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”.
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”.