A couple years ago, I was working on a research project that involved reading through the archives and accounts of colonial missionaries in Africa. They usually included a selection that described in systematic terms the process that was typically involved in converting, or attempting to convert, the “natives.” Conversion was never a simple process, and missionaries had to acknowledge that the people they variously called natives or heathens or pagans were never blank slates. It usually involved a certain degree of violence; in Africa, missionaries were actually actively complicit in the slave trade, amongst other forms of violence. Paradoxically, it was not uncommon for missionaries to see native religions as narcissistic, arbitrary, violent, self-indulgent, arrogant. Even though they were the slave trade-enabling colonizers. I see a lot of that missionary attitude in the way that atheists and so-called scientific rhetoric operate today. In quotations like the above, especially. Atheism can unwittingly operate a lot like religion. The denigration, the degradation (“a boring dwarf star”), the reducio ad absurdum (“a carbon-based bag”), this is all the language of a supremacist perspective. One no less arrogant than the one being criticized—because, of course, all religious thinking is reducible to the kind that puts humans at the center of the universe. That other characteristic of missionary writing? Disavowal of violence? If you’re, for example, living in the U.S. and a member of a settler descended population, I think it’s actually arguable that this corner of the world was made so that you could exist. The colonization and conquest of this country was always done in the name of future generations. One needn’t be a white supremacist to be living in its future tense. Neoliberal capitalism’s global division of labor? Also made so that the bourgeois and bourgeois-aspiring among us can exist, and to exist without significant interruption to our resource-heavy lifestyles. Was it Marx who suggested that capitalist ideology paved the way for the first form of godless theology?

A couple years ago, I was working on a research project that involved reading through the archives and accounts of colonial missionaries in Africa. They usually included a selection that described in systematic terms the process that was typically involved in converting, or attempting to convert, the “natives.” Conversion was never a simple process, and missionaries had to acknowledge that the people they variously called natives or heathens or pagans were never blank slates. It usually involved a certain degree of violence; in Africa, missionaries were actually actively complicit in the slave trade, amongst other forms of violence. Paradoxically, it was not uncommon for missionaries to see native religions as narcissistic, arbitrary, violent, self-indulgent, arrogant. Even though they were the slave trade-enabling colonizers.

I see a lot of that missionary attitude in the way that atheists and so-called scientific rhetoric operate today. In quotations like the above, especially. Atheism can unwittingly operate a lot like religion. The denigration, the degradation (“a boring dwarf star”), the reducio ad absurdum (“a carbon-based bag”), this is all the language of a supremacist perspective. One no less arrogant than the one being criticized—because, of course, all religious thinking is reducible to the kind that puts humans at the center of the universe.

That other characteristic of missionary writing? Disavowal of violence? If you’re, for example, living in the U.S. and a member of a settler descended population, I think it’s actually arguable that this corner of the world was made so that you could exist. The colonization and conquest of this country was always done in the name of future generations. One needn’t be a white supremacist to be living in its future tense. Neoliberal capitalism’s global division of labor? Also made so that the bourgeois and bourgeois-aspiring among us can exist, and to exist without significant interruption to our resource-heavy lifestyles. Was it Marx who suggested that capitalist ideology paved the way for the first form of godless theology?

(via thedisgruntledgradstudent)