Religion, Society

Oprah’s Bias Against Atheists

-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger

oprahOn a recent show of Soul to Soul, Oprah interviewed Diana Nyad, the long distance swimmer who, at age 64, swam from Havana to Key West. During the interview Oprah mentions that Nyad told the producers that she (Nyad) is “not a God person.” Nyad responds: “I’m an atheist.” Oprah responds incredulously: “But you’re in the awe.” Oprah just can’t believe that an atheist could feel awe. While atheists often use reason to understand reality, they have the same emotions exhibited by non-atheists. Atheists just don’t feel the need to affix the “God” label to their feelings.

Nyad saw no contradiction between her atheism and her ability to experience awe, or as she calls it: “weep with the beauty of this universe and be moved by all of humanity.” Oprah was having none of this when she said “I don’t call you an atheist then. I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, then that is what God is.”

Nyad, maybe sensing Oprah’s uneasiness, offered a concession to the faithful by saying that her “definition of God is humanity and the love of humanity.” That an atheist would make a theist uneasy indicates the theist’s lack of confidence in their worldview. The comfort of theists is not a primary concern for those who advocate reason.

Nyad also went on to explain she’s a “spiritual” person and believes in souls that live on after death. While atheism is not a set of beliefs, it is simply not believing in any god, most atheists don’t accept the other beliefs that accompany God belief. For all the reasons that belief in God unreasonable, belief in the soul is also unreasonable. Nyad’s beliefs freely crisscross the atheist-theist divide.

Oprah’s prejudice against atheists reinforces negative stereotypes. Her viewers will see Oprah’s prejudice as a trait to be imitated and the cancer will spread. For her viewers who already hold anti-atheists biases, those biases have been validated.

Many Christians have characterized Oprah’s beliefs as a form of pantheism, where the universe, or nature, is identical with divinity. While Oprah calls herself a Christian, pantheism is generally not accepted as part of Christian theology. Oprah’s promotion of Eckhart Tolle and his books has done nothing to ingratiate her with Christians.

Overt displays of bigotry against non-believers are tolerated if not encouraged by our society. Studies show that atheists are among the least liked people. This dislike keeps many atheists in the closet. The anonymity of the internet allows atheists to come out on-line while maintaining their disguise at other times. On the internet, people can learn counter-arguments to theological claims and use their own mind to decide which is more compelling.

H/T: Dave Niose, JT Eberhard, Jerry Coyne, Mano Singham, Hemant Mehta, David Edwards.

261 thoughts on “Oprah’s Bias Against Atheists”

  1. Dredd, such is not your intent, that much is certain. Observing evolution, already a non-starter for many simply because “I Believe,” has led us to bacterial messaging, and if evolution was “insulting,” the bacterial messaging is going to be considered blasphemous. One wonders if Oprah has “evolved” to that point yet. Her inability to see beyond “awe” does not fill one with hope.

    No disrespect intended to you personally, only that you routinely bear witness to things in our universe that really ought to be more widely known.

  2. James Knauer 1, October 19, 2013 at 12:19 pm

    … it borders on insulting.

    Dredd can help her with that.
    =====================
    I never border on insulting or other jimmy-rigged thinking.

  4. There was a time when Oprah was fresh. I have family members who have in the past directly credited Oprah for them feeling they could let go of prejudices, particularly against women and non-straight people. The change in their views was real. That was in the early 1990s.

    Today. America has changed out from under Oprah. She is going to get a lot more atheists on her set. Her “awe” theory is bad need of an update, as it borders on insulting.

    Dredd can help her with that.

  5. He also believed in the elimination of the Monarchy in favor of a republican government. I do not agree with this notion. Chris was a realist not fanciful about enlightened solutions. You must know, in depth, what you are up against in any viable movement. And lest your predilections find admiration for the subject of investigation, you’ll know more about your counterparts in the efforts to advance mankind, if that is your desire. He may have seemed illogical to some. I believe he was as cool and cold hearted in his investigations as he needed to be. He was able to look at something with a blind eye, as frustrating as that seems, and sometimes to me very frustrating! I think his diatribes were as much an indictment of conflict resolution which could not be concluded without some infection of Religious sentiment. I lost track of this too and I certainly don’t want to control my intellectual and spiritual life exclusively with this point of view, but, with Chris, I could suspend subjection, and be consumed with an absolute unemotional exegesis and then determine to accept or say patooey to the intellectual outcome!

