Empiricism and New Atheism: Why Andrea Vos's "I Have Absolutely No Respect For Your Faith" Sucks
The state as well as capitalism, is ruled by a tendency of empiricism that rejects philosophy, a centralized approach to anti-philosophy. Empiricism is centralized because it notes a single element: the notion of Fact: as the fundamental structure of government, and it connects this to all facets of life, considering it necessary for normal functioning. The functioning in this case is a hidden conscious subliminal metaphysics of Fact: that metaphysics is dead when dealing with things like atheism and logical positivism. This is a hidden metaphysics that denies its metaphysicality simply because it sees matter, the thing that connects the mind to the soul, as a physical item, instead of a mental and spiritual affair.
The proponents of this empiricism, the New Atheists and the scientists of the world, also reject forms of religion because they find it inherently harmful, a notion which can be easily debunked by treating religion like a firearm, and not a net negative. One of the writers who hold this view, is Andrea Vos, known for creating the resource pronouns.page, an incredibly useful website for LGBT language that I have used myself. Andrea Vos said ”Faith is not a virtue. By definition, it's a suspension of critical thinking. Something like this is not worthy of respect.” (Andrea Vos, I Have Absolutely No Respect For Your Faith)
That, however, is a fallacy in reasoning, as well as historically inaccurate. If Vos took the time to read through theology, most importantly Buddhism and Christianity, they would see that Greek (specifically the Platonics) and islamic philosophy, a mode of critical thinking, has influenced those theologies to a great degree. Not to mention, some of the most important scientists in those fields that people like him claim promote critical thinking (science and philosophy, for example) are religious or spiritual to an extent. If it was true that faith was a suspension of critical thinking, then Kierkegaard has talked about it way better than Vos (or some of the New Atheists, Hitchens and Dawkins for example) has done. For example, his book Fear and Trembling goes into this in considerable detail. Kierkegaard believes that faith is the same time doubt, and that we can’t be sure of our faith. However, we still can be faithful in despite of this. This is a position that inherently goes at odds with Vos’s position.
Vos has rooted his anti-religion from his past (an upbringing of religious oppression) instead of rational thinking, which is hypocritical for someone who wants to promote said thinking. As they said in I Have Absolutely No Respect For Your Faith, “My sexual orientation is continuously being called “an abomination”. I'm regularly being threathened with hell and eternal damnation[…] My family's homophobia is religiously motivated. Polish anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, and anti-euthanasia laws are religiously motivated. ISIS, Inquisition, Al-Qaeda, Rohingya genocide were all religiously motivated[...] I'm angry. I'm fucking furious.” Not a good look for someone who wants to replace religious sentiments with rationality and humanism. Like I said before, religion is a firearm. It isn’t a net negative (or net positive, for that matter), and it’s an inaccurate and flawed conception to think that it’s degenerating civilization, especially if your proof is the things that had been done to you, or are still being done to you.