It’s been simultaneously amusing and horrifying to read through the comments on my post about the misguided atheist holiday display in Illinois. This is still the Internet after all, and “reading comprehension” is not a highly valued skill, even among subsamples self-selected for their logic and reasoning abilities.
In brief: thinking that atheists shouldn’t be needlessly obnoxious doesn’t make me a “faithiest” or an “accommodationist” or someone without the courage of my convictions. Those would be hard charges to support against someone who wrote this or this or this or this. I just think it’s possible to have convictions without being a jerk about them. “I disagree with you” and “You are a contemptible idiot” are not logically equivalent.
Phil just pointed to a good post by Steve Cumo about precisely the same issue, with “atheism” replaced by “skepticism.” A lot of skeptics/atheists are truly excited and passionate about their worldviews, and that’s unquestionably a good thing. But it can turn into a bad thing if we allow that passion to manifest itself as contempt for everyone who disagrees with us. (For certain worthy targets, sure.) There’s certainly a place for telling jokes, or calling a crackpot a crackpot; being too afraid of stepping on people’s toes is just as bad as stomping on feet for the sheer joy of it. But there’s also a place for letting things slide, living to dispute another day.
We atheists/skeptics have a huge advantage when it comes to reasonable, evidence-based argumentation: we’re right. (Provisionally, with appropriate humble caveats about those aspects of the natural world we don’t yet understand.) We don’t need to stoop to insults to win debates; reality is on our side. And there are many people out there who are willing to listen to logic and evidence, when presented reasonably and in good faith. We should always presume that people who disagree with us are amenable to reasonable discussion, until proven otherwise. (Cf. the Grid of Disputation. See also Dr. Free-Ride.)
That’s very different than “accommodationism,” which holds that science and religion aren’t really in conflict. The problem with accommodationism isn’t that its adherents aren’t sufficiently macho or strident; it’s that they’re wrong. And when respected organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science go on record as claiming that science and religion are completely compatible, as if they were speaking for scientists, that’s unconscionable and should be stopped. They don’t have to go on at great length about how a scientific worldview undermines religious belief, even if it’s true; they can just choose not to say anything at all about religion. That’s not their job.
It’s also wrong to fetishize politeness for its own sake. Some people manage to forfeit the right to be taken seriously or treated politely. But that shouldn’t be the default position. And being polite doesn’t make you more likely to be correct, or vice-versa. And — to keep piling on the caveats — being “polite” doesn’t mean “keeping quiet,” at least as a general principle. We all know people who will resort to a cowardly tactic of claiming to be “offended” when you say something perfectly reasonable with which they happen to disagree. There’s no reason to give into that; but the solution is not to valorize obnoxiousness for its own sake.
The irony is that the pro-obnoxious crowd (obnoxionists?) is ultimately making the same mistake as the accommodationist crowd. Namely: blurring the lines between the truth of a claim and the manner in which the claim is presented. Accommodationists slide from “we can work together, in a spirit of mutual respect, with religious people on issues about which we agree” to “we should pretend that science and religion are compatible.” But obnoxionists tend to slide from “we disagree with those people” to “we should treat those people with contempt.” Neither move is really logically supportable.
A lot of the pro-obnoxiousness sentiment stems from a feeling that atheism is a disrespected minority viewpoint in our culture, and I have some sympathy with that. Atheists should never be ashamed of their beliefs, or afraid to support them vigorously. And — let’s be honest — there’s a certain amount of pleasure to be found in being part of a group where everyone sits around congratulating each other on their superior intellect and reasoning abilities, while deriding their opponents with terms like “superstition” and “brain damage” and “child abuse.” But these are temptations to be avoided, not badges of honor.
Within the self-reinforcing culture of vocal non-believers, it’s gotten to the point where saying that someone is “nice” has become an insult. Let me hereby stake out a brave, contrarian position: in favor of being nice. I think that folks in the reality-based community should be the paragons of reasonableness and even niceness, while not yielding an inch on the correctness of their views. We should be the good guys. We are in possession of some incredible truths about this amazing universe in which we live, and we should be promoting positive messages about the liberating aspects of a life in which human beings are responsible for creating justice and beauty, rather than having them handed to us by supernatural overseers. Remarkably, I think it’s possible to be positive and nice (when appropriate) and say true things at the same time. But maybe that’s just my crazy utopian streak.
