This Atheist Thinks That Accommodationism Hurts Magical Thinkers Like The One I Was, Part 1

Science bloggers DuWayne Brayton and Chris Mooney have recently written on the utility of the “New Atheism” for encouraging magical thinkers to abandon magical thinking. Specifically, they each address to some extent the issue of whether or not atheists should go on the offensive with everything we’ve got. Should we publicly deride the idea of supernatural authorities whose whims we must obey, or should we respect the idea that we can reconcile theism and science with one another? Should we exclusively use civil language to discuss religious ideas? Should we treat Christian (and Jewish, Muslim Buddhist and other mainline) ideologies with the same scorn with which most atheists and theists alike unhesitatingly treat minority superstitions (e.g., adult belief in garden fairies)?

DuWayne suggested to me that I post my response to his argument on my own blog. Here it is. This will constitute the beginning of my discussion of my opposition to "accommodationism".
Read more. . .

DuWayne closes his argument with his assertion that his personal concern is for people with whom he can identify:

The only reason that I spent twenty years in an abusive, painful and sometimes debilitating relationship with Faith, is because I was constantly running into people who told me that it is possible to make the very reconciliations that you are so adamantly defending. Were it not for Christians who accept homosexuality, were it not for Christians who accept evolution, were it not for Christians who are sex-positive, were it not for Christians who perform incredible feats of mental gymnastics and convinced me I could do the same, I would have become an atheist a very long time ago. I would have been saved the pain, the doubts - the trauma, of fighting so desperately to make the absolutely incoherent, fit together coherently.

And were it not for the uncivil, ill-mannered "new atheists" you disagree with, I would probably still be suffering that relationship today...

This was my response:

I think this is key. My experience has been very different than yours (no shit!), but I feel similarly about my phasic abandonment of theism and magical thinking for skeptical thinking and atheism. It's harmful to pretend that something so important is real when it's not, and "accommodation" often entails exactly this. Additionally, it's especially harmful to certain groups of people.

My parents were lapsed Protestants when I was growing up. (They returned to churchgoing and active worship after my mother got and recovered from breast cancer. They presently attend a military chapel, where their pastor "proves" the righteousness of the US war in Iraq with items such as this.) They refrained from baptizing or regularly catechizing me or my sister out of some vague desire to "let us choose for ourselves".

However, they wished us to adopt "Christian ideology", and I did. I believed in my conception of a Christian God-- buffered as it was by classic English literature, random KJV (and, later, New American Bible) verses and my own shamed but vigorous imagination-- strongly enough to make every one of my decisions based on what I "felt" that God wanted me to do. And I did this to varying degrees until I was twenty-seven years old.

I refrain from "unleashing the asshole" with respect to religion in the sciblogosphere solely because I know what it's like to always be the minority; one of my favorite scibloggers, who has been kind to me both in and out of the blogosphere, is a theist among a sea of non-believers. I said this once and got praised for my "open mindedness". It's not "open mindedness", though. It's a personal decision to modify my behavior that does not constitute any sort of argument against "New Atheism". Bullshit is bullshit. Why pussyfoot around it?

I can attribute all of my career and academic decisions from my eighteenth to my twenty-seventh year to magical thinking. I have to live the rest of my life knowing that I never took charge of my life until I was thirty as a result. This kind of experience isn't a big deal to a lot of people. However, I don't have the personality type to deal with this knowledge without constantly and ferociously struggling with self-loathing-- namely in the form of a conviction that I will never do anything special with my life, and that I'll be relegated to the mediocrity that I can't, can't, cannot stand. My propensity for magical thinking has only made my life less enjoyable.

In practice, there is no reconciliation of theism with science. Science is not merely a methodology but an ontology as well, and there is far more evidence that all phenomena can be explained in terms of matter and energy than there is in favor of dualism. Just because scientists can explain no more than the tip of the iceberg at present doesn't automatically mean that there are mysteries that are inexplicable. I have no idea why it makes sense to acknowledge this in the laboratory only to completely abandon your awareness of it in every other type of problem solving you must undertake in the world.

I know there are lots of privileged kids who grew up discussing existentialism around the dinner table with moms who have PhDs in psych from Harvard and dads with JDs from Yale Law School, and who thus wound up more intellectually assertive and productive despite all the woo they may have been subjected to. But I am interested helping kids like the one I was and adults like the one I am. New Atheism has done me a world of good; neither theism or accomodationism has.

More later.