You Can’t Blame Atheists For A Christian Disaster, Ross Douthat
Welcome to Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that is a response to the book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, which was written by Ross Douthat.
Ross Douthat has been an appointed member of the editorial board of the New York Times, a right wing Christian extremist who was platformed by the New York Times. Now he has moved on to CBS 60 Minutes, which is controlled by Barry Weiss, who was herself appointed as the controller of CBS News in order to make Donald Trump happy so that CBS news would not be shut down. Barry Weiss and Ross Douthat are now the faces of media censorship in the name of right wing Christianity.
It's in that context that we have this book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Everyone, including your baby, I guess, including people who have dementia, in a funeral home, including people who live off on some Pacific Island somewhere.
Everyone should be religious. Everyone, including every scientist should be religious, says Ross Douthat, every school teacher, every single person. That's the world he wants to see.
The world is a big place, so let's look at the United States to narrow it down. The United States is still mostly religious. About 70% of people in the United States are religious, and 60% of the US population is Christian, specifically.
Given that, you’ve got to wonder: Why isn't it enough for Ross Douthat to have 60% of the population be Christian?
I'll tell you why. The Christian portion of the population used to be a lot higher. Christianity has managed to turn off a huge number of Americans. Christianity has turned people off, sending them away, screaming, practically running away from Christian churches.
Instead of dealing with that, Ross Douthat chooses to blame non-believers for all of the problems in the United States of America. I want you to pay attention to one particular fact, which is that not only has there been a right wing religious takeover of media institutions like CBS news (Soon, CNN is going to join that takeover, thanks to the triumph of right wing Paramount). I want you to pay attention to the fact that the entirety of the United States federal government is now controlled by Conservative Christianity, by Christian Nationalism, by extreme religious zealots who believe that there should not be a democracy in the United States, who want a theocracy instead.
They believe that the Bible is more important than the Constitution of the United States. They believe that worshiping religion and giving your money to churches is more important than constitutional liberty.
Christian Nationalists control the judicial branch. They control the Supreme Court. They control the legislative branch. They have both houses of Congress. They control the White House.
So, if you want to blame non-religious Americans for what's happening in the United States right now, you're essentially blaming 30% of the population for what's going on, when it's Christianity that has absolute power over our government and has 60% of the population. Christianity owns the United States right now. So, if there's a problem, if the United States of America is broken, I think it's a Christian problem. It's a problem with Christianity.
Ross Douthat doesn't see it that way.
We are still on page two and page three of Believe, Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
Here's what he says on page two - these are Ross Douthat's words:
“Looking at the forces, populism on the right, wokeness on the left that had taken over Western life as traditional religion fell away, a number of writers, including even some new atheist fellow travelers, acknowledged the naïveté of the idea that simply removing Christianity or Islam from the stage would lead inevitably to greater enlightenment and peace. Relative to twenty years ago, there is more discussion of the obvious sociological importance of institutional religion.”
On page three, he adds this: “Maybe we have discarded an old and proven source of ritual in a time when we most need it.”
The premise presented by these statements is simply false. The premise of Ross Douthat's argument in this book is that we've done away with religion, and now look what a mess things are in the United States of America.
That should teach us not to get rid of religion, Ross Douthat argues… but have we gotten rid of religion?
The majority of Americans are still Christian, and Christianity controls the U.S. Federal government. Christianity still has a lock on control of the United States of America.
You can't go blaming 30% of the population that has no political representation in the federal government for what's happening in our society, in our world.
By the way, we're also talking about the problems with the digital technology, which are significant. Artificial intelligence, social media have gone awry, and you know what the tech titans are doing, the ones like Peter Thiel? They are promoting Christianity along with artificial intelligence.
They are friends of the Christian Nationalist fascist government. So you don't like what's happening with addiction to screens, with the downfall of reading literacy going out the window? Don't blame non-believers for that.
Those people are in bed with the Christian nationalists and Donald Trump, who has been cheerleading Christianity and Christian Nationalism for years now. Trump himself is a Christian, was raised Christian, yes, in a Christian church, where he went to confirmation class, a Christian church that taught racial segregation and hatred, by the way. Now, Donald Trump is promoting Christian Nationalism.
I want you to pay attention to what Ross Douthat is doing here, because it is intellectually dishonest. It's like a huckster's gimmick. It's a deception to claim that non-believers are to blame for what's happening in the United States, when non-religious people here are a minority with no control over the government, and without control over, you know, the most powerful industry that has ever existed.
There is a more specific dishonesty, a little sleight of hand in language that Ross Douthat is engaged in here.
When he talks about how there are even some new atheist people, who have acknowledged the naivete, that simply removing Christianity or Islam from the stage would inevitably lead to greater enlightenment or peace.
He's lumping that in with the idea that, wow, yeah, you know, actually religion is a good thing and we need it. 1st of all, what those atheist thinkers are saying is that you can't simply remove religion and then presume that all of our problems will go away because all of our problems are due to religion.
This is something that Ross Douthat is doing throughout this book. He's making a strawman argument. Then he's claiming that the only alternative to his strawman is the religious alternative and the Christian alternative.
What he's claiming here is that because you can't make all of the problems of society of humanity go away by removing religion, and you have a couple of atheists admitting that, well, then obviously you must need religion. An intelligent person will be able to understand that that's not the only option.
What those atheists Douthat refers to are saying is simply that you cannot blame all of the problems of humanity on religion. That doesn't mean that religion is therefore a good thing. It means it's not the only bad thing. Religion is not the only problem that we have in the world, and humanity is complex. That doesn’t make religion a rational solution.
Ross Douthat wants you to think that religion and Christianity specifically are the default, and that if you find any single little flaw in anything that is not religious, you have to be religious and a Christian.
That's simply not an honest argument.
Ross Douthat is, for all of his flaws, not a stupid person. He knows that this is not an honest argument.
We are only on on page two of the introduction to this book, and already we're finding a huge thread of dishonesty. This kind of dishonest communication has been part and parcel of religious leadership and control of our society for a long, long time.
Habitual religious dishonesty is just one more reason that not everyone believes Ross Douthat.