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.
I believe that most atheists will leave believers be until they try to preach to them. Personally I don’t mind believers believing in anything they want to. But I will react when they try to convince me or others about their beliefs
I try to be respectful of others’ beliefs until they
- try to make them law
- try to convert me
- try to use their book to control my behavior through guilt, etc
- make truth claims about reality
at that point they are begging for pushback.
I’m not respectful of others’ beliefs when they’re idiotic.
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 a member of this sub, this just popped up on my feed. I disagree with the general sentiment of this post. I stopped calling myself an atheist years ago because many atheists I interact with are bitter and antagonistic, kind of like how anti-natalists attack people who choose to have kids. People aren’t concern trolling, this is a legitimate and common experience. Maybe it’s a minority but they’re the ones making noise, and I find that these voices take over in atheist spaces.
I’m anti-religion because I dislike the institutional power religious organizations, and because these organizations often champion causes which I believe I prejudiced and harmful. It’s not because I believe people putting faith in a higher power are unintelligent, or because I want to wear a shirt that says “if you believe in God, fuck you.” And those are the attitudes and actions that made me distance myself from atheism.
Do you believe in any gods? No? Then you’re still an atheist. Full stop.
Wow that’s a lot of words desperately attempting to justify why you’re an asshole.
Every atheist I know is perfectly nice and nothing like you. I’ve never heard anyone describe all atheists as assholes, just the loud obnoxious ones that preach their edgy middle school rhetoric at every possible opportunity. Kinda like you.
You’re not clever, you haven’t figured it out, you’ve just managed to devise a poorly founded justification as to why people think you’re an asshole, instead of just admitting to yourself it’s because you’re an asshole.
You need help.
And I guess it’s good to see
r/atheism is exactly as cringe as its always been.And don’t bother replying, I’m not going to argue with a bunch of 14 year olds.
I don’t suffer fools & I consider “religious & loud about it” to be the just that.
I’m not interested in unconverting believers, but neither am I interested in enabling or endorsing their beliefs. While I’m not interested in participating in their rituals either, I will go to weddings and funerals.
That said, there’s a piece of my mind that wonders how anyone with average intelligence or better can possibly believe in this fantasy BS. It just makes no sense to me.
So when I’m faced with someone who’s deeply religious, the only way I can reconcile it in my head is to assume that they’re cognitively challenged.
And I really don’t have a lot of patience with idiots. I suppose I’m not very good at hiding this.
