Some of you may remember a few months back my post about Larry Darby, former head of the Atheist Law Center who is now running for attorney general in Alabama. Eugene Volokh and I both wrote posts outing Darby as the total nutball that he is after a series of bizarre posts he made to the ReligionLaw listserv that Volokh runs. Now it seems that folks in Alabama are catching on to his barbaric and ignorant views, while Darby takes his crusade to other states. In addition to being a holocaust denier (he says that less than 200,000 people died, and most of them died from typhoid), he also sounds very much like a white supremacist:
Larry Darby concedes his views are radical, but he said they should help him win wide support among Alabama voters as he tries to "reawaken white racial awareness" with his campaign against Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson...
Darby said he will speak Saturday near Newark, N.J., at a meeting of National Vanguard, which bills itself as an advocate for the white race. Some of his campaign materials are posted on the group's Internet site.
"It's time to stop pushing down the white man. We've been discriminated against too long," Darby said in the interview.
That rhetoric is straight out of the KKK handbook. And what a bizarre combination of views. No doubt there's a minority of people in Alabama who would find his racial politics appealing (this is, after all, the state that only 6 years ago had 40% of its citizens vote against removing laws against interracial marriage from their books despite the fact that they were struck down almost 40 years ago and can't be enforced), but I can't imagine many of them would vote for an atheist. To see an atheist taking a position that is usually held by those who claim to be Christian, typically southern nationalists, is quite disconcerting.
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Newark? Is he kidding? He must be kidding. There's no use in holding a quasi-KKK rally in Newark. More than half of Newark's population is black. Only about 25% is white.
Oh, that would be a sight: Mr Darby, blurting out his racist idiocies to a >50% black audience. And what an opportunity for the stores to get rid of spoiled eggs!
Darby is a patheric lunatic.
I have absolutely no idea how someone can be cognizant enough to reject bad religious ideas, only to turn around and latch on to even worse political and/or cultural ones.
I shouldn't be (because I have no other ties with this man other than a shared disbelief in deity), but I find Darby deeply embarrassing. I hope they rub shit in face in Newark. Literally.
I think it's good to poke fun at kooky atheists every now and then to offset the (deserved) kooky Christian fundamentalist bashing that goes on so much on this site. Wackos are found everywhere I'm afraid.
I also think that this underscores something about atheism. Atheism doesn't really mean anything. I says what you don't believe, but doesn't say much about what you do. There are indeed some really kooky atheists.
That's a very good point, Adam. Atheism means nothing more than a lack of belief in God. Atheists have nothing in common beyond that. Their political views can range from anarchist to communist to fascist to libertarians. Their ethical views can be similarly diverse. The mere fact that someone is an atheist tells you virtually nothing about their views on anything else. And despite the silly, egotistical notion that some atheists have that atheists are smarter than religious people, I have known some staggeringly stupid atheists (just as one can find them in any other group as well).
Darby just keeps getting more and more insane. I really hate him and I wish he would go away.
What an utterly pathetic excuse for a human being.
There are even atheist theocrats who believe that, while they personally don't need religion, that it is necessary for "society in general" and that it should be integrated into government and encouraged. Most of them believe some variant of "stupid people need religion, but I don't because I'm intellectually superior."
I get the impression that there are some of these in the right-wing think tank community. Irving Kristol comes to mind.
Yes, those people are followers of Leo Strauss, or one strain of them anyway (the East Coast Straussians). I don't think I would call them theocrats; they certainly don't want an actual theocracy. But they do think that it's necessary to not undermine belief in God because that's what keeps the ignorant masses in line and behaving themselves. Allan Bloom was certainly among them, a man who defended a whole litany of religion-based moral laws, yet was himself an atheist, a homosexual and a hedonist.
i riff off ed's post here.
Interesting post, Razib. I knew that there was a strain of Odinists among racist groups, but I wasn't aware there was any sizable percentage of agnostics and atheists among them. I guess I'm used to seeing the Christian Identity types more commonly.
ed,
1) christian identity is generally considered on the wane in relation to odinism. honestly, i think it is too much artifice to "explain" away the fact judaism is fundamentally the precursor to christianity (identity types do have explanations about how they are the real jews, etc., but too many racialists are seeing through these fictions, a similar dynamic occured in germany in the 1930s between 'german christians,' who were somewhat similar to identity in rejecting the jewish origins of christianity while trying to adhere to christianity in the generality, and german pagans who mocked german christians for trying to square a circle).
2) remember that many racialists lionize nietzsche (he, the philo-semitic pan-europeanist), so atheism is often seen as a step of emulation.
3) atheists are to a great extent non-conformists to socia mores, and racialism is similar. it makes sense i think that a bias toward bucking societal mores is probably a necessary precondition for being a racialist, so you can expect all sorts of other deviant beliefs/attitudes, and i think atheism is one of those (that is, the % of people who are "christian" because of social expectation only might become atheists if that social expectation disappears, which is exactly what happens in the racialist movement).
Darby sounds like John Gibson telling "us" to "have more babies" because minorities are going to outnumber "us" soon.
I found this quote resonated with my feeling during the reading of this post:
Amen. Amen, brother.
Thats definetly true, although as a trend they seem to be more logical in their thought and less dependent on emotions in this one area.
But atheism certainly doesn't make any statements passed the lack of belief. I often wonder why and how it came to be that a supernatural belief of lack thereof matters in any way.
I think each of us is a product of his culture and upbringing. That determines whether the Darby's of the world have idiotic stances far more than supernatural ideas.
I don't see this at all being valid. The majority of atheists I know are very straight laced conservative types.