Atheists also share the commonality of being repressed by religious folk, not just a lack of god-belief. If all an atheist-con offers is religion bashing, then that’s a serious waste of time and resources. I mean, off the top of my head I can think of several interesting topics:
-humanitarian issues like the GLBT movement or genital mutilation or AIDS crises in Africa, and religion’s negative influence on them
-religion’s negative influence on certain arenas of politics
-strong vs weak atheism
-the negation of claimed “proofs” in favor of god
-the problem of evil
-ways to convert a practical non-fundie to atheism (kind of like witnessing, I guess)
-discussion of parts of the Bible that even fundies don’t take seriously–if we don’t beat kids or stone women or refrain from approaching women on their periods or sleep with our wives’ sisters anymore, why should we hate teh gays?
I just have this image of a bunch of angry assholes going around the room trying to find someone, anyone who believes anything that might remotely be considered hooie, at which point the entire room converges and screams self-righteous insults at that person until they flee in tears. About 10 seconds of laughter and self-congratulations later, they break up and begin searching for the next victim. Continue process until it’s about 11pm and everyone is drunk, when they all start searching the room for females to attempt to hook up with. Queue fifty guys hounding each of the very few women still in the room. Then end with one or two drunken fist fights and a bunch of angry men with sore throats from all the yelling retiring to their rooms for the night.
Ideally there shouldn’t be. But when you get a group of people reading the Bible so they can pick out the parts they think are false and planning how they’re going to confront Christians with this information in order to convert them to atheism, I think devout atheist is applicable. These aren’t people who rejected religion because its supernatural basis lacks rational evidence. These are people with a cause that’s every bit as irrational as the religion they’re rejecting. They might as well be Marxists.
Maybe it’s just a definitional thing, because I’d call those people ‘confrontational atheists’ or perhaps ‘asshole atheists’, both of which are a lot more descriptive and don’t imply atheism is just another group of faith claims.
Rejecting Biblical literalism because it’s hypocritical is irrational? The fuck? I’m talking about pointing out hypocrisy. When hypocrisy is used to justify marginalizing oppressed minorities, this is a BAD thing. Is not logically negating a harmful hypocritical viewpoint the very definition of “rational”?
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! /mugatu
I mean, even many religious people (the ones who are both rational and religious) give Biblical literalists a wide berth.
We had a thread a few months back about how ahteists would react if they were confronted by a genuine divine manifestation. Something like an angel appearing with a burning sword and performing miracles before your eyes and saying “I am a messenger from God”.
Now I said what I thought would be the obvious answer. If I was confronted by something like this, my reaction would be “Wow, I guess I’ve been wrong all this time. Here is clear evidence that God exists so I’m now a believer.”
But other people felt otherwise. Several people said that even if they were presented with clear proof that God existed - something like God himself appearing and performing miracles for them - they still would refuse to believe in the existence of God. They said they would assume anything they witnessed must be fake because they absolutely believed God does not exist.
And to me that makes their version of atheism just as much an article of faith as any religious beleif is.
I was one of the responders in that thread, and my question is the same: Why would I automatically presume what was presented to me was a god? Because it said it was? Because it performed sleight of hand tricks? How is this proof of goddom? If someone presented themselves to you as a real leprechaun would you take the assertion at face value or question it? And anyway, if a god as defined by the big three religions really existed, I suspect not believing wouldn’t be a thought that would occur to anyone.
Little Nemo: That’s a bad example, because the most likely explanation for seeing a divine manifestation is schizophrenia or some other mental disorder that causes elaborate and grandiose hallucinations and delusions. (Although I’ve always thought the elaborate wheels-within-wheels flaming-chariot style Old Testament angels were migraine auras.)
Basically, that means it couldn’t be a personal revelation; it would have to include others, and it would have to leave verifiable evidence that is implausible to have occurred in any other way. Massive spontaneous entropy reduction would work: Turn a pile of dust into an apple tree in a few moments, and write your name in the junk DNA of every cell in that tree.
If someone’s beliefs are truly unfalsifiable, though, that is a fairly bad thing.
This, or that one of my idiot friends is playing a really elaborate joke. The thought that what I was witnessing was the true manifestation of a god wouldn’t cross my mind. I’d be too busy looking for the hidden cameras.
However, some things are impossible given the laws of physics as we know them; if someone turned into a cat, or a pile of ash turned into an apple tree, there is no way to really explain that and keep reality ‘real’ in the way we know it (that is, a universe governed by a fixed set of physical laws).
Thus, your only alternatives are “You’re hallucinating” (or, equivalently, “The Matrix has you”) or “Reality is run by divine fiat”; you either can’t trust any of your senses, or nothing is comprehensible and we might as well be dodos in Wackyland.
His point is that the big, complicated, seemingly-unrelated physical laws are all due directly to simpler, more fundamental physical laws, such that the only way to change some of the complicated laws and not others is to selectively suspend the most fundamental ones.
In practical terms, of course, it’s too easy to gimmick the matches, so that becomes the most likely explanation. That’s why we have stage magicians like Randi evaluating the paranormal; they know how to palm things and aren’t going to get taken by some simple misdirection.
(And I think if Eve hasn’t fallen asleep on us entirely she should do well at the convention. ;))
And that was the standard some people had. They said that no amount of evidence could convince them God existed.
As I’ve said, I’m an atheist. But I’m an atheist because that’s where the evidence is. If I’m presented with evidence that God exists, I’ll believe in God. If I’m presented with evidence that some other religion is true, I’ll believe in that.
But faith is when you believe something even when the evidence is against you. If you believe in the divinity of Jesus when the evidence is against that, then you’re a devout Christian. But when you refuse to believe in the divinity of Jesus even if you’ve been given evidence that it’s true, then you’re a devout atheist. Your atheism would be as much a matter of faith as somebody else’s Christianity.
I think you are confusing the words “devout” and “proselytising”. What you are describing is the latter not the former.
There may have been an extremist or two who said that (I can pretty much guess who one might have been) but I’ve seen this debate played out a number of times and such extreme views are not the common atheist position.
In my experience the key underlying factor that causes misunderstanding is that very few theists understand just how absolutely preposterous the gods they propose really are. Obviously I’m simplifying but all too often the type of theist thinking involved is along the lines of “if you saw an angel you would have to believe in my particular deity and if you don’t accept that, well clearly your atheism is a dogmatic unfalsifiable position based on faith”. But anyone with half an ounce of rational scientific grey matter to their name can see that seeing an angel (whatever the hell that is) is evidence of an angel, and does not magically corroborate the idea there is a god, assuming that “god” means something like an “all powerful being who created the universe and hears your prayers”.
Another key misunderstanding is that atheists will tend to say “I can’t imagine the depth of evidence that could possibly be presented to me that would cause me to believe in a notion so preposterous”. This is not the same as saying no amount of evidence could satisfy them, and further, thinking about it as such is entirely wrongheaded: atheists have nothing to prove, it’s theists who need to come up with something convincing, since they are making the proposal.
As a matter of principle do you think that if I come up with a notion so bizarre you can’t even begin to imagine a proof for it, then you are evidencing a faith based and unscientific belief if you refuse to accept my notion, since you can’t imagine how I’d prove it?
