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Yep, that will make people in Texas less lilkely to support religious-based laws alright
It is a provocative way of making a point that I would not personally choose but at the same time I understand it. Your critique could just as well be applied to a gay pride parade, particularly a couple of decades or more ago. You would not expect being deliberately provocative to have resulted in resources being directed to AIDS research, the SSM ruling and other improvements for the acceptance of the personhood and right to exist of the LGBTQ community. You would imagine that you'd catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And yet ... when there is a structural privilege designed to make the playing field uneven for a minority, sometimes in-your-face tactics make sense. It forces people to confront issues they otherwise would refuse to, with the full support of the majority to encourage them not to.
Ask any activist about why they do non-violent protest. It is to get around ingrained attitudes and to destabilize enshrined majority privilege. And there are few privileges that need deflating more than religion's chronic insistence that it deserves unearned respect and deference in the marketplace of ideas, including a blanket exemption from substantiating its claims.
As I've said elsewhere, I don't really give a fig what nonsense others want to believe and mostly leave them alone in it. But there are ways in which some of the things people get up to foster harms in society. Some people feel a calling to be activists against those harms. It's not my bag, particularly not at my age ... but I do not judge it either.
V.P's is making a useful point. I think we all knew that some atheists were going to take the wrong line and do more harm than good. By and large though that bad press has come through helpful Christians drawing our attention to atheists having the law on harmless caff owners who gave reductions to people who prayed before eating or atheist teachers who encouraged their pupils to ask WHY they believed in God (turned out to be a Christian) rather than anything atheists have posted.
In any case, accepted VP's advice about how to help secularism flourish, who knows best how to do it? Maybe one memorable stunt is worth all the debates. Maybe one Zombie Jesus march is more effective than the collected works of Farrell Till. If someone goes over the top, then the Internet allows us to express disapproval.
The bottom line should never, in any case, be like politics: about who looks like their mom would approve of them, but which one has the best case.
"You are so dumb to believe in your silly sky daddy and you may as well believe in a Flying Spaghetti monster and no one should believe something that is written in a book and I know this because ..."
victorian here is 100% correct.
nothing makes atheists look worse than their own posts and the language they use.
every offensive thread, every name-calling post, and there are hundreds of threads and thousands of such posts here on CD, is another nail into the coffin of atheists making themselves look bad. Their behavior renders their message unattractive, unappealing, uninviting; and very effectively pushes people away.
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
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Quote:
Originally Posted by victorianpunk
Reddit is for cucks. You can guess where I am on the internet by that statement...
And online debates are meaningless when people are trying to use their religion to justify controlling women's health or legalizing discrimination against GLBT people based on their understanding of religious texts.
Too bad most atheists today are more concerned with petty garbage than they are interested in promoting a true secular society.
And reddit/atheism is a hugbox for people who have no idea what they are talking about but just have an axe to grind against their own religious upbringing and/or former belief system.
You think that maybe, just maybe, this is the reason. Many atheists on this forum used to be christians, and a good number of them came from the fundamentalist side of that belief system.
You think that maybe, just maybe, this is the reason. Many atheists on this forum used to be christians, and a good number of them came from the fundamentalist side of that belief system.
I think that a goodly majority of them do come from such backgrounds.
You think that maybe, just maybe, this is the reason. Many atheists on this forum used to be christians, and a good number of them came from the fundamentalist side of that belief system.
Yes, and that is quite informative...as it tells me something about them. So I know what I'm dealing with...especially relatively.
I come from 1st generation Americans from Italian & Sicilian immigrrants...and, of course, was raised in the Roman Catholic Church.
But they NEVER put that stuff over on me...I was ALWAYS (even as a child, let alone as an adult) too intelligent and wise for that.
What do they want? Do they want to convince the 80% or so of Americans who believe in some kind of higher power to abandon it all based on endless rants on the internet? Do you really think taking every opportunity to repeat the same Dawkins/Harris talking points are going to convince people to stop using their religion to pass laws against gays? Do you really think that cries in countless comment sections of "ur a dumby for believing in an invisible sky daddy!" are somehow going to make people change their minds on restricting abortion?
Well I think "yes and no" is the answer to the general question you are asking here. I genuinely do think that religion, and in many contexts the religious, do need to be confronted on every stage and in every medium possible. I worship, if I can be said to worship anything, discourse above all things. Every idea should be challenged. Mine and theirs.
So that is the "yes". The "no" part of my response comes from the desire that those challenges and that discourse should meet some standard of honesty and quality. discourse of the form you describe..... the "You are a dumby with your sky daddy" type..... does not help anyone or anything. The religious need to be challenged endlessly, but in a robust and intellectual fashion, not a petty school yard fashion. And internally in the atheist and secularist movements, we need to pull aside those people who are "letting the side down" and try to raise their game.
