Tag Archives: atheism

Big Tent Atheism?

March 2nd, 2009

Boing Boing guest blogger Paul Spinrad has issued something of a challenge to activist atheists.

Firstly, he offers up this insight:

In politics, I think there are two competing motivations for voters to support a cause publicly. One is to influence the majority to agree, to make changes that you believe in, and the other is to distinguish your opinions as superior to most other peoples’. These two motivations generally cause people to act in similar ways…

I think this is a useful thing to think about – are you passionate about a cause because you want to see the cause be successful? Or do you simply enjoy identifying yourself with the cause? Spinrad clearly thinks most atheists go for the identity:

With religion, I think atheists have the same dissonance going on. If they really think the world would be better off without religion, they shouldn’t hate religion and call believers fools. Any successful new belief system must appreciate the beauty of what it’s replacing and strive for backwards-compatibility. If Matthew 1:1-16 hadn’t explained how Jesus’ lineage fulfills the prophecy in Isaiah 1:1-5, it wouldn’t have gotten where it is today.

Hmmm… First of all, let’s make clear for the umpteenth time: atheism is not a belief system. It is not a religion. Atheists aren’t interested in replacing religion. To confuse this is to misunderstand the mission of the new atheism. In fact, the assumption that atheism is a belief system — and that everyone just must have a belief system is exactly what the new wave of atheist activism is attacking.

So when Spinrad asks:

Do you think that most of humanity is A) hopeless and doomed to kill each other because of their stupid religious beliefs, or B) capable of coming to and benefiting from your views?

For my part, I can emphatically answer B. Humanity is fine. The problem is the societal norm that everybody is allowed an arbitrary “belief system” that is based on nothing and requires no defense. We can get over this. We will get over this. And we will be better off when we do.

In the meantime, if atheists seem unusually angry and dismissive, there are plenty of good and valid reasons for that — no snobbery required.

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Scott Dikkers of The Onion

March 2nd, 2009

Turns out that editor-in-chief of The Onion is a thoughtful, well-spoken atheist. Not surprising, really. Here’s a talk he gave about atheism. The best line in it is this:

People now have the option to just believe whatever they want–just make something up–it doesn’t matter if it’s not substantiated. And that hurts the rest of us.

IMO, this is the single biggest problem with our society’s current perspective on faith, and it’s nice to see it stated so simply.
via The Morning News

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Positive Positions

January 29th, 2009

Readers of Andrew Sullivan make the point I tried to make in my last post much more articulately. But then other readers of his come back to make confounding statements like this one:

You gotta live somewhere, and you gotta believe in something, because your beliefs are being expressed every day in how you live your life. Atheists should be forced to articulate their positive position (say, secular humanism) as price of admission to the conversation.

So before I can point out someone else’s factual and logical error, I have to confess to that person what gives my life meaning? That’s insane.

And then there’s this ridiculousness:

What the defenders of the Flying Spaghetti Monster thesis’ commensurability with actual theism fail to recognize is that belief in God generally doesn’t have anything so “concrete” as its substance. It’s not the particulars of God — the “invisible man in the sky” imagery and such — that matter. In some sense these particulars aren’t the content of theist belief at all; it’s the “consequences” of God — moral compunction, cultural taboo, social phenomena that amount to a de facto eschatology, etc. — that actually constitute theism. And when measured by adherence to behaviors consistent with this belief, atheism suddenly appears much rarer.
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Summed in another way: the evidence for God that your last commentator finds lacking is the same kind of evidence which can’t be found to support the existence of morality.

Oh, awesome! The old “you can’t have morality without religion” argument, which denigrates morality as arbitrary while simultaneously offering no actual argument to support the factual claims of religions.

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Ross Douthat Tries to Rebut the Teapot Analogy

January 27th, 2009

Ross Douthat offers a counter-argument to the Teapot Analogy and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God (here I do feel comfortable using the term), rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School. I am unaware of anything similar holding true for orbiting pots or flying noodle beasts.

He’s missing the whole point behind the Teapot and the FSM. Of course it’s not as ridiculous to believe in God as it is to believe in the Teapot. For all the reasons that Douthat points out, our human nature and our society make an individual feel very comfortable about believing in God. The point of the Teapot is that it does seem like a very ridiculous belief to hold. As a behavior, it’s head and shoulders more ridiculous than believing in God. But as a factual claim, it has just as much merit as the Judeo-Christian God. The Teapot and the FSM pull the societal and psychological cover away from the belief in God, exposing how ridiculous any argument for it must be.

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Why Aren’t American Atheists Nice?

November 7th, 2008

Why are American atheists unhappy and mean? Suprise! It might be religion’s fault.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, “[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them.”

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There’s Probably No God. Relax.

October 22nd, 2008

Theres Probably No God. Relax.
via Andrew Sullivan

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