Raise Your Hand if You’re an Atheist

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I was in an oddly public place listening to ostensibly professional presentations when it was announced that the next topic would be atheism, in honor of some sort of international day of atheism. I understand why this happened. Identity and very personal issues have steadily invaded what had previous been neutral spaces. If we’re going to talk about Ramadan, then we also need to let atheists give their spiel.

What I found jarring though was the introduction: “Raise your hand if you’re an atheist”. A good 80% of the crowd raised their hands. I was was not one of them.

I wonder what people thought of me. Did they assume I was some sort of Christian fundamentalist that’s often parodied in the media? Because this was in a crowd of tech people, did they think that those with unraised hands were intellectual simpletons, not worthy of the lofty vocation of pushing buggy code into production?

From what I can tell, I was one of the few people to think that this entire thing was inappropriate. These are very personal matters, and asking for a show of hands in a public place is incredibly invasive. I don’t talk about my religious views to casual acquaintances, and even with closer friends it’s a rare topic of conversation.

The Western tradition of tolerance is largely built on the separation of personal and public life. The early legal framework for making discrimination illegal in European societies was that you could only judge students or employees based on their performance, thus setting aside race, ethnic identity, religious views, biological sex, sexuality, political views, and other irrelevant matters.

This neutral space is liberating. You’re free from any identities and can be accepted precisely because you don’t have any public identity. It also sets the foundation for the type of compromise that is essential to a democratic society. People of vastly different political affiliations, religious views, and from different identity groups can function together without needing to agree about everything. This is what I’ll call the Old Model.

Under the Old Model, tolerance is a virtue that is developed and then further trains the ability to civilly disagree, set matters aside, and, in practice, usually leads to accepting other people. After all, if you’ve worked side by side with someone for years, maintaining negative stereotype of them is a bit absurd. But this is a process, not an a priori assumption.

The shift away from this has been subtle and slow, but I believe this will ultimately be detrimental to the continuity of democratic and liberal societies. Under what I’ll call the New Model, neutral spaces are being eliminated and replaced with the expectation that you publicly state your personal views and identities, and that as long as these identities are on the list of publicly acceptable identities, you will be tolerated.

Under the New Model, tolerance itself is no longer a virtue, compromise and working together with people you otherwise disagree with is not seen as a good trait. Instead, finding people who disagree and removing them is now the highest virtue and how social harmony is maintained.

As an aside, when it’s broken down like this, it’s very easy to see how most of the newer left-wing movements in the West aren’t democratic at their core. They’re authoritarian-technocratic along the lines of Plato’s Republic. Perhaps, Old and New Models are complete misnomers and this is really a debate between Aristotelian virtue ethics with tolerance and civility forming the basis of societal eudaimonia versus the philosopher kings of Plato.

As a further aside, this isn’t an endorsement of right-wing politics, which I find even more odious.

The road to liberal society has been paved with neutral spaces and privacy. Discarding them in favor of identity politics is playing with the very fire that has the potential to destroy liberal, democratic societies.

Back to asking the atheists to raise their hands.

I’m not a theist in the sense of believing in an Abrahamic creator God. But I’m very much not a materialist, think it’s pretty well demonstrated that there are things well beyond what science can and will ever be able to understand, and there are definitely enough signs of some form of continuity of life beyond death to merit serious consideration.

I’ve grown increasingly reluctant to mention publicly that I’ve been practicing Buddhism for more than a decade. I don’t want the identity baggage that comes with it. Does that mean I’m some new age hippie, mostly stoned and staring at the ceiling all day? Am I one of those secular mindfulness self help gurus? Neither.

I’d raise my hand if you asked Buddhists to raise their hands, but that wouldn’t really tell you much about me. The far better option is to not ask private questions in public spaces.

Over the years I’ve met sincere Christians, Jews and Muslims whose faith has transformed, guided, and nurtured them. It’s a really rotten thing to single them out at a public event by asking the atheists to raise their hands, especially when it carries the none too subtle implication that it’s the enlightened majority with their hands raised.

And this cuts both ways. I don’t want to go to a UX conference to hear about Ramadan, the Bible, meditation, politics, or someone’s sexuality. I suspect the real roots of this are in people working too many hours and having no community or social life outside of their professional circles. And thus the average middle class office worker has literally no one to talk to about their private lives because instead of friends, family, and community all that’s left is the Uber drivers, Amazon Prime couriers, and ChatGPT.