You list things like smug, loud and annoying. But I think they are petty crimes compared to being incoherent, insulting, petty, anti-intellectual and so forth. There is a RIGHT way to be smug, loud and annoying. And there is a WRONG way. "Loud" to me just means we want to be heard. "Annoying" to me just means we refuse to shut up in the face of their attempts to silence us. And I have no intention of changing any of that.
But when being loud and annoying we should be at least robust and intelligent, not petty and immature with "You so dumb" comments.
As for smugness. Well that goes both ways in the world and perhaps you can start by taking your own advice. For example do you really think it promotes discourse, mutual understanding, politeness and so forth to start off a post with a massive image of a Face Palm? And then follow it with two sentences that are DRIPPING with condescension and smuggery and snidery like "Gnostic Christianity. It is a religion. There exist in the universe this strange device referred to as "google" that can be used to answer these questions in ten seconds."
It seems you simply do not have the pedestal you think you have from which to admonish others on the standard of their discourse and presentation. I would recommend you tidy your own house up before you run your finger along someone elses sideboard checking for dust.
Quote:
Originally Posted by victorianpunk
The more you whine about things from "In God we Trust" on money to the fact that Sunday school isn't taxed like corporations, the more fodder you provide for the Jerry Falwell's of the world.
And yet there is genuine reasons to take a fight to those issues. The endorsement of religion on the currency of a secular state is a joke. Merely labeling it as "whining" when it is anything but, is to ignore the real motivations and goals behind taking issue with such things.
And there is a deeper reason why such issues are taken by people like the FFRF. They are not just trying to win petty victories over small insignificant (to some) issues. They do it to establish legal precedent on smaller issues which can then be taken to bigger issues.
Often when people cite a story about one of the issues people like the FFRF are taking, they do so asking "Have they nothing more important to whine about rather than this petty little thing". But they are failing to see the big picture. They are failing to see the legal impact and implications and context of winning these "petty" fights. Because even the smallest win can be cited then in larger arenas as precedent in the legal sense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by victorianpunk
And why is it that so many self-proclaimed "realist" can see that it is NOT realistic to think you will be able to make the hundreds of millions of believers in America and beyond abandon their religion? It is not going to happen.
Because many of us are looking at the big picture. The long game. We realize quite openly and readily that religion is not something we are going to defeat in our life time, or maybe in many generations to come. But those facts do not negate doing the right thing today, saying the right thing today, or fighting for the right goals today. Goals are worth fighting for in and of themselves, not just because we will see the fruits of that fight ourselves. A fact that is often sadly forgotten by many, including politicians in a world of 4 year presidencies and the like.... which leaves them subscribing to policies in the short term.... to make their term in power look good..... rather than committing to long term meta policies and projects that are actually the RIGHT thing to do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by victorianpunk
BUT, if you try to act like the "rational humans" you claim to be, than maybe you can convince them to keep their religion to themselves and not push it on you.
You make it sound like doing this is mutually exclusive with doing the rest. You will find that many atheists, humanist and secular groups take a multi-pronged approach to the whole affair and they are doing what you suggest here AS WELL AS fighting religion on a social, public, political and other levels.
Quote:
Originally Posted by victorianpunk
Why not put down the Dawkins and Hitchens for a minute and just quote the founding fathers who themselves believed in God yet wanted secular government?
Again this is far from mutually exclusive, and in fact those people who DO have an interest in Hitchens will know how much he too respected, cited, quoted and promoted such things too. He was even in some respects a Jefferson Biographer himself. And he saw himself as fighting for the very ideals you refer to here, and referencing founding fathers all the while he did it.
victorian here is 100% correct.
nothing makes atheists look worse than their own posts and the language they use.
every offensive thread, every name-calling post, and there are hundreds of threads and thousands of such posts here on CD, is another nail into the coffin of atheists making themselves look bad. Their behavior renders their message unattractive, unappealing, uninviting; and very effectively pushes people away.
VP is at best 5% correct and we didn't need him to tell us anyway. This current ploy of trying to shame atheism into invisibility as it was in the good old Silent Days is not new and is even less likely to work than it did then.
Instead, people are going to note that we take the point on board and try to be even more polite, reasonable, patient and good -humoured than before and they will contrast that with the religious apologists' increasingly strident hectoring and abuse (which I actually see as a less typical percentage of the theists and a higher profile by the strident minority) and will be able to provide terms like closed -minded, ill informed, arrogant, venomous, malicious, hypocritical and ignorant without us having to use them ourselves.
victorian here is 100% correct. nothing makes atheists look worse than their own posts and the language they use. every offensive thread, every name-calling post, and there are hundreds of threads and thousands of such posts here on CD, is another nail into the coffin of atheists making themselves look bad. Their behavior renders their message unattractive, unappealing, uninviting; and very effectively pushes people away.
And what's a bigger shame is that these fundamentalist atheists are not indicative of the broader population of atheists, agnostics and syncretic theists, who are besmirched by non-Abrahamic association to the offensive fundamentalists.
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