When Humanists Betray Atheists - Why Atheists Should Abandon Humanist Organizations

Humanist organizations and public humanist intellectuals have abandoned the tradition of freethinking and intellectual independence, and this is why I argue that atheists should abandon these institutions.

I have been an atheist since the age of 10. For some reason when testosterone kicked in, I turned from a pious young Hindu boy to an anti-theist who quoted Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Age has tempered my anger, and taking psychedelics inspired me to treat nature as my god, but I still hold my values of freethinking and rejecting intellectual orthodoxy seriously.

Living without religion is not without its drawbacks, there is a powerful social cohering force to a shared belief system. I do not have the temple as a community center as my parents did, nor do I have church, as many of my Christian colleagues. At Brown and Harvard, I felt that many of my peers placed a unconscious faith in workaholism and progressivism. I desired something that would connect to my soul, a fundamentally religious yearning, but leave out the dogma and intellect-dulling tendency of blind worship. When I learned about Harvard’s humanist group, I decided to turn there for my continued search for meaning.

For those unfamiliar, Humanism “is a non-religious philosophy that emphasizes the potential of human beings and their ability to shape their own lives”. However, it has come to take on many different meanings depending on who you ask. There is secular Judaic humanism for example, which aims to blend many Jewish traditions with humanism. I want to focus on a version of humanism that I find particularly prevalent but intellectually and morally vacuous - progressive humanism. I focus on this form of humanism because it has come to dominate many humanist institutions such as the American Humanists Association. Aside from the obvious issue of its alienating a growing demographic of atheist conservatives, it has serious issues with its failure to stand up for freethinking values. It commits many of the cardinal sins of self-righteousness that organized religion is guilty of.

My time with Harvard’s humanist community had many positives. I met a group of introspective and kind individuals who I could discuss my life’s journey with. I enjoyed my participation within the group for a year. However, my experiences with the humanist chaplain marred the experience. The chaplain is an avowed progressive who claims to specialize in “racial justice and healing”, “masculinity from a feminist perspective”, and was aggressively vocal in Kamala Harris’s election campaign in 2024. It is ultimately his leadership that deterred me from the group, as not only did I find that his progressive politics, which were clearly a sign of his personal white male guilt that he spoke of, to be off-putting, but I also found his belief system emblematic of a deeper issue with upper middle class humanism. By nature of the group being at Harvard, we only spoke to people in a privileged elite, which I found dismaying as my family has more humble roots. This led to an air of virtue signaling in the group that I believe larger humanist institutions are guilty of, and ultimately it is this hubris that has led to my rejection of humanist institutions. Let me explain why.

Progressive humanists spit in the face of the history of atheism in order to adhere to their puritanical political correctness dogma

Any person acquainted with atheism and freethinking has certainly come across Richard Dawkins. What they likely don’t know is that Dawkins has been publicly rebuked by the American Humanist Association.

Dawkins was awarded the Humanist of the Year award in 1996 for his obvious contributions to making atheism a viable identity to hold in public. It should be emphasized that in the years Dawkins was a public intellectual, atheism and criticizing religion was seen as a blasphemy. All of the New Atheists (such as Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett) levied strong arguments against organized religions such as Christianity and Islam. So when the American Humanist Association decides to revoke his award, there must have been a serious reason.

Unfortunately, that is not the case - Dawkins had his award revoked for the following tweet:

For context, Rachel Dolezal is a white women who cosplays as a black woman and headed the NAACP. His tweet here is questioning whether this attempt at identifying as another race is equivalent to identifying as another gender. I can understand how some may see this is upsetting and perhaps insensitive, but this is hardly the grounds for the public rebuke Dawkins received:

“Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values. His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.”

When I attempted to find this history of disparaging remarks, I was unable to find it. Instead, I found Dawkins defending the rights of women and discussing the immoral treatment of the LGBT community in fundamentalist religious communities. This quote also shows the lack of reading comprehension of the individuals retracting the award - there is no way in which Dawkins attacked black identity here. In fact, his highlighting Dolezal’s bizarre behavior reinforces the moral bankruptcy some self-serving white people have in using the struggles of black individuals. Dawkins even wrote a public clarification to his tweet:

“I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue.”

