Is Atheism "arrogant"?

Great Debates
1

It really tries my patience whenever I hear Christians (I don’t know if other faiths do this, so I don’t speculate) call atheists “arrogant”.

So I ask you… Which is more arrogant? To believe that humans are individually loved by the Creator of the Universe, and that all this exists for us, and we will live forever? Or to believe that humans are mortal and not any more important than hookworms or interstellar gas.

Sometimes I’m told directly that I’m arrogant for saying “There is no God”. I’m told I should say “I don’t believe in God”.

But why should I say this? I don’t, for instance, say “I believe there was a Holocaust” (by which I mean an officially sanctioned and systematic program by the Nazi regime to kill Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and other groups as part of a eugenics program) or “I believe there are no unicorns or leprechauns” or “I don’t believe in the ether, phlogiston, or spontaneous generation”.

Holocaust deniers would love for it to be acceptable common practice to treat the Holocaust as a matter of belief. For entirely different (and not malevolent) reasons, God-ists wish to impose a custom of hedging atheistic statements as if they were also matters of faith rather than rational thought.

Of course, the matter is complicated by the fact that I actually am an arrogant person. So I ask you all… what say you?

2

Atheism isn’t arrogant, though atheists can be arrogant.

Depends on the person.

I think many atheists happen to be arrogant with their opinions, and are quick to whip out the “you’re a brainwashed sheep” before even bothering to find out that I’m not, in fact, part of that evil of evils, Christianity (which most Americans use as synonymous with “religion,” it seems).

3

Maybe atheists’ arrogant is manifested in their belief that they are their own god.

That in itself could be very offensive to someone who actually believes there is a god.

4

Wow, this is new. A guy who gets his theology information from watching Hellboy.

Well, okay, it just opened, so it would have to be new. Maybe “odd” would have been a better word choice.

5

Plus, one man’s arrogance is another man’s confidence.

Being humble could also possibly mean being incompetent.

6

I think it’s arrogant to say that you know the answer with absolute certainty either way.

7

You misunderstand atheism then (at least soft atheism). I don’t believe in god for the same reason I don’t believe in bigfoot the burden of proof hasn’t been met to my satisfaction. Doesn’t mean I claim to have special knowledge or that I’m above another person. I could be wrong on both counts.

I think the view of arrogant atheists comes from several sources.

  1. bitterness. Many left their religions bitter and take it out on people.
  2. Related to above many get sick of dealing with misconceptions about what type of people they are and start becoming what they hate condescending jerks.
  3. I’ve noticed a vast ignorance in many believers and they hate it when I point out inconstancies in the bible or their personal faith. Because I raise questions they are ill equipped to answer because they haven’t done their research where I have I come off as a jerk that’s attacking their beliefs not someone that’s defending why I can’t buy the story they are trying to sell me
8

Nonsense, that’s just craven puppying out of the question. There’s no reason to believe in the Judaeo-Christian god because the putative evidence submitted by his adherents is merely a collection of old, contradictory folk legends. Can one absolutely prove YHWH’s nonexistence? No, but neither can one prove the nonexistence of Zeus, Odin, Ra, Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Izanami, Vishnu, Huitzlopochtli, P’an Ku, or any other of the myriad deities born of the human imagination so that primitive humans could pretend that natural forces were persons that could be controlled through rituals. If you maintain that one must believe in YHWH because one cannot positively negate his existence, then one must believe in every god that has ever been invented for the very same reason. Can you prove that Apollo does not exist? If not, then why don’t you pray to him?

To quote Terry Pratchett, prayer is just a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.

9

Ah, I think we hit on it. Many people presume atheists are arrogant because atheists pretend to know everything about religious motivations and ideology.

10

Hmm. I don’t think one must believe in YHWH or any God at all. I’m coming from an agnostic perspective where I claim I just plain don’t know the answers.

11

Actually, that makes you an atheist. An agnostic specifically believes that the answers can’t be known, not just that they aren’t. Of course, that may be what you meant, but from that description you’re not talking about agnosticism.

12

And there you have it. Zagadka’s right, the OP has been answered via example.

13

Combined with your assertion that your dead-solid certainty in the nonexistence of something which by definition is empirically unverifiable …

Yeah, that’s it. I mean, if you’re a dick, people generally treat you like a dick. Funny, that.

Thanks for object lesson, gobear.

And Laigle, the terms aren’t mutually exclusive. Some people refer to “soft atheism” as “agnosticism.”

