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Atheism @lemmy.ml
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"Atheists are so mean!"

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.

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  • By all means, fight fire with fire, but you don't get to fight historical fire with fire against people who never wronged you or tried to convert you. The only actual fact is that you don't know any better that there is not a god/creator than they know that there is and vice versa. Neither a strong belief that god does or does not exist is supported by logic, reason, or science. The only logical conclusion is that we don't know. That also makes the often touted (and childish) belief that atheists are smarter than theists for not believing a non-starter. You don't know that you're right and neither do they.

    • “When two parties are in a discussion and one makes a claim that the other disputes, the one who makes the claim typically has a burden of proof to justify or substantiate that claim especially when it challenges a perceived status quo. This is also stated in Hitchens's razor, which declares that "what may be asserted without evidence, may be dismissed without evidence." Carl Sagan proposed a related criterion – "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – which is known as the Sagan standard.”

      If I claim that unicorns, leprechauns and Bigfoot exists; it is then my responsibility to prove it. There is absolutely to reason not to dismiss such outrageous claims.

      Same applies to god and religions.

      • I'm familiar with the line of reasoning, I'm also familiar with why it doesn't apply here. If I said "I believe God exists" that is very different in our language than "I believe in God, or in the existence of God. We use the word "in" here to qualify that we are saying that we believe in something as an idea that we cannot prove. It's a subtle but extremely important distinction. I would have the same bit of issue with someone saying they know God exists. They don't, period. I would have the same issue with someone trying to convince you that God exists. It's not their place, you can make your own mind up what to believe. Neither a firm belief nor a firm non-belief are rooted in logic and reason. These are personal decisions based on internal logic and internal reasoning. In the face of eternally inconclusive evidence, it's not irrational to make a choice to believe in one or the other, existence or non-existence...it is irrational however to believe one made a choice so right that they should convince others to follow suit.

        Atheism is complicated because both those who simply do not hold a belief either way and those who firmly believe there is no God/creator/whatever fly the same flag. As an agnostic I have no issue with either the theist or the atheist, I take issue with the ones in either camp who pretend they made the superior choice of unprovable beliefs.

    • I'm not saying that I'm smarter because I'm an atheist. Atheism doesn't mean I'm automatically a better person. Atheism isn't a magic spell that makes me smarter, stronger, faster, more moral or ethical than someone who believes in a god. Atheism challenges me to reconsider questions that I used to consider sufficiently answered by religion such as science, morality and ethics but that doesn't guarantee I'm going to do a good job with it. I am still the same person I was when I was standing behind the podium leading the church congregation in singing religious hymns, I just no longer believe what religions claim about reality and I don't participate in church any longer.

      Atheism doesn't mean I know there are no gods. I suspect there aren't, because religious claims about gods and reality don't stand up to scrutiny. The more excuses you have to make for why reality doesn't work the way you insist it should, the less inclined I am to believe you know what you're talking about. Arguing for a prime mover or appealing to consequences doesn't convince me either. I'm intellectually honest enough to say that I don't have concrete knowledge that there are no gods the way I know there's no money in my wallet, but not being able to prove there are no gods isn't enough for me to believe that there are. Wanting to believe there are gods is no more useful than wanting there to be money in my wallet. It's still a claim that requires validation, not a default assumption.

      The point here is simply to push back on people who would concern troll me if I'm less than polite to people who would happily lock me away or force me to church because I dare to disagree with them. Being mean to someone who never brought up their religion isn't cool. Submitting to or otherwise ignoring people who would abuse me for not attending their church is likewise not cool. Someone needs to stand up and point out that a secular society doesn't allow religious beliefs to be used as justification to be dicks. And sometimes you have to be a dick to get that point across.

      • I personally always considered god belief on two axes... Axises? Axii? Gnostic and Agnostic on one and theist and atheist on the other. For those that don't know, gnostic means you're absolutely sure your belief is true, and Agnostic is the opposite, you're not sure or don't know.

        There are both gnostic theists and gnostic atheists who are both equally sure they have it right.

        If I had to describe myself I would probably be just Agnostic. I don't think the Judeo-Christian idea of God exists, but I know that I can never know for sure, and maybe there is a higher power out there, even if it's nowhere near as high a power as the bible would claim. I very much so resonate more with pagan pantheons where Gods are fallible, have weaknesses, and even fail to defeat mortals from time to time.

      • I agree with almost all of this except for the validation part. The belief that something created the entire system we are in can neither be validated nor proven false. Even if a being created a planet in front of us, we couldn't know if they were just an alien being millions of years more technologically advanced than us. We still could never prove whether we are or are not a fancy snow globe or ant farm in someone's office. That's not a reason to believe we are, but it's a reason to choose to believe based on the evidence we have. For some, the splendor of the universe is enough to make them decide that there must be a greater intelligence at work, for others it's not. Neither conclusion is wrong or right, the evidence is inconclusive AND there will never be proof either way...so in a sense that's the purest choice we have. Waiting for a proof that cannot exist is not as logical and reasonable as many seem to think. It's a default stance of science applied to the one question that science will never be able to answer.

        • The belief that something created the entire system we are in can neither be validated nor proven false.

          If it can't be validated, then there's no reason to assume that it's true. The burden of proof never lies with the skeptic. To demonstrate why, if I must prove that a god doesn't exist then you must also use the same evidence for it to prove that I am not that god. Feel free to try.

          That’s not a reason to believe we are, but it’s a reason to choose to believe based on the evidence we have.

          I mean, that's a choice you can make, but it's not a good reason to believe. It's not a justifiable reason. The god of the gaps argument is considered a fallacy.

          Waiting for a proof that cannot exist is not as logical and reasonable as many seem to think. It’s a default stance of science applied to the one question that science will never be able to answer.

          That's why there's a concept in science called "not even wrong."

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

          If you can't answer it one way or another, then there's no reason to take it seriously.

          • You've attempted to still prove that you are "right" to not believe. That's just your choice, it's not due to logic or reason. We are getting into the theistic probability scale, you believe it's not likely there is a creator and that's totally fine. Others believe it's more probable that there is, that's also fine. The only ones who are wrong are the people who pretend to know definitively whether there is a creator or not. "Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic." We've been around from mere thousands of years while the universe has been around for billions, we wouldn't even be able to tell if a being in front of us was actually mystical if it was capable of creating a planet or advanced beyond our comprehension. We are already playing with genetics and creation as a society mere thousands of years old. We will never be able to prove that there is or is not something beyond that which we have discovered already. A creator of systems could always be one level above, the ant doesn't understand the concept of an ant farm. That's why it's a pure choice. Your reasons that make sense to you are just fine, but they do not have the capacity to be better or more sound than those of a religious person and the same holds for them in reverse. It's purely belief, non belief, and belief in the negative. Not logic.

            • 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.

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