Open letter to The Public Editor of the NY Times

By Mathew Goldstein

Mark Oppenheimer's popular recent magazine article on an atheist preacher “The evangelical scion who stopped believing,” contains gratuitous atheist-bashing.  The article is larded with the usual attacks against atheism and atheists, including a few swipes at Richard Dawkins.  The NY Times is allowing Mark Oppenheimer to utilize the newspaper as a vehicle to promote selectively negative, exaggerated, over-generalizations that play into popular stereotypes against a disliked minority group.  Accusations like those made against atheists in this article are not well justified and should have been omitted.

It is a pejorative canard to characterize atheism as representing an "uncompromising scientism".  How about the more accurate, less nasty, "uncompromising empiricism"?  The efforts of this article's author to instruct NY Times readers to self-identify as humanists instead of as atheists because the former is more acceptable to him is misplaced personal editorializing.  

Mark Oppenheimer overlooks that Sam Harris wrote a book on morality without God, that Dan Dennett has never said that religion should be mocked or its adherents pitied, and that The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has a positive message about how one can be moral and fulfilled without relying on a God. A main message of these books was a rejection of theism, but why is the NY Times publishing content about atheism that assumes a rejection of theism is negative? If theism is false then why is it bad for people to focus on rejecting it?  Does Mark Oppenheimer make the same complaint against theists when they opt to make adopting theism a main message in their books?  And why is the NY Times publishing content that is predicated on denying and rejecting the arguments from those same writers, and many other writers, about the advantages of living a life without gods, without requiring the effort of a point by point rebuttal of those arguments?

As for “rampant misogyny” in atheism, unfortunately some atheists, like our president-elect, express sexist attitudes or behaviors.  But an objective account of atheist gatherings will not comport with Mark Oppenheimer's depiction of atheism as rotten with misogyny.   As a group they favored Hillary Clinton to be president.  Atheists as a group are not purveyors of, advocates for, or instantiations of, a rape culture. Positive attitudes about civic equality and ethical behavior may even be more prevalent among atheists than among other groups.  

As for “exalting Darwin,” wasn’t it Darwin who weakened the hold of theistic religion over society by showing that phenomena commonly considered explainable only by God had a purely naturalistic basis?  Mark Oppenheimer apparantly dislikes the implications of modern biology, but that is his personal bias that should not be imported into NY Times journalism covering atheism.

Instead of relying on Mark Oppenheimer for articles about atheism, how about publishing someone who will not try to define atheists as people with negative character flaws?  How about publishing someone who can write about atheists and atheism similar to the way journalists are expected to write about theists and theism, without the snarky anti-atheist editorializing?  Or at least do more redacting before publishing.  This article is mostly very good. With some modifications it would have been an excellent article.