Jeff Sparrow, and who'll come a waltzing matilda about the evils of new atheism ...

(Above: a cheap attempt by the pond to mock Xians, when as everybody knows, the entire point of old, and brand spanking new, available for a song and a dance at an incredibly cheap price, atheism is to mock Islamics).

With the pending Murdoch paywall looming - well, it's four months away, but any loom in a storm - it's time to wander into fresh fields, and where better to start than in struggle street, with New Matilda, and Jeff Sparrow's demanding question Where Have All the Progressive Atheists Gone?

Straight way, we're put on a Godwin's Law alert:

Melbourne is bracing for an influx of atheists next year - and that means oh so many right wing war-mongerers. It's getting hard to tell a New Atheist from a neo-fascist, writes Jeff Sparrow

Yep, it seems that new atheists, and perhaps angry atheists, as opposed to slightly befuddled and unhappy atheists like Dick Gross, are marching behind Christopher Hitchens towards the establishment of a new world wide right wing neo-fascist regime of non-believers.

This is excellent news for hairsplitters of the kind who wondered whether Claude Chabrol could be included in the nouvelle vague because he kept on making conservative thrillers for the entirety of his movie making career. Get thee gone Chabrol ...

And get thee gone all those atheists who might gather under the atheist banners and attend the thoughts of Hitchens at a couple of conventions next year in Melbourne.

Mere attendance will signal conformity to Hitchens' war-mongering ways and blood lust ... and there's the problem, because you see, this is not progressive behaviour in any way shape or form:

The so-called New Atheist movement, in which Hitchens is a key figure, is not progressive in the slightest. On the contrary, it represents a rightwing appropriation of a once-radical tradition — and it’s well past time that so-called left-wingers, both in Australia and elsewhere, stepped up and said so.

Uh huh. So now it seems belief in god or an absence of a belief in god must now become part of the great left-right divide, and if you're on the left, you must cast true believing atheists in to the burning fires of hell for their sins and recidivism.

Fortunately the Xians have been defeated in Australia, and so you get these two remarkable leaps in logic:

... in contemporary Australia, an indifference to Jesus is fairly widespread among the educated, inner-city populace, which is, after all, the main readership of the New Atheists.

No-one’s going to burn you alive if you don’t believe in the Trinity; you are not going to lose your job if, like millions of other ordinary Australians, you’re unconvinced by Genesis.

Yep, just as in a Murdoch rag there it leaps from the page.

Talk of the educated inner-city populace, atheists and latte sippers the lot of them, suddenly now endorsed by millions of other ordinary Australians living in the suburbs. Socio-economic insights scattered around like confetti, and with as much substance.

Despite what some atheists would have you think, really, it’s not all that brave to be unreligious in Australia.

No doubt, Christians still exert a vestigial influence in the school curriculum, and, yes, various evangelists pop up from time to time in the culture wars. But overtly religious parties and political movements are marginal in mainstream politics, and have been so for years. Even the Cardinal Pells and the Wendy Francises make their arguments in secular terms rather than as an appeal to scripture. Tony Abbott might be a devout Catholic but he frames an opposition to gay marriage as an appeal to popular prejudice rather than Biblical injunction — just as the atheist Julia Gillard does.

Yes, Christians carry such little influence that opposition to homosexuality and gay marriage is a mere populist foible, without biblical foundation, much the same way as banning the sight of gays clutching a condom is simply an expression of popular cultures. And as for funding religious charities or private schools or chaplains, why that's just a vestigial influence in the halls of power ...

Uh huh. So with the Christians routed - this might be news to the Pellists and the Jensenists - moving right along, what's the real issue?

Which is not to say that religion doesn’t arise as a political issue for progressives. It’s just that the important debates for the Australian Left are not about attitudes to Christianity but rather about attitudes to Islam.