If at this point you still think Dawkins is a bigot and deserves to have his award taken away - you are part of the problem. The public acceptance of atheism was not won by being hypersensitive, and projecting bad intentions onto somebody who may be making an honest mistake is a level of puritanism that atheists criticize amongst the religious. Human rights are not won without strength and courage, and often that means being willing to offend others. There is no doubt that Dawkins can be quite coarse in his rebuking religion, and perhaps this coarseness may lead him to accidentally committing social taboos at times. But neutering this freedom of intellect and opinion in the name of “inclusivity” throws out what has given the atheism movement its vitality and resilience. It reflects a cowardice of the modern humanism movement which has grown soft now that it has been pampered with the lack of intense public pushback that individuals like Dawkins fought against.

On the topic of cowardice…

Progressive humanists do a disservice to the millions oppressed by Islamic theocracy in their constant fear of being labeled “Islamaphobic” and “racist”

Islam, like any other religion, can become oppressive when followed from a fundamentalist point of view. While humanist organizations succeed in criticizing the insanity of the Christian right (gay conversion therapy, blanket stance against abortion even in cases of rape and incest, Bible in schools), they fail miserably in standing up for people oppressed in the Islamic world. This is due to the weaponization of terms such as “Islamophobic” and “racist” in the Western world, which has been hastened by progressive sensitivity.

Western countries face a dire questions as to how to integrate immigrants from developing countries as there is often a cultural clash between Western sensibilities and these immigrants’ countries of origin. This clash is very strong between the Islamic world and the western world. While it is true that right wingers can propagate bigoted views of Middle Easterners out of fear of terrorism, it is also true that many immigrants from Islamic countries hold bigotted views and actively make the West unsafe, especially for minorities. For example, the following abomination of a headline came across my newsfeed the other day:

Antisemitism and homophobia are omnipresent in the Quran, and Antisemitic attitudes are taught to many Muslims from a young age. I am curious why humanist organizations remain silent about such issues while they are more than happy to attack the religious right. The above headline is not an isolated incident - I can find many similar issues with Muslim fundamentalism in the West such as fundamentalist Muslims practicing “Sharia councils”. I urge humanists to move past their fear of being called racist or Islamophobic to hold bad ideas accountable. These slanders are often weaponized to guilt trip people into silence.

In the wake of the October 7th massacre at the Nova music festival and growing worldwide Antisemitism, Atheists and freethinkers also owe it to themselves to ardently defend Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend itself from the genocidal Hamas terrorist organization. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East where atheists and agnostics can live in safety. This does not mean that we shouldn’t mourn the lives of Palestinians lost or that Israel has handled their relationship with Gaza perfectly, but to turn a blind eye to the rampant antisemitism growing in the west, particularly within largely secular universities is a moral failure. It is unfortunate that Humanist leaders such as the humanist chaplain of Harvard fail to sufficiently condemn the Antisemitic nature of the massacre and continue to associate with individuals such as Timnit Gebru who perpetuate the lie that Israel is committing a genocide.

The final nail in the coffin for my desire to associate with humanist organizations is their failure to defend ex-Muslims. Humanists should be defending ex-Muslims. However, we find that many ex-Muslims continue to live in fear and are called “Islamophobic”, which is a silly accusation to make when many ex-Muslims fear physical violence as retaliation for leaving the religion. Individuals like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim and female genital mutilation survivor, are shunned by progressives and many in the current humanist movement for their criticisms of Islam. Similarly, Yasmine Mohammed, an ex-Muslim, is accused of Islamophobia on her wikipedia page. It is no wonder many ex-Muslims do not allies in western progressives, who are crippled by their fear of being accused as racists and Islamophobic.

