Roys is not the only Christian whistle-blower in blogland. Many, thank God, have chronicled the misdeeds of evangelical kingpins like Bill Hybels and James MacDonald and Jerry Falwell Jr, and have helped catapult these creeps from their seats of influence into the slime of opprobrium where they belong.
Christian investigative reporters like Roys focus zealous indignation on their own kind – their own “tribe” if you will. If there are any serious Christian journalists out there chronicling the corruption of atheists, I have yet to discover them. I could be missing something, since I am a modestly informed armchair schlub myself. But isn’t it the case that the Christian muckrackers mostly concern themselves with cleaning their own house?
This phenomenon alerts me to an asymmetry that I find instructive. Are there any atheist Julie Roys’s? If so, please let me know so that I can revise or take down this post. What I observe every day is lots of Christians saying, “Our house is filthy: we must clean it!” and a chorus of atheists chiming in, “Your house is filthy: you must clean it!” (Actually, from reading their websites, I think many of them would prefer that we just burn it down.) But do any atheist spokespersons devote themselves to cleaning their own house? Is there a comparably earnest self-reflection going on in that community? Maybe there is, but I never find evidence for it on (for example) my Facebook feed.
Take the matter of historical apologies. For decades I’ve been reading Christian laments about “our” medieval crusades, Salem witch trials, and complicity in the ownership of human beings. Can somebody please send me a link to an essay where an atheist apologizes to us for Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and the Kim Jongs? Turnabout is fair play. If Christians must bear the guilt of crusades that killed a few million some eight hundred years ago, then I suppose atheists should lament their part in the slaughter of tens of millions in just the last hundred years.
If I were an atheist, I would respond to that zinger by saying, “Oh come on. What a cheap shot. I will not be linked in common cause to geopolitical monsters who happen to share my philosophical materialism. I’m not responsible for them, and our shared biological reductionism in no way inspired their atrocities.” To which I as a Christian would say, “Good, now you know how I feel. I don’t identify with butchers and bullies and sadists and scoundrels either - no matter how hard they claim to be Christians. I urge their downfall and celebrate their exposure. I will not be painted with the same broad brush that includes them, and I am certainly not going to be baited into apologizing for crimes I never committed but have instead opposed with unrelenting vigor.”
But even in the above imaginary exchange I let my atheist opponent get away with something that I do not grant: “[B]iolgical reductionism in no way inspired their atrocities.” Yes it did. Of course it did. According to atheism it must have inspired their atrocities, because nothing else could have. In atheistic biological reductionism, all human ideologies, and all human actions, are determined by neurons and chemicals in our brains interacting with their environment in strict observance of physical laws outside a person’s control. Even the control you think you have is itself biologically determined. And the only wiggle room in that deterministic complex comes from quantum uncertainty at the atomic level, but of course no one has ever tried to base a serious doctrine of free will, rationality or moral accountability on that.
According to atheism, Stalin’s atrocities – and, for that matter, Lincoln’s benevolence, and Ted Bundy’s murders, and Tom Hanks’ sweet nature, and Robert Sapolsky’s biological reductionism, and my Christianity - are all inspired by atoms in our brains that no soul ever moved because there’s no such thing as a soul. So, atheist friend, yes, biological reductionism did in fact – according to you – inspire Stalin’s atrocities (not just a belief in biological reductionism – but the reductionism itself). Just as it inspired Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews, and the selfless behavior of Doctors Without Borders, and the Civil Rights movement, and the KKK, and my Christianity, and your atheism, and this conversation we’re having now, and any objections you have to the words I’m putting in your mouth, and to the counterarguments you imagine yourself to be marshalling in protest. All thoughts, according to you - including the ones you’re thinking now – are, in the end, biological knee-jerks masquerading as rationality.
The fact that atheism thus delegitimizes all thought, including its own, and provides an inescapably deterministic account of all behavior, including Jerry Falwell Jr’s, never seems to trouble the atheists with whom I am acquainted. Their inability to reflect upon the validity of their thinking or question the certainty of their moral judgments (or why they have moral judgments in the first place) suggests to me a blindness so egregious it can only be explained by a willful closing of the eyes. For example, just a few minutes ago, by complete coincidence while looking up something unrelated, I came across this popular quote from an atheist: “The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to those who think they’ve found it.” How can such a sentence emerge from a conscious thinker before a nanosecond’s reflection crushes it like a grape? All one has to do in response is ask, “Is that statement true?” If it isn’t, well, then disbelieve it and act accordingly. But if it is true, then clearly it is a truth the speaker has found, and by his own admonition you should run away from him because you “infinitely prefer” to be with those who are only seeking the truth. What in the world prevents this herd-of-elephants-in-the-room question from even getting asked? What accounts for the atheistic inability to subject its own thinking to the rigors of a principle it has just laid down as law?
I have a prediction to make should there ever appear on the horizon the morning star of an earnestly self-reflective atheistic Julie Roys eager to reform the moral outrages she discovers within herself and her own group. Her faith in atheism will soon prove to be as unstable as radon. When she turns from the agreeable, energizing, self-affirming task of denouncing her neighbor’s untidy house to the galling, repulsive, humiliating task of cleaning her own I believe that there will arise troubling questions about right and wrong and the existence of true rationality for which atheism can give no account. When those destabilizing thoughts occur she will want to distract herself with entertainment or return to the simple comfort of condemning those with whom she disagrees. Or, she might just give up and bow the knee to that God she frankly wishes would go away and leave her alone.