Yes, the real problem is that atheists seem to have it in for all religions, including Islam, Scientology, the Exclusive Brethren, Judaism, Calathumpians and all the rest listed by that old ambivalent writer Mark Twain, be they Quakers, Baptists, Wesleyans Ranters or tub thumpers:

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.

But no, it seems that the proper thoughtful atheist must spare Judaism and most particularly Islam, for no particular reason, except that it's the right and proper thing to do, and otherwise might lead to charges of racism:

I have argued before in New Matilda that there’s no structural difference between the prejudice against Judaism expressed in Australia in the early 20th century and the way that Muslims are discussed today. Anti-Semites denounced Jews for congregating in ghettoes and refusing to assimilate to Australian norms. The Jews, the racists said, wore peculiar clothes and headgear signaling their religious convictions. They ate peculiar foods. They were disproportionately involved in crime. They were the masterminds behind international terrorism. Why, everyone knew that both Bolshevism and anarchism were Jewish plots!

And it seems the concept of racism has now expanded to a gigantic humongous level of meta-racism:

Today, anyone who published such stuff would be ostracised as a racist bigot. And rightly so — but you can find almost identical rhetoric in your daily newspaper, albeit with the word "Muslim" replacing the word "Jew".

And spare us the spluttering response about how Islamophobia isn’t racist because Islam isn’t a race. The concept of "race" — defined by skin colour or nose size or whatever mumbo jumbo you prefer — is itself a product of racism. Jews, Irish and Pakistanis are all victims of racism. Which race do they belong to?

Yep it seems that if you crack a joke about the Polish, you are a racist. Not an ethnicist, or a tribalist, or a simple-minded prejudiced git, but a racist. And if you splutter that the Polish aren't a race, clearly you're a product of racism.

Speaking of Godwin's Law, Adolf would be pleased, since the misuse and abuse of the concept of race was one of the most singular achievements outlined in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler invented a race, and then credited it with the entire flowering of the fruits of civilization (Chapter XI: Nation and Race).

Without pausing to consider whether it might be appropriate or considered, Sparrow proceeds to throw the concept of 'racism' around with gay abandon:

Today, all across the world, the parties of the far right are supplementing (or, in some cases, replacing) their traditional anti-Semitism with the much more popular anti-Muslim racism.

Oh sweet absent god, not another anti-religion as racism routine.

And it turns out that this 'racism' in relation to a religion - haven't you been listening, racism has nothing to do with genetics, everything to do with culture - is just a leap and a bound to that grand code word 'fascism':

Nothing surprising in that, of course. Fascism has always been entrepreneurial in that regard, content to exploit any prejudice that’s going. No, what’s really remarkable is the rhetorical convergence of the populist right with the "progressive" New Atheists.

Cue a quotation from Sam Harris getting agitated about multiculturalism and religious fundamentalism and sensible fascists:

Harris and Hitchens are not advocating fascism. No, it’s just that they think that progressives should learn from the European fascist parties about how to relate to Muslims.

To be fair, Sam Harris is a complete nut — a professional atheist who thinks there might be a scientific basis to reincarnation. If anything, he’s even more bloodthirsty than Hitchens, with his book The End of Faith pivoting from proselytising disbelief to explaining the morality of torture.

But his enthusiasm for the rhetoric of the Islamophobic Right is entirely characteristic of the New Atheism.

Yes, there's nothing like taking an extreme position to establish that all 'new atheists' are complete nuts, especially if they listen to complete nuts (what then the fate of those who read the Murdoch press?)

As opposed say to the enthusiasm for the rhetoric of fundamentalist Islamics, which seems to be entirely characteristic of the New Progressive.

Ah yes, now I'm getting it. Throw around glib phrases and words, toss them in the air, frolic and cavort with them, wield the blackening paint brush with vigour, and suddenly anyone in an opposing camp can be dressed up as Islamophobes and right wing reactionaries.

