“I feel like the feminine has
been a little undervalued. We all have to get our own jobs and make our own
money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking — it’s a
valuable thing my mom created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining
armor. I’m sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s
why relationships work.”
So
said Kirsten Dunst . . . an actress . . . from Hollywood.
Why
does this matter? It’s not so much that
she said something reasonable, level-headed and sensible, it’s the immediate,
nasty, and villainous attacks which started following Ms. Dunst’s
comments. In what supposedly passes for
some sort of commentary, Erin Gloria Ryan on the website Jezebel, for instance,
uses an extremely profane four letter word as part of her title, then simply
dismisses Ms. Dunst’s comments because “[Ms. Dunst] is not paid to write gender
theory so it shouldn't surprise anyone that she's kind of dumb about it.” In other words, Ms. Dunst doesn’t agree with
Ms. Ryan, therefore, nothing she said can have any value.
I
find myself asking: Why do people like
Ms. Ryan feel compelled to be so mean-spirited?
What animates such despair that she would feel compelled to write the
kind of vindictive and malicious words she has used against Ms. Dunst? If the most recent article on Jezebel, the
website Ms. Ryan edits, is any indication, it results from her atheism. Atheism claims that no transcendent authority
exists of any kind. Humans are their
authority. Thus, we can say whatever we
want, whenever we want, about whatever we want, however we want, in whatever
form we want. Right? I mean isn’t atheism all about freedom? Freedom from God placed restrictions on
living? Live and let live?
Yet,
Ms. Ryan seems to think Ms. Dunst is wrong. This happens so often with atheists that I’m
beginning to wonder if they are even able to see it. How is it that Ms. Ryan concludes Ms. Dunst
is wrong? If we are our own authority,
shouldn’t she take a live and let live approach? Shouldn’t that be at the heart of
atheism? Yet, again, and again, so often
it has become ubiquitous, atheists aren’t simply saying live and let live. They’re out there proclaiming something –
they’re out there proselytizing for their
worldview (see various books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and
others). The American Atheists
organization has a website which proclaims all kinds of goals and
aspirations. Frankly, it’s downright
bizarre.
The American Atheists
define atheism as: “the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts
the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a life-style and ethical
outlook verifiable by experience and scientific method, independent of all
arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.”[1]
There’s
only one itsy bitsy problem with this definition: it’s completely arbitrary. It also fails to meet its own standard (which
means it’s irrational) and it sounds an awful lot like a creed. First, it’s completely arbitrary to “accept
the supremacy of reason.” Human beings
have emotions and those emotions matter.
Ask any mom, atheist or not, who just lost a five year old to
leukemia. Let’s see if reason alone
reigns supreme in her thinking. Not. Nor should it. Second, how do you verify ethics by
experience and scientific method? By
ethics I presume the atheists here mean how humans should govern their
interactions with each other? That
certainly seems to be what the website suggests. Gosh, just the events of the 20th
century strongly suggest to me that experience dictates that human beings are
pedantic creatures who will most often act in their utter self-interest even at
a gargantuan cost of human life, enormous human suffering, and tremendous
destruction of property. This is despite
roughly 5,000 years of recorded human history leading up to the 20th
century, which certainly, I think, would have been a sufficient period of time
from which to draw all the appropriate data necessary for us humans to get it
right . . . right? Problem three is that
the proposed definition is, itself in the form of a creedal statement
describing what atheists believe. Upon
what authority have the American Atheists determined that this is what people ought to believe? With no transcendent authority, human purpose
can only be a purely arbitrary purpose, suffering from the whims of human
tyranny. How is it the American Atheists
have come up with a proper determination of what ought to be?
So
we get a relatively innocuous opinion from an actress who simply responded to a
question. She was honest in her
answer. How can she possibly be wrong,
given the atheistic worldview? Who cares
whether Kirsten Dunst is paid to write “gender theory.” In fact, who cares what “gender theory”
is. Who cares whether reason reigns
supreme or not. How can it possibly
matter? There is simply no basis for
atheists to make these kind of claims without being completely arbitrary.
The
atheist dogma, ironically, crashes in on itself. It claims to be independent of “arbitrary assumptions
of authority,” except, of course, for its own arbitrary assumption that its
statements about reality are authoritative. Thus, Ms. Ryan can claim Ms. Dunst is wrong
because she arbitrarily believes that “gender theory” has some sort of
authority to which Ms. Dunst apparently unwittingly owes some allegiance, even
though Ms. Dunst may not agree with it or even, gasp, believe in it!
Sounds
vaguely familiar . . .
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