The godless have been praised by Rachel Maddow for being one of the few American subgroups that recognize torture for what it is, and oppose it.

While many might assume that the faithful would be morally repulsed by torture, the reality is the opposite. When poll respondents were asked, “Do you personally think the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists amounted to torture, or not?” most Americans said the abuses did not constitute torture. But it was non-religious Americans who were easily the most convinced that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were, in fact, torture.

The results in response to this question were even more striking: “All in all, do you think the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists was justified or unjustified?” For most Americans, the answer, even after recent revelations, was yes. For most Christians, it’s also yes. But for the non-religious, as the above chart makes clear, the torture was not justified.

In fact, looking through the poll’s crosstabs, non-religious Americans were one of the few subsets that opposed the torture techniques – and that includes breakdowns across racial, gender, age, economic, educational, and regional lines. The non-religious are effectively alone in their opposition to torture.

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William Saletan takes a look at this chart and says creationism isn’t as bad as it could be; I look at it and see no good news, no consolation, at all.

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For the last several years, the most common strain of complaint I see in my mailbox is the “atheism only means you don’t believe in gods” comment. Sometimes they try to say it politely, more often it’s accompanied by howls and threats and fuck-shit-cock profanity. It’s been like this for a long, long time — I recall hanging out on alt.atheism on usenet and getting exasperated because the whole forum was about dogma, and that dogma was that you got to shut down any discussion about complex social issues that you didn’t like by declaring atheism to be totally values neutral (the other thing they talked about that drove me mad was the distinction between “strong” and “weak” atheism, and how significant the difference between “I don’t believe gods exist” and “I believe gods don’t exist” was. Jesus. Hair-splitting atheologians.)

Anyway, the main thing people hate me for now is my declaration that atheism has implications and consequences beyond being an abstract philosophical statement that lets you skip church on Sundays, and that further, among those implications is a requirement for those good ol’ Enlightenment values of equality and justice (and that we do more than pay lip service to them, unlike many of those 17th century writers who argued likewise). It’s reassuring that a lot of commenters here at FtB are sympathetic to those ideas, but really, sometimes it’s a little depressing to discover how many other atheists elsewhere turn purple and start screaming if you dare to imply that women, for instance, are fully autonomous, thinking individuals, and that the Biblical tradition of treating them as secondary servants to The Man is invalid.

So it’s kind of a relief to see that James Croft agrees with me, even if he is at that blah pudding of religious pandering, Patheos.

And I think that responding to a post about the relationship between social justice and Humanism with forceful assertions about the values-free nature of atheism is bullshit.

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Philip Kitcher is interviewed about his new book, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism. It sounds interesting, and I’ll probably pick it up…but two things annoyed me about the interview: the misrepresentation of the position of some New Atheists, and the religious apologetics. It’s nothing personal about Kitcher, but they’re just two things I bump into all the time, and it’s exasperating.

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