A common trope I see in atheist circles are people (often claiming to be atheists themselves, and I’m sure many genuinely are) going around chiding other atheists for being mean, rude, or otherwise disrespectful to believers. It’s counterproductive! It doesn’t work! It paints us in a bad light!
Often enough, these criticisms are an example of concern trolling, someone telling us what to do because they don’t agree with what we’re trying to do. Greta Christina correctly pointed out that when they do us, they’re trying to get us to lay down the weapons we use to fight back against what’s done to us. They’re trying to get us to surrender our power.
Atheists are often caustic, sarcastic, and generally unpleasant with believers. I built up quite a reputation for snark in my days on reddit, and I have no doubt I’ll continue that tradition on lemmy. Why is that? Because reciprocity is a fundamental aspect of morality. We give back what we get, and in places like the US atheists are not treated very well. So a lot of atheists will either hide or they’ll fight back. Personally, I switch between them depending on my mood and circumstances. I also observe that for centuries, atheists did their best to stay quiet and get along without any reduction in the abuse they received. This quote comes from Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists:
I’ll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive.
And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.
So what’s the point in being a dick to believers? It can have more utility than people realize. Sometimes being a dick to dickish people helps contain them. Sometimes there’s utility in tactical dickishness. This is a problem that needs to be attacked from multiple different angles, not just the one that you think best.
I think Daniel Dennett said it best:
I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.
Try getting a scientist to concede that astrology or alchemy is a valid belief using that logic and you’ll get a lot of laughs. No one will challenge your right to believe nonsense if you want, but the moment you advertise that belief you should be prepared for ridicule.
Thomas Jefferson — ‘Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.’
Sam Harris also did a great job of demonstrating the problem with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmPtH4IDFNQ
The Elvis defense looks to be a good defense against religion. We should try using that type of defense more.
Fantastic video! Haven’t seen that one yet. Thanks for sharing.
Lol, you just did it again. Calling religious belief “nonsense” is pretending to have a more logical or sound conclusion. Your internal logic is just that, you’ve made a rational decision based on the evidence FOR YOU. That decision is affected by your values and belief systems. You are among others who agree here, no different than a church of people who disagree, it’s all merely belief trumped up as reason. Factually speaking, your conclusions are no more valid than a religious person’s. It’s all just unsupported belief, positive or negative, other than the admission that we just can’t possibly know.
You’re missing a lot and I don’t expect you to understand, you’ve shown a pretty clear inkling towards repeating your entrenched position without realizing the error in your thinking. It’s funny to me, the agnostic, that you don’t realize that it’s your confidence in your belief that makes it flawed.
To an ant in an ant farm, the kid whose room the farm is in who turns off the light at night is God. They have “no reason” to believe that there are other ant farms out there just as we have no reason to believe there are other universes out there. Your hubris lets you think that you can ridicule anyone who might believe our own universe is an advanced being’s ant farm. One ant might tell another that there is a world beyond this kid’s room, but no ant would likely fathom that there are other planets, stars, and galaxies. If you were the skeptical ant, you’d be telling the others that there’s no reason to believe there are other ant farms, let alone other planets, let alone other stars, galaxies etc. You’d mostly be right, but there’s no real evidentiary reason not to believe either. The facts are beyond the ant’s powers to observe or deduce.
If you think that as a member of a species mere thousands of years of age that hasn’t even explored one measly star’s worth of space, that you can confidently assert there’s nothing else out there because it hasn’t been proven, then you are a fool. Every bit the fool that the ant is who confidently states there’s nothing outside the boy’s room.
You don’t know what’s out there, and neither does anyone else. That’s the only truly logical conclusion.
I didn’t call religious belief nonsense. I said you can believe whatever nonsense you want, but you shouldn’t expect to express it without consequence. You wanna read into what I’m saying, go right ahead. You’re not making me look bad.
Of course I don’t know everything. I don’t pretend to. I certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers, or to have any connection to some amorphous higher power that grants me revelation. I’m not an atheist because I know there are no gods, and I’ve already said that. I’m an atheist because I have no reason to believe that gods are real. That distinction seems to escape you, somehow.
But you’ve already made up your mind about who I am and what I think, so I think that’s all there is to say here.
You:
>I didn’t call religious belief nonsense.
Also you:
> No one will challenge your right to believe nonsense if you want, but the moment you advertise that belief you should be prepared for ridicule.
You can cut the gaslighting, thanks. Maybe I did get you wrong, but my first impression was your post which seemed pretty danged antagonistic. I do appreciate the times you’ve said that you don’t claim to know, but find that to contradict statements like the one I highlighted. Catching you in the middle of a rant doesn’t give me the right to judge you though. Just leaving you with a quote from the founder of agnosticism, emphasis mine.
"Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the “bosh” of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not.” -Thomas Huxley
As an agnostic, I also find it more offensive when atheists profess to be guided by reason and science than when theists say they believe on faith. However…I’d defend either the atheist or the theist from someone in the opposite camp who would ridicule them for their beliefs or lack thereof. The distillation of agnosticism is that our belief systems on the origins of the universe aren’t capable of making us unequal. Take care.