Sparrow then proceeds to a pop quiz of 'guess the fascist' from various quotes, but we'll leave that game to readers of his piece - here no spoilers, no spoilers here.

But we can reveal that Sparrow emerges triumphant from the game, and then unveils his very own version of pie in the sky:

Now, none of this is to say that the Left shouldn’t combat superstition and promote free thought. But a progressive atheism, as I’ve argued elsewhere, begins from a recognition that religion is shaped, first and foremost, by the material world and that the key task for the Left is thus not to berate believers for their ignorance and stupidity but to build the kind of society in which God no longer seems necessary.

Dearie me, that seems most noble and idealistic. A new kind of society in which god, or gods of choice, are no longer necessary:

By contrast, the characteristic method of the New Atheists is a crass philosophical idealism ...

Oh dear. Crass idealism. Do go on ...

... in which religion consists exclusively of a set of silly ideas, and religious believers are therefore simply dim-witted and dangerous. Which means, of course, that those groups who take religion particularly seriously are, almost by definition, particularly idiotic and particularly threatening.

Uh huh. Well I'm relieved to learn that those who take their religions particularly seriously aren't by definition particularly idiotic and particularly threatening, and perhaps it's time for Sparrow to head off to Uganda and pretend to be a homosexual, just to discover that the fundie Christians there aren't particularly threatening about being gay ...

Then on an equal opportunity basis, he can embark on a tour of Islamic countries and the deep south of the United States ...

But wait, apart from not calling devout true believers idiotic fundies, there's more.

It seems Islamophobia is responsible for Australia's response to refugees, as opposed to simple xenophobia, or a long time spent under the banner of White Australia and whites for a white country, helped along by liberal doses of the notion that Australia is a Christian country:

It’s surely not controversial to suggest that, lying behind the extraordinary hysteria about tiny numbers of boat arrivals, is a xenophobia traceable, in part, to Australia’s history as an outpost of white settlement in the midst of Asia. But since the War on Terror, the hostility to asylum seekers has also been fanned by hostility to Muslims. As has often been noted, a boatload of white, Christian refugees from Zimbabwe simply wouldn’t receive the same treatment dished out to Muslims fleeing from Afghanistan.

Oops, did I get that wrong. It seems it isn't the work of the new atheists, it's the work of Australia's proud white settlement history, assorted xenophobics, and white-loving and Christian-loving racists.

Oh heck, let's just pin it all on the new atheists anyway:

It is, of course, perfectly possible to question the existence of God, to support intellectual freedom and to oppose dogmatism, without embracing an Islamophobia that is the functional equivalent of 20th century anti-Semitism. But that’s not what the New Atheists are doing. Which is why the Left needs to call them out.

Call me a godless liberal if you like, but really if the left is full of this kind of illogical reactionary ranting, apparently in the service of the quaint notion that women should be bustled into burqas, and the sooner the better, for fear of offending fundamentalists in the Islamic world, then where's the difference to the ranting reactionary types at Murdoch, who also trot out the fascist angle at the drop of a hat, and resort to wild-eyed use of concepts like 'racists', 'inner urban elites' and 'group' stereotypes about rampant new angry atheists?

To be fair, Sparrow achieved the aim of all trolling, which is to generate plenty of comments below the fold. And along with it he's generated plenty of heat, and bugger all in the way of light as he elevates a couple of speakers into representatives of a 'new atheist' movement which deserves a decent stoning.

With a call to arms for the Left to challenge any atheists who dare harm the heads of stout hearted, true believing fundies and their pious, if sometimes a tad oppressive ways ...

Truly, it seems that the Progressive Left - as opposed to the lower case left, marching in lockstop to Sparrow, seem closer to god and to the Jensenist nepotics and the Pellist heretics than those damned new atheists with their fascist ways ...

I feel a Monty Python skit coming on:

Of course we could have ended with the ending to The Meaning of Life, but all that jibber jabber about getting along with each other might be a tad troublesome for the big and little endians.