A philosophy professor was guest speaking at my wife’s church yesterday, and she asked me to go because, and I quote, “I’m probably going to want to talk about it with you and it’ll just be easier if you hear everything first hand.” OK.
The guy must have taken off his professor hat and put on his preacher hat because he called his speech a “sermon” several times, and it sounded like one. Even had the “can I get an amen” thing going on. Aside from occasionally dropping a quote from Nietzsche, it had very little to do with philosophy.
I can summarize the speech as follows. About 75% was a bunch of statistics to the effect of “look how mind-bogglingly incredible the universe and the human body are! It’s obvious that there’s a god!” And about 25% was, “Since it’s obvious that there’s a god, why don’t atheists believe? It’s because they willfully reject god so they can do amoral things.” The words in the thread title were actually used to describe non-believers.
I sat quietly through those whole thing, feeling my long dormant passion for confrontation welling up within me. As soon as he was done I excused myself to gather up the kids. My wife looked at me like she wanted to cry. She was pretty shaken up by at the rest of the day, I told her she wasn’t responsible for everyone at her church but she still felt awful.
I’ve heard a lot worse directed at me over the years, so I can’t say I was shocked or even surprised, but this message of hate essentially came from people she trusts and respects. It also seems… pointless, since atheists are such a quiet minority. I’m guessing 95% of the people in the room couldn’t name a heathen if they had to, so what’s the sense in demonizing us? I suppose a philosophy professor probably has to have a pretty strong defense mechanism, but white folks in the suburbs? Just seems unnecessary.
Man, it isn’t even my church and I feel like apologizing…
Had there been a subject announced for the talk, or was it just “come hear the philosopher talk”? You make him sound like he makes my 11th grade Philosophy teacher sound good (that was among my worst ones, as he had more prejudices than braincells; my mother meets with him several times a month and he still tells her it’s a pity I chose the sciences track, he despises science).
That’s a pretty unusual story for an actual philosophy professor, and yes, I’ve known a few. Most of them are willing to take a position and fight like hell about it, but most aren’t dogmatic, just loving a good argument. If you don’t put up a good enough fight, they’ll usually start fighting on your side to make it more fun.
Except ethicists. Don’t by a car from an ethicist. Trust me on this one.
The church does “series,” where they link several weeks or months of sermons, bible study topics, etc with a common theme. The current series is, “Why do you believe?” I’m assuming he was brought in to talk about this theme, but I don’t know that anyone knew what his specific topics would be. My wife was under the impression that it would be about why Christians believe, not why atheists don’t. Seemed like a reasonable guess, and in fact about 75% of the sermon followed that theme. Although he didn’t say anything profound, especially for a philosopher. Halfway through I started likening it to a circle jerk for Christians, when his arguments started boiling down to “We believe because DUH, that’s why!” And everyone would shout “AMEN!”
In any case, the atheist bashing just seemed out of left field, and not characteristic of the church’s usual message.
We talked it over, she’s upset with the church but wants to bring it up at her bible study this week. She mentioned she might want me to be there as well, but my desire for confrontation has since subsided, so I don’t know how I feel about that. She had my back the whole time, and I figure the whole thing will blow over by next Sunday, with maybe a 5% chance that her bible study group will double down on the hate and she’ll leave the church. I told her a few months back that Unitarians are accepting of atheists and she said she’d go once to see what it was like – maybe this will prompt her to carry through on that.
I guess I’m lucky: I’m in a whole church of people who accept their morally-deficient-ness. And I’m sorry you had to encounter the morally-superfluous sect.
That’s a tricky situation you find yourself in. On the one hand, it would probably be beneficial for you to show up, in order to demonstrate that atheists aren’t monsters, on the other hand, if they just grill you it could turn ugly. Then you’d be labeled ‘the angry atheist’ regardless of whether you were or not.
I’m surprised he would quote Nietzsche. Although, I guess if you want to play at being a philosopher, and you pronounce it with a certain academic flair, it lends a certain cachet to your philosopherness.
mrAru loves a good argument, which is why he took forensics all through high school … he loves the phrase ‘standup philosophizer’ from History of the World.
Actually good debaters are a blast to watch, especially if both sides are well informed. It really is a shame that the philosopher at church was really not ready for any sort of discussion.
As a philosopher, let me apologize on behalf of the profession. We have our share of assholes, but we try to keep them locked in the basement. I see one got out; we’ll have to re-examine our security protocols.
I’m very curious to know who it was, though; maybe you could PM me.
I’m curious… in other professions, the nuts tend to come in particular specialties. For Chemistry, it’s Traditional Physical Chemists (those guys need to move up a century into the 20th); for Computer Science, it appears to be Systems Design (we had a boss who was comfuckinetely nuts; the programmers in the team calmed down when they discovered she teaches SD in college, because “SD people live in their own parallel universes, she’s normal for SD”).
Is there a specific branch of Philosophy that tends to make people start looking for the nearest exit, or are they kind of spread out in you experience?
I think they are pretty well spread out, although come to think of it, there are some pretty notable examples in the area of Christian philosophers (Alvin Plantinga comes to mind). But that may just be my own bias as a Morally Deficient Philosopher manifesting itself.
I recently attended a Philosophy of Religion conference, and there were a number of snide comments against atheists from the presenters, culminating with one dumbass saying that atheists were angry at God along with some other nonsense. I was actually pretty restrained in my comments during the Q&A, merely stating that dialogue required understanding, and attributing absurd motives to ones opponents only insured that one would never understand or be able to productively engage with them. (Okay, the first sentence out of my mouth was, “I have heard so many slanderous comments aimed at atheists over the last few days that I wonder how many of my colleagues here have actually ever met an atheist.” But after that I was much better.)
But who knows? Maybe a philosophy of religion conference that recruited mostly atheists would have been full of rude comments aimed at theists.
So as an agnostic, I am not pissed at God, I am pissed at other religious personages [pastors, priests, cantors etc?]
Actually, I seem to be pissed at hypocracy, or at least that is how my agnosticism started. You get grumpy with what you are familiar with first, then it spreads.
There’s even a Society of Christian Philosophers. They have their own journal, Faith and Philosophy(although the latter publishes the occasional critical or skeptical piece).
I like to tell people I am atheist after they’ve known me for a long time. They are inevitably shocked.