Richard Dawkins’ The OUT Campaign
Posted by cabalamat on 2007-Oct-01
Dichard Dawkins has launched a new campaign for atheists: the OUT Campaign. They have a logo you can put on your website:
Today, the bestselling books of ‘The New Atheism’ are disparaged, by those who desperately wish to downplay their impact, as “Only preaching to the choir.”
Some choir! Only?!
As far as subjective impressions allow and in the admitted absence of rigorous data, I am persuaded that the religiosity of America is greatly exaggerated. Our choir is a lot larger than many people realise. Religious people still outnumber atheists, but not by the margin they hoped and we feared. I base this not only on conversations during my book tour and the book tours of my colleagues Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, but on widespread informal surveys of the World Wide Web. Not our own site, whose contributors are obviously biased, but, for example, Amazon, and YouTube whose denizens are reassuringly young. Moreover, even if the religious have the numbers, we have the arguments, we have history on our side, and we are walking with a new spring in our step – you can hear the gentle patter of our feet on every side.
Our choir is large, but much of it remains in the closet. Our repertoire may include the best tunes, but too many of us are mouthing the words sotto voce with head bowed and eyes lowered. It follows that a major part of our consciousness-raising effort should be aimed, not at converting the religious but at encouraging the non-religious to admit it – to themselves, to their families, and to the world. This is the purpose of the OUT campaign.
Norm Geras — an atheist himself — isn’t impressed with Dawkins, or at least not by what The Guardian has to say about the campaign. Geras writes:
I’ll certainly be giving it a miss if Dawkins is here reported accurately:
When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.
‘As far as many people can see’ - nice. Dawkins’s organization is to be called the ‘Out Campaign’. What, not the ‘Association for Propagating Poisonous Myths’?
I suspect Dawkins may have been misreported. What the OUT Campaign itself says about the Jewish lobby is similar but not quite the same:
But it doesn’t matter that we’re not a majority. To be effective, all we have to be is recognizable to legislators as a big enough minority. Atheists are more numerous than religious Jews, yet they wield a tiny fraction of the political power, apparently because they have never got their act together in the way the Jewish lobby so brilliantly has: the famous ‘herding cats’ problem again.
The Israel lobby in the USA has undoubtedly been very successful, but supporters of Israel are very shy about mentioning the fact, and they can get very defensive when people point out how successful the lobby is; consider Norm Geras’ comments above. Or consider the response to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. This is particularly odd when you consider that normally people and pressure groups are happy to trumpet their achievements.
So why the odd reticence? Maybe I’m being too cynical, but could it be that the Israel lobby know full well that they have an exceptional level of influence over U.S. foreign policy, such that the U.S. government often does things that Israel wants it too when these policies are not those that would best serve American interests? And that the Israel lobby doesn’t want the cat let out of the bag, for fear that they will lose influence?
