“If there is no God, why spend your whole career refuting that? Why not stay home?”

The question was, famously, put to Christopher Hitchens at a debate with Frank Turek. It keys into a major perception of anti-theists — that all we do is argue against religion out of some ego-driven craze to merely rub in people’s faces that they’re wrong. This stereotype is particularly disturbing because it implies that we are against religion just for the sake of being against religion — there is nothing in the wider world we care about. It puts us in terms of being against religion without thinking that, possibly, we could be for something.

The reality is that we are anti-theists because we are pro-other things. But, for better or worse, it is easy for others to define us based on what THEY are in favor of. So, for example, if you are pro-truth and others are pro-lie, every time you speak up for the truth the pro-lie people will see you as speaking against lie. This makes you against them, in their minds, so that your “anti-lie” identity becomes more apparent than your “pro-truth” identity. Now, if you’re not all that pro-truth, you might say, “OK, lies are not so bad” and be seen less negatively. But if you are strongly pro-truth, you may be forced, in a place that loves lies, to speak against lies much more often. The real answer, then, to anyone who asks you, “Why do you spend your whole career fighting lies?” is not primarily, “For the sheer joy of it,” but more, “because I am pro-truth.”

And because you’re primarily pro-truth — it’s not like you’re fighting lies all the time. Perhaps much of the time, you’re just living your life, a life that happens to embrace the truth. Sometimes lies might bump against that, prompting you to respond. That doesn’t mean that fighting lies (or religion — which is pretty much the same thing) is all you ever do.

That’s more-or-less how Hitchens responded — first by pointing out that defending atheism didn’t make up his whole career, and then by describing what he was for in stating his motivation to fight against religion:

It’s not my whole career for one thing. It’s become a major preoccupation of my life, though, in the last eight or nine years, especially since 9/11, to try and help generate an opposition to theocracy and its depredations internationally; that is now, probably, my main political preoccupation — to help people in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Lebanon in Israel resist those who sincerely want to encompass the destruction of civilization and sincerely believe they have God on their side in wanting to do so. I think maybe I will take a few moments to say something I find repulsive about especially Monotheistic, Messianic religion, with a large part of itself it quite clearly wants us all to die, it wants this world to come to an end you can tell the yearning for things to be over, whenever you read any of its real texts, or listen to any of its real authentic spokesman, not the pathetic apologists who sometimes masquerade for it. [He then discusses several examples from Christianity, Islam, and Judaism] So when I say as a subtitle of my book that “Religion poisons everything”, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity: it says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission, it means we can’t be good to one other, it means we can’t think without this, we must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone who we fear – the essence of sadomasochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship – and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say that this is evil. And though I do some nights stay home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity.

There are reasons, then. It’s not like he’s against religion just to ruffle feathers. He’s against it because he has concrete values, and religion actively attacks those values. But because the values are a positive aspect of his life that he embraces, he’s not always fighting against religion — his fight against religion is incidental to the values he personally holds.

I’m making this clarification because I have heard, way too often, that anti-theists are obsessed with religion. No, that’s not the problem at all — the problem, all too often, is that religion is obsessed with insulting atheism, in various ways. And it strives to restrict the arena for us atheists to fight back for our values if they don’t conform to the dictates of the religion.

There are many atheists who are content to accept the arena the religious give them, debating religion only according to the rules of a religion.

I am not one of them. And it’s not about selfishness — it’s because I know that this arena is there to insulate religion from criticism. I want the arena for criticism to be widened, because I think religion (albeit some forms more than others) needs to be challenged much more than it is willing, oftentimes, to be challenged.

But of course that doesn’t mean that I’m always talking about religion every time I’m around religious people. I said as much in a recent blog post:

And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have close relationships with religious people. Most atheists have religious friends, family members, business partners, and acquaintances. Some of the people who hate religion the most even have very religious spouses. And these people often talk about religion in ways that seek understanding and respect the person without accepting compromise and respecting the religion itself.

I certainly don’t discuss religion all the time in talking to religious people — there’s more to people than that. Often, I talk about work, how their family is doing, funny stories, life goals, movies and tv shows, and the like. When I’m around the people close to me, and for many religious acquaintances, talking about religion doesn’t take up a lot of my time — although I do usually discuss religion when it comes up, and, in Hitchens’ words, doing so in public forums is a major preoccupation of mine.

There are a lot of reasons why I have this preoccupation, but they boil down to the fact that I don’t think faith is a healthy variable to use when making decisions. If you do things based on faith, as opposed to reason and evidence, you’re likely to have beliefs that there is no way of proving false, no matter how outlandish and harmful they are. Yeah, I know that some religious people think that’s a naive view of faith but, in spite of their protestations, their definitions of “faith” consistently seem to inevitably include a bit of a leap into a realm in which you’re just supposed to believe some things about the world and other people, regardless of evidence to the contrary. I’m not in favor of this tendency — I think that trying to find and stick to the truth as much as possible is crucial when attempting to solve the problems and construct the morality that will best serve the real lives of people today. And that’s what I want to do, primarily — solve the major problems and construct the morality that will best serve the lives of people as they are, rather than as we imagine them to be. At least, as much as possible. Doing otherwise can produce negative consequences when our imaginations hit upon the way the world actually works.