This is by far the best counter-argument to my views yet. I currently have no good response to it whatsoever, but I can't just ignore it since clearly I'm one of these "Atheist Douchebags" he talks about. However, before I start discussing this in earnest, please, for the love of the God that doesn't exist, read the damn article, and don't think I'm surrendering my position to a theistic viewpoint. God that would be terrible.
Anyways, the article makes a damn good point, and that is that I'm not helping the atheist/rationalist agenda with my blog as it is pure preaching to the choir and fuel for the theistic extremists. I am compelled to agree with him. Am I helping the rationalist agenda with this? Hell no! Of course not. I'm doing this purely to entertain other rational atheists, especially those with an extremist bent like myself. However, I hope that I am making up for this little guilty pleasure of mine with my personal interactions. After all, I live in America, a heavily Christian country. 2 out of 3 of my roommates next year are very Christian. My best friend is a Christian. I discuss religion openly and logically, and even though I do insult religious ideas on a regular basis, I feel like I'm at least respectful of the people themselves, if not the beliefs. A terrible atheist (I know several) is worse than a reasonable Christian (I know many), although better by far than a terrible Christian (the whole damn religious right).
In any case, if you read some of my posts, such as "My Offer", I hope I convey the fact that I am okay with reasonable religious people, i.e. those religious people who DON'T want to impose their religious values on the American people and for whom religion is personal. I still hate evangelists - it's indescribable how much damage they do to humanity. But scientific, rational people with a few irrational beliefs (like, again, my economist best friend) aren't harmful in the least - at least until he betrays me, as an evangelist once hilariously predicted.
In any case, I still plan to be angry. It's my thing, really, and I'm much better at anger (reasoned anger - using reason as a tool to express exactly why I'm so damn angry at [insert irrational belief here]) than I am at non-anger (even reasoned non-anger). I'm an entertainer (or try to be), not a crusader. So yes, I'll still blast theism and other crazy beliefs. Yes, I'll still work myself into a tantrum so that I'll be at risk of bursting a blood vessel. But I won't pretend I'm really helping so much. That, again, is for later. And maybe, just maybe, one day I'll win a convert, like I came so close to during high school. And then Hell will freeze over, and I'll ride away on my winged unicorn leaving a trail of fairy dust in my wake.
Of course, one could turn the tables by saying that merely faith (especially the Christian faith) is a horrendous detriment to progress. Religious faith means that your entire world-view operates on an unverifiable basis rather than basic logical steps which build up to various opinions. That could mean that people don't want to explore or to experiment, which makes progress come to a halt. For at least some militant atheists, this makes religious faith a thing to be eliminated to allow the bulk of humanity to progress.
ReplyDeleteforgive me for quoting reddit but:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/cm7v5/feynman_i_believe_that_we_must_attack_these/
"I believe we must attack these thing which we do not believe... not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view. Because we have learned that, by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in appreciating where we are and what we are. And I believe that science has remained irrelevant because we wait until somebody asks us questions or until we are invited to give a speech on Einstein's theory to people who don't understand Newtonian mechanics, but we never are invited to give an attack on faith healing or astrology--on what is the scientific view of astrology today.
"I think that we must mainly write some articles. Now what would happen? The person who believes in astrology will have to learn some astronomy. The person who believes in faith healing will have to learn some medicine, because of the arguments going back and forth; and some biology. In other words, it will be necessary that science become relevant. The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right so long as it doesn't attack religion, was the clue that I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn't attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from modern society except for its applications, and thus be isolated. And then we have this terrible struggle to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know. But if they want to defend their own points of view, they will have to learn what yours is a little bit. So I suggest, maybe incorrectly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite."
-- The Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society, 1964