Humanism claims to embrace science but sacrifices it at the alter of delusional progressive ideology

Atheism and freethinking end up going hand in hand with the scientific pursuit. In fact, the American Humanist Association states one of its 10 commitments to be freethinking:

As we are each bombarded with a constant stream of information, it can become challenging to decide what is accurate and true. Thinking critically allows us to make sense of all this information and reason our way to good judgments and effective solutions to the problems we face while rigorously avoiding pitfalls like rationalization, conformity, and stereotyping. This process forms the basis of the scientific method, which opens the door for new discoveries through hypothesizing and experimenting. Critical thinking is a skill that requires continued attention, practice, and reflection. Exercising our minds to build these skills enables us to challenge biases in ourselves and in others, paving the way for a fair, open-minded, and autonomous perspective that fosters a multicultural worldview.

However, this commitment is thrown out the door if it means championing progressivism. When advertising his latest book Tech Agnostic, the humanist chaplain invited the physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to chair the discussion. Unfortunately, Dr. Weinstein is the author of papers such as “**Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics”.** Here is an excerpt from this publication:

To provide an example of the role that white empiricism plays in physics, I discuss the current debate in string theory about postempiricism, motivated in part by a question: why are string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to racial hegemony? I believe the answer is that knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists. Contingentists focus on top-down social forces, or the contingency associated with laboratory instrumentation; in this way, they challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.1 Scientists are also typically monists—believers in the idea that there is only one science—who, rather than feeling burdened to prove there is only one science, expect contingentists to prove that there can be more than one (Soler 2015b). This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix.

I do not blame you if this jumble of words doesn’t make sense. Simply put, Dr. Weinstein calls into question much of physics due to it being a result of “white empiricism”. Not only does this violate the nature of experimentation being independent of the skin color of observers, but it also forgets the history of non-white physicists such as Satyendra Nath Bose and Jim Gates. I am aware that science has historically discriminated against non-white people. I am also not arguing that Dr. Weinstein has not done good scientific work in astrophysics, as one can search. However, it is important for freethinkers and atheists to distance themselves from individuals who use will use intersectionality and similar ideologies to reject fundamental aspects of reality.

All of the aforementioned critique can be levied at the denial of many humanist that biological sex is binary. This comes from a fear of being labeled “transphobic”, which is what happened to Dawkins. However, not challenging delusional intersectional ideas undermines the integrity of scientific integrity. A paper in Cell titled Sex contextualism in laboratory research: Enhancing rigor and precision in the study of sex-related variables underemphasizes the differences between the sexes on a biological level. This is done in an attempt to make science more inclusive. Scientists must make an effort to remain ideologically unbiased and challenge the scholarship of works like these, especially in a time where there is dwindling public trust in scientific institutions. The lack of humanists challenging academic ideologues on unscientific ideas is disheartening, but their willingness to work together with these ideologues to push an intersectional dogma is disgraceful.

Parting words

Many humanists have actually found a new religion, progressive ideology. They use it to explain the whole world. All ills of the world can be explained through the oppressor vs oppressed narrative. In this way, many prominent humanists have invented a crutch that religion serves for billions, a blanket and uncritical ideology that prevents them from having to stare into the chaotic void that is reality. This was a natural progression for humanism, as most of its followers are upper middle class, college educated, and left leaning. Many of these individuals fall into the luxury beliefs class of society, the types who will put vacuous signs such as these on their lawn:

My recommendation to atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers is to avoid politically polarized organizations and movements, scrutinizing everything critically. Obey no masters, listen to no chaplain or guru, and trust in your ability to reason and feel your way to who you truly are. True humanism involves talking to people of all backgrounds and treating them as equals. I argue that it is humanistic to reject the attitudes of modern progressives since these attitudes turn one into the arbiter of who is moral and immoral. Instead, it is worth taking seriously other people’s points of view and understanding how their life experiences have shaped their world view, but also being able to dispassionately come to a conclusion about your agreement with their point of view. This means taking conservatives seriously (I say this as a staunch liberal). Only then can we bridge this current empathy gap and live fully as humans.