  6. Oprah is an idiot. She preaches spirituality and then gives everyone in her audience a new car. Very spiritual indeed. Everything that she does of a “charitable nature has her name on it, which is not charity, it is ego. She has nothing to say that is worth listening to.

  8. I’m not at all qualified to pass judgement on Oprah in that I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched her show, including her movies. I just found her rather silly and about as deep as a rain puddle.

    However, one can not deny her business sense and ability to recognize opportunity and jump on it.

    As to her sense of religion, atheists, awe, etc … rain puddle.

    But … I just finished reading a poll commissioned by Esquire Magazine and published in this Nov.’s issue entitled: “13 Things That Define the New American Center” in which Oprah got a relatively strong call out as trustworthy … so, what in the he!! do I know …

    I’ll note the link in a separate post so as to confound the vortex of doom

  9. George Steele said: “(I have been disowned by portions of my family for my non-belief. In their religions non-belief = amorality. To them it is impossible to be moral without faith. I must be a rapist, child molester or worse because I have no morality.)”

    So ask them exactly where in the bible do they get their morality. Do they follow ALL the prescriptions/proscriptions that are written there? If so, I assume they’re out there stoning adulterers and non-believers, etc. No? Then I guess they pick and choose what they follow. Huh, I wonder how that works.

    How can your morality be guided by a mish mash of cherry picked prescriptions/proscriptions that vary from one person to the next. I thought morality was supposed to be consistent. And if they’re just picking what they think is right, what is guiding them? Very curious stuff.

    And all nonsense, of course. If they do follow it all to the letter then they’re clearly stone evil. And if they just pick what they think is right, then they’re clearly finding their true morality somewhere else; maybe the same place as atheists do?

    But I’m asking a religious believer to be rational. And that’s clearly not their thing.

  10. Misrepresentation has always been the tactic of religion. It worked well against each other (e.g. pejoratives like “satanist”, “baby eater”, “mud people”, “subhuman”, etc.) but only because those being attacked are equally believers in another fiction. Atheists don’t subscribe to fictions, so such lies and insults don’t work, and atheists have the knowledge and argument to refute them. We read religious texts because we want to know what the theists’ arguments are, while they “think” ignorance of differing views make for a stronger argument.

    No, they don’t. Arguing from ignorance only displays their ignorance a second time.

  11. patsylvania,

    What do you think about the point Elaine raises? Did his stance on Iraq change how you viewed Hitchens or is that stance irrelevant to you? Is it possible to miss someone but to also take a critical view of them at the same time? I’m asking for your thoughts about those ideas.

    Hitchens was one of the few people who was pro-torture, gung ho about waterboarding, yet he did undergo it, unlike all other proponents. I thought he made some good points and I also think he made unreasoned arguments that harmed many people.

  13. Many people have been so deeply affected by the view that religious belief is mandatory that they are uncomfortable with doubt. They feel that if they were to allow themselves to doubt, they would suffer punishment. They may also feel that since belief is universally commanded, it is wrong for anyone else’s doubt to be tolerated, and so they are uncomfortable acknowledging the legitimacy of anyone else’s doubt. They therefore feel that it is obligatory for them to jump to the defense of belief, because to fail to do so might be interpreted by the “jealous God” as a lack on faith on their part, as well.

  15. Mike S.,
    She have won the “lottery”, but it was one heck of a lottery!
    Good catch Elaine.

  16. patsyvania,

    I lost a lot of respect for Hitchens when he became a big proponent of our preemptive war with Iraq.

    Christopher Hitchens’ Unforgivable Mistake
    http://gawker.com/5868761/christopher-hitchens-unforgivable-mistake

    The outpouring of grief, goodwill, and teary encomia that has attended news of Christopher Hitchens’ passing would—if he was anything like the persona he presented in print—have turned his stomach. He loathed sentiment, welcomed combat, and delighted in inflicting hard truths. In that spirit, it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong.