14

Sorry to upset you, zagadka and Johnny Bravo, but the Bible is just a collection of legends and pious fictions contradicted by archeology and modern science. Mind, the same is true of every other collection of sacred writings in every other religion. There was no Exodus, the Jews were never slaves in Egypt, Joshua did not make the sun stand still, no Noah and no Flood, there were no Adam and Eve, no Garden of Eden. It’s all fiction. There have been enough threads on the problems of reconciling the Bible with the known history of Near Eastern civilization. Calling me arrogant won’t make the facts go away.

As long as religion confines itself to codes of behavior and metaphysics, it’s pretty much immune from rational analysis insofar as it is not internally contradictory. But when it attempts to explain natural phenomena in supernatural terms or passes on historical falsehoods, it deserves to be debunked.

If you want to believe in invisible spirits, I can’t argue you out of that belief. At the same time, there is no reason for me to find your belief so compelling that I must accept it as fact.

15

But why?

There’s absolutely no evidence that any such thing as a god exists. And I have never heard a claim for a god’s existence that didn’t violate common sense, logic, and/or verifiable fact. So why should it be arrogant to believe firmly and categorically, without qualification, that there’s no such thing?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Allowing oneself to believe “well, I just don’t know” whenever a ridiculous claim can’t be absolutely disproved leads to dangerous thought patterns.

Requiring absolute proof of a negative is inherently a dangerous standard.

I mean, I can imagine that this room I’m in exists as I experience it. Or, I could imagine that there is also in this room an undetectable dog. By definition, disproving the existence of the UD would be impossible, and it would be a convenient explanation for why my papers sometimes get lost and I find my shoes in here when I thought I left them elsewhere.

I think the claim of arrogance comes from implying that millions of people believe firmly in a fiction, and that many have actually dedicated their lives to, even died for, a nonsensical notion.

But hey, sometimes the truth is ugly.

Now, add to all this, science is beginning to uncover the reasons why human beings should have evolved in such a way as to be predisposed to religious thought.

I firmly deny the reality of the undetectable dog in my room, of psychic surgery, of alien abduction, of divination by tarot cards, and of god. And I still fail to see how that in itself is arrogant.

16

Maybe you should stop lying about people. I have yet to meet a single atheist who “believed” this. If they did they wouldn’t even be an atheist, by definition.

However, the latter doesn’t fully cover the former. Whether or not someone is an agnostic, they still either believe in god or they don’t.

17

Well, mainly because, like I said, it isn’t the belief itself that is arrogant - it is how you state that belief. Atheists frequently (as you did) call theists their choice of “ignorant, delusional, stupid, weak willed, etc.” That “I’m right, you’re wrong” attitude is what make some atheists annoyingly arrogant, just as it makes some theists annoyingly arrogant.

Also, as you did above, many American atheists equate “religion” with Christianity, with scarce acknowledgement of other religions.

Further, as (again) you do above, some atheists (like you, it seems) feel a need to “flaunt” their atheism around, strutting about shouting “Look at me, I don’t believe in God so I’m smarter than you,” which makes no more sense than “I believe in God so I’m more moral than you.”

Finally, as I said, atheists tend to state that they have profound understanding of every religion on the planet.

So in the end, it boils down to the person being arrogant, not the belief. The fact that you associate individual behavior with general beliefs points to certain facts about you that I won’t venture to make here.

18

Yes, but I’m not asking why people treat me like a dick. (Surprisingly, many don’t, btw.) I’m asking about the claim – which I hear made by Christians about atheists in general, not necessarily about me – that atheism is inherently arrogant.

This coming from people who believe that humans are the very purpose of the Universe and will live forever with the Perfect Being.

That just seems bizarre to me.

But here’s the nub, isn’t it… “dead-solid certainty in the nonexistence of something which by definition is empirically unverifiable”. If there’s a god, why should it “by definition” be “empirically unverifiable”? Why should it not, in fact, be explicitly verifiable, even self-evident?

If it is arrogant to take the view that absurd claims which are conveniently untestable should be rejected (not just waffled on with an “I don’t know”), and if it is humble to believe ones species to be the purpose of life itself, then I’ll choose arrogance. But to me, it sounds like nonsense.

It’s the latter view which is arrogant. The belief that humans are not any more significant than rocks and trees is not arrogant.

19

Is it arrogant to believe that your mother and father love you and watch out for you?

Is it arrogant to believe that there’s a god figure that loves you and watches out for you?

Neither theism or atheism are inherantly arrogant, but many people on both sides are. It’s the man, not the beliefs.

20

I don’t think either are arrogant, but recognize that the latter is a distinctly different sort of claim than the former.