“The problem with accommodationism isn’t that its adherents aren’t sufficiently macho or strident; it’s that they’re wrong.”
Sigged!
Vita brevis,
Convincing people longa.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. ” -Einstein
How is the sign quoted by Sean either mocking or superior?? It is not mocking to disagree
with someone. Religious people do it all the time. Huckabee disagrees with evolution and says so on national TV.
Listen to some of the sermons on Sunday TV if you are brain dead.
We have to get beyond giving religion respect and politeness that it, almost exclusively, claims
for itself. Look at the response of the Western media to the Danish cartoons. They fell all over themselves being “respectful” to the muslims who were, it seems, basically a hysterical car-burning cult. Give respect where respect is earned, not to comforting delusions.
I don’t have a problem finding common ground with religious folks. Put me in a room with 20 people of different religions, and I’ll always be in agreement with 19 of them that the other person’s religious beliefs are flawed.
I have religious friends and relatives whom I get along with well. There are some things they come to me for advice on, and some things I go to them for advice on. However, I have three channels on my TV which I have blocked because they are all religion, all the time, the greater part of which is … well, nonsense. (Sample: “Send me $50, and I will put my hand on your letter or your email, and ask God to give you the miracle you need.”) Plus, there’s all the cable TV punditry about the “war on Christmas” and that Fox News editorial mentioned above. So when I get on the internet, my snarky side comes out and I vent some of my irritation. To rephrase Rodney King, can’t we all just be rational?
So some of us are fairly nice guys in real life, who finally have a venue to express these thoughts that have been percolating in us all our lives, and sometimes overdo the sarcasm. Of course, there are also some people who would be obnoxious whether they were on the right or wrong side, and happen to be right. There are plenty on the wrong side too. (I’ve seen a lot of Christians get road rage.)
But that’s their problem. I’ll try to do better with mine.
When I was 13 i was stoned, yes as in with fist sized stones, by two school mates after sharing my disbelief in religion. I was also suspended from my (public)school and then kept in in-school suspension for a week after for wearing a pentacle necklace. When I was 17 I was thrown out and disinheireted by my father and his family for not sharing their religious views.
Maybe I’ve just run into an abnormally high amount of religious fanatics but they and my gleefully misogynistic(thank you Cara) grandparents who raised me have made it very difficult for me to be sincere and sometimes even civil towards any follower. How can people like THAT demand my respect for their views and faith?
I wish we could all be as sensible as you.
Hi Sean. I guess there’s just a little devil in all of us.
I was recently reading Stephen Jay Gould’s essay on Non-Overlapping Magisteria. The problem with this position is that the world-view of any specific religious position and the knowledge set of established scientific theory will overlap. “Like a Venn diagram” as my wife perceptively pointed out when I was explaining my opposition to Gould on this. For some religions this area off overlap will consist of broad agreement, Unitarians obviously fall in to this category. However by and large a majority of Catholics, mainstream Protestants and non ultra-orthodox Jews will also fall into this category.
However there are a wide range of religious world-views that are in disagreement with some or all of the findings of science in the area of overlap. An evangelical young earth creationist Christian by definition has an area overlap that covers all of science and indicates a disagreement with all science not just the Theory of Evolution but also the other two theories modern science is built on; Quantum Theory and Relativity. The overlap and amount of disagreement will vary with different religious viewpoint.
Those whose religious viewpoint causes them to reject large parts of modern scientific knowledge are dangerous. Some are merely ignorant and uneducated, but others seek to undermine the Enlightenment philosophy that underpins modern science. They do so from a political and moral agenda that is sometimes hidden and sometimes open. They are a danger to all of us that live in the post-Enlightenment post-Christendom world. Those religious people who fall into the first category of full acceptance of modern science are our allies in this struggle. Our enemies see this and they hate the theistic evolutionist as much as they hate you or me (though they talk a lot about love they are in fact motivated by hate).
It is consequently vital not to alienate our potential allies by dogmatic and arrogant atheistic proselytizing which is only counter productive. It is vital for atheists to be open and explain why they don’t believe. It is also important to do so in the form of a friendly and constructive debate that builds links with our enlightenment influenced Christian and other religious allies. It is a struggle for freedom of thought.
I find it interesting atheists all agree on what they don’t believe (certain religious faiths), but exactly what is it they do believe? Is it some doctrine, or does everyone just have their own individual understandings? If the former, is it documented somewhere so all can view and understand?
