Perth Voice Interactive

PROMINENT US atheist Matt Dillahunty is coming to Perth with a warning for Australia’s atheists and secularists: don’t get complacent.

The magician and TV host of the Atheist Experience was raised in a southern Baptist home and spent 25 years as a fundamentalist.

He says the complacency of American atheists at the end of the 1800s has had disastrous results, with the country retreating ever further into religious extremism.

“There was this intellectual elitism, where some folks said ‘oh we’ve got evolution, we’ve got this thing licked, let’s let the peons have their religion,” he told the Voice. “And it backfired.”

The irreligious became more insular and made little effort to advance debate with theists. By the time the 1950s rolled around and the godless communists became the enemy, US evangelism underwent a resurgence. Church attendance figures skyrocketed and “one nation under God” was slid into the pledge of allegiance.

And so a republic founded by people escaping religious persecution—with a constitution written to separate church and state—became a nuclear-armed soldier for Christ. Now, even leading contenders for the Republican party’s 2016 presidential nomination are creationists who believe humans and dinosaurs shared the planet at the same time, less than 10,000 years ago, and state education departments across the US south and midwest are throwing out books that teach evolution.

“If we get lackadaisical we will regret it,” Mr Dillahunty says of Australia.

Evangelism here is on the rise, particularly with new age “cool” churches like Hillsong. Religious leaders play prominent roles in public debates including marriage equality, abortion and euthanasia, Catholic and “independent” (ie, protestant) schools are showered in public funds, taxpayer-funded chaplains in public schools are required to be sourced from religious organisations and the proportion of MPs who attend parliamentary prayers is far in excess of the number of Australians who declare themselves actively religious.

Mr Dillahunty says atheists must engage and encourage people to think for themselves, but not by looking down on people of faith: “Nobody’s going to be a perfect thinker, not even the hardline sceptics and atheists,” he says. “No-one has a monopoly on perfect thinking.”

He believes atheists can learn lessons from the gay community: staying in the closet does nothing but reinforce the status quo, it’s only by coming out loud and proud and working at it that change will occur.

“When you know atheists are people who deliver your mail and replace your kidney and share a fence with you, it’s hard to say those people are the terrible baby-killing monsters,” he says without irony (given the Old Testament is full of stories of God’s armies putting babies to the sword).

The atheist movement’s also often criticised for its “tone”. Religious leaders tend not to refute Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens’ words, but they do complain about how mean they can sound.

“There’s something else we learned from the gay movement,” Mr Dillahunty says.

“Thirty years ago, you had two different groups: the gay men in business suits with briefcases, and then you had the folks in assless chaps who were doing the pride parade.

“And you need both of them, because they are both working in different spheres. We need diplomats, and we need firebrands.”

For his Perth visit he won’t just be bashing on God, he’ll also encourage people to apply sceptical thinking to areas such as health products, psychics, superstitions, and how to source quality information, not quackery.

“Teaching people how to think is more important than teaching them what to think,” he says.

Mr Dillahunty is at UWA on Monday March 23, along with internet atheist AronRa. Tickets and info from goo.gl/KPvl4m

The Voice contacted God for comment. We’re waiting to hear back.

by DAVID BELL