I smell a false dichotomy. Condemning religion (or some particular set of religions) on human-rights grounds and then advocating a theory of ethics which disregards or doesn’t contain a notion of human rights is of course inconsistent, but it’d take a remarkable lack of introspection to do that.
Inconsistency’s a common symptom of naive ethics, of course, but for the sake of clarity let’s restrict ourselves to talking about people who’ve put actual thought into their ethical opinions. In that case, it seems more likely that the horns of the alleged contradiction don’t coexist but rather belong to non-overlapping sets of beliefs, which simply happen to share the trait of nontheism. Perfectly reasonable: religious disbelief doesn’t require you to subscribe to notions of human rights, much less a single consistent set of human rights, and there are plenty of nontheist schools of thought that don’t. Nor does it require you to endorse the ethical opinions of all other atheists.
Atheism is not a unified ideology. Treating it as one leads to some extremely wrong conclusions.
Condemning religion (or some particular set of religions) on human-rights grounds and then advocating a theory of ethics which disregards or doesn’t contain a notion of human rights is of course inconsistent, but it’d take a remarkable lack of introspection to do that.
Read the sequences on cognitive biases. People, including yourself, are a lot less introspective then you seem to think.
Atheism is not a unified ideology.
The problem is people making atheism part of their identity, and therefore being reluctant to criticize fellow atheists. And then going no true Scotsman on the ones that are obviously wrong, so you don’t have to learn from their mistakes.
A certain lack of introspection in the general population doesn’t make blanket accusations of hypocrisy any more reasonable, particularly when the opinions at issue are entirely irrelevant with regard to the class you’re accusing. If Alice the Atheist believes in a particular inalienable human right, accuses theists of ignoring it, and goes on to espouse a moral philosophy which rejects that right in some circumstances, that makes her either a bad rights theorist or a bad moral philosopher, but not a bad atheist—and I remain unconvinced that there are many well-informed Alices out there.
Sure, there’s some some arguments-as-soldiers thinking going on among atheists. That’s never too hard to find in a closely fought ideological battle. But there’s a vast gulf between “atheists identified as such are unlikely to call each other out on their particular ideological inconsistencies” and “atheists, as an unqualified class, are hypocritical in this particular way that has nothing to do with atheism”.
I smell a false dichotomy. Condemning religion (or some particular set of religions) on human-rights grounds and then advocating a theory of ethics which disregards or doesn’t contain a notion of human rights is of course inconsistent, but it’d take a remarkable lack of introspection to do that.
Inconsistency’s a common symptom of naive ethics, of course, but for the sake of clarity let’s restrict ourselves to talking about people who’ve put actual thought into their ethical opinions. In that case, it seems more likely that the horns of the alleged contradiction don’t coexist but rather belong to non-overlapping sets of beliefs, which simply happen to share the trait of nontheism. Perfectly reasonable: religious disbelief doesn’t require you to subscribe to notions of human rights, much less a single consistent set of human rights, and there are plenty of nontheist schools of thought that don’t. Nor does it require you to endorse the ethical opinions of all other atheists.
Atheism is not a unified ideology. Treating it as one leads to some extremely wrong conclusions.
Read the sequences on cognitive biases. People, including yourself, are a lot less introspective then you seem to think.
The problem is people making atheism part of their identity, and therefore being reluctant to criticize fellow atheists. And then going no true Scotsman on the ones that are obviously wrong, so you don’t have to learn from their mistakes.
A certain lack of introspection in the general population doesn’t make blanket accusations of hypocrisy any more reasonable, particularly when the opinions at issue are entirely irrelevant with regard to the class you’re accusing. If Alice the Atheist believes in a particular inalienable human right, accuses theists of ignoring it, and goes on to espouse a moral philosophy which rejects that right in some circumstances, that makes her either a bad rights theorist or a bad moral philosopher, but not a bad atheist—and I remain unconvinced that there are many well-informed Alices out there.
Sure, there’s some some arguments-as-soldiers thinking going on among atheists. That’s never too hard to find in a closely fought ideological battle. But there’s a vast gulf between “atheists identified as such are unlikely to call each other out on their particular ideological inconsistencies” and “atheists, as an unqualified class, are hypocritical in this particular way that has nothing to do with atheism”.