Being polite is good.
Being right is arguable.
What is the exact QM definition of “Right”?
The one thing that stuns me is how much time people are wasting on this.
chemicalscum, surely you don’t imagine that Unitarians all agree on anything. Disagreement is our trademark; the founding principle, which goes back hundreds of years to Bohemia, is that there is no creed defining membership.
There’s a joke that Unitarians sing so badly because everyone’s reading ahead to see if they agree with the next verse. My congregation (my parents’, actually) is probably mostly humanist, which is to say atheist, but about a quarter believe in an afterlife. Diversity is considered a feature, not a bug.
I’m going to respond to a particular sentence in this blog post, which I think sums up the disconnect between what Sean’s saying and what people are replying to: “We should always presume that people who disagree with us are amenable to reasonable discussion, until proven otherwise.”
I wholeheartedly agree with this, but I don’t feel that it applies to the original situation of the Illinois State Capitol sign. A holiday display is not a venue for discussion, reasonable or otherwise; it’s simply a presentation of a group’s views or traditions. I don’t think there is any way to be “nice,” in the way Sean suggests, via a holiday display (or similar public display). On a personal level, I am quite willing to discuss someone’s religious beliefs with him or her in a respectful, polite manner (and often do), but on the broad level of public displays, such a rapport is unlikely, if not impossible.
I do feel that the sign itself could have been more _positive_. The last line, rather than out-and-0ut bashing religion, could have said something like: “There is only our natural world, in which we may find more than enough wonder without the attachments of oppressive dogma, if only we take the time to look.” This presents a more coherent alternative to religion as an outlook on life, and would most likely be far more appealing.
I think that a lot of atheists get caught up in bashing religion without totally understanding the viewpoint of people of faith. Most atheists fall into one of two categories: having little significant religious faith in their upbringing, or having extreme religious faith in their upbringing, from which they then break away. In both cases, I suggest that they have not truly experienced the faith felt by the devout, and it takes a significant effort to understand this without having the experience. I have only recently made this effort myself, and I can say that it makes a big difference in how I contemplate and phrase my arguments “against” religion and “for” atheism, both within my mind and when talking to others.
The key is that faith is something internal, and it can be ultimately authoritative to the person who has it, but it shouldn’t be the basis of external decisions or policies. I cannot truly deny that someone who has a religious experience has been in touch with God, but neither can that person present me with an objective case that they have. It is perfectly fine for that person to give weight to their subjective experience in his or her own life, but it’s not a reasonable basis on which to apply conclusions externally. Obviously, just as there are many atheists who don’t understand the “truth” about religious faith, there are many religious people who have not taken the time to consider the difference between faith and dogma. It can be a difficult distinction to make, but I think that it’s worth it for both atheists and religious people. The point is not to convince people that God does not exist; the point is to convince them that the subjective bases for God’s existence do not qualify for external decision-making in the same way that other, objective considerations do.
@Sean
I don’t have much to disagree with in content, but I think you are pushing a false conflict for it gives the impression (that you don’t intend to convey I think) that advocates of atheism are somehow special. The fact that you find this situation comment-worthy is actually misguided in my opinion.
First, in agreement with you, I think a case can be made for the following:
“It is always best to present one’s ideas as carefully as possible and they should be designed such that they engage their audience as effectively as possible. The arguments of some atheists fails in that regard and are as a result less than optimally effective and may conceivably be rude and/or counterproductive.”
For the moment, I’m conceding the point about whether or not politeness or even calmness is always an asset. We can probably both agree that there are times and places for true rudeness. But I concede that for now.
What we’re left with is a very pedestrian sentiment that boils down to: “Some atheists are doing it wrong some of the time.” Well, whoopty doo. I almost never see this sort of asymmetrical meta-commentary about sports, literature, music, food, etc. Nobody runs around saying only: “OMG, maybe the Apple fanbois shouldn’t be so durned rude and vocal! They should be more civil!” In the Mac/PC wars, people of both sides have discourse ranging from insightful and fruitful to base name-calling, and calls from both sides for everyone to be civil, everyone to shut up, etc.
On the other hand, when the topic is religion, most religious people call Dawkins et al. “intolerant” and a substantial proportion of atheists also express reservation about their discourse. What you will rarely find however is the converse. For any controversial topic, you can expect wild west behavior by both sides. But it is only for the atheism/religion debate where Doc Holliday is asking Wyatt Earp to be a good man and use a knife while the Clantons et al. are just firing away willy nilly.
