being, has nothing in common with fundamentalism.  There is neither hubris nor arrogance in this assertion.  No sensible atheist that I know makes a claim that we can disprove God’s existence.  What we state is that through reason and knowledge, the God hypothesis appears to be incompatible with what we know about the world.  Furthermore, atheists do not condemn believers to hellfire or any similar consequences.  We argue that, to lesser and greater degrees, many theists are condemning us to a world ruled by superstition and ancient stories.  Pitts goes on to state:

God is not proven. God is felt. I know the subjectivity of that will give [the atheist] Patricia — and others — fits. Deal with it.

Non-theists contend that such feelings are easily explained by human psychology.  More significantly, and I believe that Mr. Pitts would agree with this, God-feelings cannot serve as an objective measure of morality.  If God is just your feeling, don’t expect others to necessarily share it.  And for goodness’ sake, please explain to your fellow theists the difference between your benign God-feelings and their more malignant authoritarian deity.  Do not be misled.  Your fundamentalist co-believers do NOT confine God to feelings.

Like many liberally religious people, Leonard Pitts has been taken in by a caricature of atheism created by the zealots.  Perhaps the comment he received did not further the atheist cause, but his response was quite misguided.