    In its obituary, the New York Times quoted Hitchens’ friend Ian Buruma, who told the New Yorker in 2006 that Hitchens was “always looking for the defining moment — as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy.” He shared that impulse with George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, and they found their moment in the stupid decision to invade Iraq. For Hitchens, it was the opening maneuver in a grand, imagined clash of western civilization against the Islamofascist hordes.

    It was something else for 113,000 civilians who died in the chaos unleashed. The great tragedy of Hitchens’ life was that, toward its end, he aligned himself so stridently with the very fools, cowards, and charlatans who most desperately invited exposure by his prodigious skills as butcher. How can someone who devoted so much of his life to as noble a cause as destroying the reputation of Henry Kissinger blithely stand shoulder to shoulder with Rumsfeld?

    People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made. In September 2005, he defended the debacle in Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard in terms that are simply breathtaking in their lack of concern for the victims of his Mesopotamian adventure. It was headlined “A War to Be Proud Of.”

    Torture and murder by feckless American troops at Abu Ghraib? “Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad,” he wrote. How clever! Anyone objecting to the occupation of Iraq on the grounds that torturing and murdering people is wrong and illegal is now obligated to defend the “abattoir” that existed prior to our arrival.

    Anyone complaining that the chief rationale for the invasion—the indisputable presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—turned out to have been a fantasy is being “childish,” he wrote. “‘You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire.’ I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra.” How tiresome you are with your boring insistence that wars be justified! Hitchens’ answer to that whine is a trivial list of ominous fragments, conspiratorially arrayed: “Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad.” If you don’t recognize the immediate global danger that the presence in Iraq of a man who built a bomb that killed six people ten years ago presents, you are a child.

    If you dispute the Bush Administration line that “terror” must be fought in Iraq lest it be fought on our soil, Hitchens alleged, you are guilty of dispensing “sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates.” Sheehan’s son had been dead scarcely a year at the time Hitchens wrote this.

    But surely Christopher, you recognize that the war has been badly bungled even if all your hearts were in the right place, right? “We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves.” For Christopher Hitchens to identify a subject about which no argument is required is a rare thing indeed. Abu Ghraib—why argue? The $9 billion in cash that simply disappeared—what’s to argue? Two months after the Hitchens wrote those words, U.S. Marines massacred 24 men, women, and children in Haditha. No need to argue.

    “If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated,” he closed, “I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.” The rest of Hitchens’ life turned out to be unjustly circumscribed. But his demilitarized federal and secular democracy is a mirage. More likely a future Iranian client state and Shi’ite stronghold awaits. Those words would not wear well on his headstone.

    Hitchens’ style—ironically, given his hatred for tyranny and love of free expression—brooked no dissent. There was little room for good-faith disagreement or loyal opposition. His enemies were not just wrong, they were stupid or mean or small-minded or liars or cheats or children or cowards. It was thrilling and gratifying to see that articulate viciousness deployed against the Clinton cartel, or Mother Teresa, or Henry Kissinger—against power and pretense. To see it deployed in favor of war, on behalf of a dullard and scion, against the hysterical mother of a dead son was nauseating.

    In the months and years since Hitchens publicly proclaimed his pride in the invasion of Iraq for Murdoch’s ideological crib-sheet, 78,708 Iraqi civilians and 2,548 U.S. troops have been killed. He did immense good in his life, and unforgivable harm.

  17. Jill: While I agree with you about the nature of such deities, the reason I care is that the fictional deities provide an excuse to those that would oppress others in the name of such deities, and often defraud them into being willing participants in their own oppression and robbery, by promising them “rewards” that will never be delivered.

  19. I miss Chris Hitchens too! He did make you think! Sometimes I called him Juggernaut Screed and sometimes I just wanted to hug him. He always sent me scurrying to find more about his points of view, even if I didn’t agree!

  20. I’m a, don’t care. The gods and goddesses humans have devised seem terrible. Why do they need worship? Aren’t they supposed to be all powerful, etc.? I never see these deities doing anything of value in the world. They could exist but why associate with beings who ask for worship, murder, war and torture in their name? Why associate with deities who ask you to turn over your mind, body, and spirit to them? Of course, these are all things humans in power want and people give them to other people when they should not, just as they do to deities.

    Oprah is willing to erase the real ideas of another person, forcing them to agree with her. That is disrespectful and wrong.

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