Some related thoughts:
1) Just to get this out of the way (I don’t think you really take your impressions from comment threads), characterizing an argument by the arguments of respondents on a thread in general is a straw man fallacy if you are really discussing a larger issue. This is the internet. People in any thread, not just your threads on atheism, will be embarrassments to civility about every conceivable topic and there is a selection bias compounded with an absence of direct social interaction that escalates rudeness;
2) The original sign in Illinois, far from being an oblivious attempt at rudely insulting the religious, seems to me to be instead a shrewd (if potentially risky) form of reverse psychology. When pro-theists see offensive beliefs by people who don’t share their faith, maybe those people that insist on parading their doctrines in public will opt for a religion neutral policy. For goodness sakes, the entire Christmas holiday rests upon the Christian dogma that the messiah was born in Bethlehem as foretold to sacrifice himself to save humanity from eternal torture by a vengeful and jealous god for the original sin of seeking knowledge. Let everyone proclaim the message of the Gospels from their own rooftops and leave the capitol building clear. The sign was self-evidently not trying to promote atheism, it was trying to communicate the offensiveness of overbearing religiosity;
3) Atheists are well-represented by articulate rhetoriticians with delicate touches and rapier wits, including Grayling, Stephen Fry, Sagan, and you, to name but a few. Even Sam Harris, who despite the forceful nature of his arguments, is unfailingly patient, polite, and even didactic in his writings. On the flip side, the “uncompromising” atheists (such as Dawkins, Hitchens, Myers, Coyne, etc.), whatever their failings, are possessed of a forcefulness that would be considered unremarkable in most subjects of interest to public figures like sports, music, food, literature, technology, science, politics, etc. What is really remarkable is how “edgy” and “rude” it is to simply be a cranky detractor to X only when X is religion. But if you are a cranky detractor from Spielberg movies, suddenly it is unremarkable.
I am not in favor of niceness. Nice will always be taken advantage of by the religious until atheism is a fringe and we are back to belly crawling and apologizing for not being religious. There was a time in the 70s when atheists were nice. When nice people like Carl Sagan were the prominent atheists. When evolution in schools wasn’t such a hotly contested topic. When presidents didn’t wear their religion on their sleeves. That niceness gave way to today’s time when challenges to evolution are commonplace. When Any elected official has to swear how Godly he is and so on. The results of being nice are not good.
They don’t have to go on at great length about how a scientific worldview undermines religious belief, even if it’s true; they can just choose not to say anything at all about religion. That’s not their job.
See, I disagree with this. There’s an elephant in the country when it comes to science education, and that elephant is religion. Religion as it is presented in some (many? but *not* all) contexts is inconsistent with science. If an organization is all about advocating for good science education, they’re falling down on their job if they completely ignore the elephant. That leaves them with two choices: siding with those Sean claims are right, that religion and science are fundamentally compatible; or siding with those who are really right, that many, many people are able to be good and rigorous scientists AND hold religious faith at the same time. This very clearly empirically shows that you they ARE compatible, at the very least in the sense that somebody need not abandon all religion in order to have a good grasp of the scientific world view.
I mean, c’mon here Sean… if you’re really about evidence based argumentation, surely the fact that there are huge numbers of us out there who are doing very well in the science field despite not being atheists provides evidence for the compatibility? It may not provide philosophical compatibility FOR YOU, but it does provide empirical, practical, what-exists-in-nature compatibility… and the latter is what scientific observation is really all about.
I’m completely with you about not being a jerk, and I hope you don’t think I’m a jerk in this comment. (I know some will, but they are the ones who probably think you’re an accomidationist by suggesting that one shouldn’t be a jerk.)
joel rice @16: Religion has never been about physics and biology, and pretending that it is
so one can complain about the Bible is just to set up a straw man.
That’s patently not true. Again, your definition of what religion is may well make this true… but if we go with empiricial, what-exists-in-nature sorts of things, there is a lot of religion that has long been and remains very much about physics and biology.
Physics : look at (say) the whole Galileo affair, or What the *bleep* do we know?
Biology : uh, ever heard of creationism and its objections to evolution?
Many, many, many people make their religion all about physics and biology.
