Modern-day Jesus = Richard Dawkins? Seriously?

One main goal of this blog is to celebrate the ideas and thought of modern atheists, who I find far more interesting than my fellow Christians. One delightful infidel who I find almost irresistible is A.C. Grayling.

Grayling is a philosopher (at Birkbeck College, University of London) and commentator at The Guardian. His columns at The Guardian regularly celebrate secularism and denounce faith, and they're always entertaining.  Plus he has great hair.

Now Grayling is no genius – his attack on the science of belief was wrongheaded and surprisingly ignorant, for example. But his thoughts on belief, liberty, and British culture are worth a look. Check out the great little collection of quips in the "This much I know" series at The Guardian. It includes this gem:

I would imagine Jesus was a kind of Jewish reformer. If you were looking for an equivalent to the figure you dimly perceive through the gospels it would probably be a Richard Dawkins.

Who but an English atheist would compare Richard Dawkins to Jesus? (If you find the comparison to be horrifying or scandalizing in the extreme, then you really won't like where this blog is going.)

It's entertaining, to be sure, but seriously: Richard Dawkins as a "reformer"? That one's hard for me to see. Rabble-rouser, yes, and so was Jesus. They share a fondness for straightforward speech and a disinclination to worrying about what people think of such. But is Dawkins a reformer in the radical, rule-breaking sense that Jesus was? I'm a fan – I mean a big fan – of Richard Dawkins, but there's a difference between being brutally frank and being truly revolutionary. Call me biased, because I am, but sorry A.C., I don't see that one. Jesus should get a lot more credit than that.

Why body counts can only hurt the case for Christian faith

Christian culture warriors will make regular appearances on this blog, since nearly everything they say is embarrassing rubbish.  Today, consider Dr. Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon who fancies himself a scholar and a scientist.  (As do his fawning admirers, the duped masses of the multiply-misnamed Intelligent Design Movement.)

Dr. Egnor appears to be rather displeased by the existence of atheists, and he's downright pissed off by the recent uptick in atheist uppity-ness. Jerry Coyne, a top evolutionary biologist and uppity atheist, wrote a blog post about "atheist humility." Coyne cites a recent letter to the editor in the New York Times, in which the writer decries a lack of humility on both sides of this religious culture war, and claims that such humility is "necessary for serious engagement." Coyne thinks this is bosh, and I agree:

I may be mistaken, but I think we’re already doing serious engagement.  It’s fatuous to think that if only both sides became more “humble,” we’d arrive at some welcome compromise.  And what would that be?  Presumably, atheists would stop their vociferous criticism of religion, while religion could continue business as usual.  In other words, the status quo.

Dr. Egnor begs to differ. He doesn't think atheists have been humble at all, because they've killed millions and millions and millions and millions of people whenever they've been "in power."

Now let's just pretend that it's really true that there were "65 million dead from Atheism in People's Republic of China."  First off, what in hell does this have to do with atheist "humility?"  Coyne's point is that in the West, atheists have tended to live and let live in the culture.  If Engor aims to dispute this, he needs different data.

But second, what is it with Christians who think that they can score culture-war goals by stacking corpses at the door of Atheism*?  Even if Atheism could be described coherently as being responsible for enormous quantities of Death and Destruction, Christendom would have the much bigger problem.  Because similar lists of deaths (and other horrors) attributable to Christianity are easy to compile and far more difficult to explain.  Killing and other Bad Things are, after all, the fruits of fallen humans.  That humans do these things, in numbers great and small, is unremarkable.  Tallying the score is unnecessary and says nothing about whether atheists are "humble" or even evil.

No, what Egnor would have to do to score goals in this silly match is this: show that Christian faith has lessened Death and Destruction, ideally when Atheism has not.  Smugly reciting body counts – even if they weren't obscenely inflated and misattributed – merely invites the devastating counterpoint: Christian faith has created horrors all its own.

This is one big reason why I'm a Christian atheist. Egnor is a fool, but worse, his arguments are self-incriminating. Why is it that our world isn't so much better off for having so many Christians?

* It's quite silly to talk about some cabal called Atheism, but that's what Egnor and his ilk love to do, and I do think it looks amusing in print.

Who is the Christian Atheist?

Hi, I'm your host, the Christian Atheist.  Let's make this a FAQ.

Q.  Is there just one author of this blog?

A.  Yes.

Q.  So are you a Christian or an atheist?  Because you can't be both.

A.  I'm a Christian who thinks like an atheist.  This is explained in the introductory post, What do you mean by "Christian Atheist"?

Q.  What kind of Christian are you?

A.  Probably best described as post-evangelical.  I go to a denominational church but can barely stand the group-think and cultural parasitism.  I would be described as confessing, in that I point to certain creeds (the Nicene is my favorite) and confessions (the Westminster is pretty good) as somewhat reliable and accurate statements of Christian belief.

Q.  What is your profession?

A.  Hate to be coy here but I must stay anonymous.  I have a postgraduate degree and it got me my current job.  I do a lot of writing and I travel regularly.  I am not a clergy member.

Q.  Where do you work?

A.  Don't be silly.  I'm anonymous because there are things I will write that could annoy my employer or its partners.

Q.  Male or female?  Married or otherwise?  Old or young?  Hot or not?

A.  Hot.

What do you mean by "Christian Atheist"?

Let me start by explaining what I don't mean by the term.  Years ago, I was chatting with a professor who mentioned that he was "an Orthodox Jew."  I thought this was interesting and started asking him about his lifestyle.  After answering a few of my queries, he said something like this: "Yes, well, the only thing I'm really orthodox about is my atheism."  He was a Jewish atheist.  At the time, I found this curious, even absurd, but it described him pretty well.  He was an unbeliever, who was practicing a particular religion for reasons apart from belief.

So there are many Christian atheists, I suppose.  These are people who don't believe, but who practice Christian religion for reasons apart from belief.

But when I write as The Christian Atheist, I write as someone who is the converse of that portrayal.  I do believe, but culturally and intellectually and even religiously, I'm an atheist.  I act and think more like a humanist or a skeptic than like a typical Christian.  I'm more comfortable around atheists than I am around most Christians – I'd rather spend a week on a cruise with nothing but skeptics than an afternoon with a clatch of earnest evangelicals.

I'm naturally skeptical, and habitually prone to disbelief.  I trust atheists more than I trust believers.  I tend to hate religion as much as atheists do.  It's not enough to say that I'm embarrassed by Christians, or apologetic about the failures of Christianity.  I'm distrustful of Christians, and suspicious of Christianity as a system.  Yes, I've seen and heard and experienced evil at the hands of Christians, but I have no dramatic story of persecution or suffering.  Rather, I'm just someone who finds most of what is said and done in the name of God to be worthless or worse.  And I'm someone who has found that the questions of the skeptics are good questions, and that the answers of the faithful are not always honest or helpful.

So why not "The Skeptical Christian"?  It would be more accurate, but it doesn't sound quite right.  The Christian Atheist bespeaks the tension and the contradictions.  And it sounds better.