It doesn’t HAVE to be that way… but denying that it is is just as much ignoring the elephant in the room as thinking that a science education advocacy organization doesn’t have to consider the issue of religion.
bad jim @37 : How does a Unitarian express rage? By burning a question mark on somebody’s lawn….
I just went back to look at those comments, and I’m wondering. Out of 120 comments, only three were so critical to even use the words ‘fatheist’, ‘accommodationist’, or ‘hypocrite’ (one person each). Not only is that not horrifying, at the same time at least a dozen people wrote very positive remarks. So it’s hardly fair to characterise the comments as “simultaneously amusing and horrifying”. At least that would be very curiously biased.
What’s more, some of those critical of you made some good points. Why, for example, should one accord religious believers more respect than atheists? Why shouldn’t you argue for atheism at that particular place? Somehow you seem to think that’s not okay, but you don’t seem to say why exactly.
And speaking of “horrifying”, there were two posts by people who trotted out the well-worn and well idiotic ‘arguments’ that Stalin killed people of faith and that some (unnamed, of course) Commercially Successful Atheists were “just as dogmatic and hateful as many Christians”. I would have thought those much more worthy of a comment by you than someone who says, “I’m sorry, but you sir are being a hypocrite.”
Lastly, for you then to insult those people by saying that it’s their fault for misunderstanding what you said seems a bit much. And while we’re on the subject of reading comprehension, how does “Religion is just myth and superstition” translate into “You are a contemptible idiot”?
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I think we (meaning we unbelievers) should stay nice as long as they (meaning they the faithful) are nice.
But see, I can’t stand obvious crackpotery and bullshit, and I tend to take hokum personally, particularly if they it’s connected with my particular area of knowledge. Creationism is an insult to biology, young earth creationism is an insult to biology and geology, and so on.
Therefore, as soon as the faithful start spouting bullshit, it’s open season. I mean, lets call a spade a spade!
I think many people tend to confuse tolerance with respect.
#42 Rob – I am not aware of any religion that takes cognizance of atoms or cells. I am not
‘defining religion’. Preachers do not usually go on about DNA or the Lamb Shift. They do
go on a rant if the ACLU trashes their traditions, which it does on a regular basis, along
with plenty of other groups.
#40 Farhat – please check out the other side.The First Amendment guarantees freedom of
religious expression, but the court came up with some garbage from a letter from Jefferson
about a ‘wall of separation’ which was just his personal opinion. Now you can be thrown out
of a school just for bringing a bible. Now you are seeing a backlash because constitutional
rights are being trashed. There is wholesale re-writing of American History – that the
founders were Deists,etc. George Washington declared ‘days of fasting and repentance’.
If you rewrite my history then I will rewrite yours. No more mister nice guy.
#34 Rick – your point deserves to be amplified. Religious folks go out on a limb and put
their beliefs in public, for example the Westminster Confession, where others can snipe
and heckle. What do atheists believe that is of any consequence to civilization, to the
upbringing of children, to the form of government. Do atheists have principles, or do they
put their finger in the air to see which way the wind blows. If you think it does not matter
well maybe not today, but it did in Russia in 1917. You can see it today in the disregard
for the moral hazards of ‘securitizing’ mortgage loans and dumping them on those down
the line – how is your economy doing ????? Ideas do indeed have consequences.
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Sean,
you’re not an accomodationist, but you have way too much respect for religious beliefs and those who hold them. Saying “I disagree with you” is appropriate when discussing questions that involve a certain amount of uncertainty, questions like “Who will win the next Superbowl?”, “What is the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics?”, or even “Will Obama be assassinated before his term is over?” However, it is not appropriate to meekly express one’s disagreement when the remaining uncertainty is so small as to be negligible, such as in questions like “Can witchcraft cure cancer?”, “Did the creator of the universe pick a tribe of barbaric desertmen as his ‘Chosen People?”, or “Did the archangel Gabriel dictate the Qur’an to Muhammad?”
By publicly treating these laughably ridiculous beliefs as if they were merely _mistaken_, as if this was a debate between two groups of reasonable people, you are implying that these beliefs _aren’t_ laughably ridiculous. This is a lie, and it helps sustain the veneer of false respectability that religious beliefs are protected by. It’s the kind of thing a faitheist would do.
I agree with Janus. The idea that religious people would be nice and respect you back if you are nice and respectful to them is a mistaken one. Crawling on your belly in supplication will not get any kudos from them.