I spent spring break visiting my friend in Houston, Texas. He’s a protestant Christian, but we generally get along just fine respecting each other’s right to hold their beliefs. We usually exchange a few volleys just out of habit, but with no realistic expectation of ever altering the other’s position. Presently he’s still too smart to become a biblical literalist, and he still doesn’t believe in the literal truth of, say, the first 11 chapters of Genesis (if he ever did, I’d question his sanity.) But judging from the friends he’s making down there, and the Southern Baptist church he joined (ugh!) I don’t know how long he’ll retain some semblance of a rational brain. It’s towards a friend of his that this rant is directed…
Since he had given me the respect of not expecting me to go to church with him (as if I’d get up before noon during spring break), I agreed to watch this DVD featuring interviews with prominent ID’ers, including Dembski. We watched it at one of his friends’ homes, had a conversation about it in which it became known I was not a theist, and one of the guys I met there joined us at the sports bar the next night to watch the Sweet Sixteen. I will refer to him as Christian Guy. During conversation with me over halftime, he mentions another talk he had with a coworker of his. The coworker revealed that he was an athiest to Christian Guy, and they had a brief discussion about this. At the discussion’s conclusion, Christian guy actually said to the athiest (paraphrasing) “no offense, but I’ll be locking my office doors and the cabinets when I leave from now on, since I can’t trust you not to steal anything from them.”
Don’t you just love it when someone prefaces an outrageously offensive statement with “no offense”??
Apparently Christian Guy makes the all-too-common assumption that athiests have no ethics. His presumption, as he explained to me, was that without the fear of offending god with immoral actions, an athiest would simply do whatever was best for him, meaning he’d steal from a coworker if he could get away with it.
I pointed out to him that, since he was a protestant evangelical Christian, his religion believes that all people, both athiests and Christians included, are wretched, wicked, ugly sinners. I have a positive image of humanity, he is the one with the negative opinion of people.
I went on to point out that, even if he’s right that we all act in our own best interests (even he does, since he believes following his little rulebook will get him into heaven), that stealing from coworkers isn’t necessarily in our best interests even if we don’t get caught. My act of theft in violation of another’s property rights contributes towards creating a society that doesn’t respect property rights, and thus my act of thievery increases the possibility that my property rights will be violated in the future. This basic argument for community-based ethics seemed to elude him, as he apparently thinks that not only do all athiests make decisions in self-interest, and that self-interest is wholly limited to material gain, but also that we make these decisions looking only about 5 seconds in the future.
He didn’t waver. He went right back to his original position. In fact, after I explained all this, he went ahead and stated that if I were his coworker he’d give me the same treatment he gives the other guy. What the fuck? This guy has known me for a total of one day, spent about 2 hours with me, and he thinks he can make a judgment about my character solely based on the fact that I don’t worship his precious Magical Sky Pixie.
Maybe I should have gotten indignant at his assertion, and the fact that he actually had so little tact and respect for others that he went right ahead and said it, to my face. But since his position was so colossally stupid, and he showed no inclination to comprehend rational arguments against his moronic position, I didn’t think it was worth my time and effort to get enraged by him. Such stupidity baffles me, it puzzles me, but I think I’m just coming to expect that from the majority of protestant Christians these days. Living in Texas, he probably never had his viewpoints challenged, he’s probably been surrounded since his birth by others of like mind, it’s not really his fault he forgot how to think.
What galled me was that he says all this after I had sat down with him the previous night and watched a 45-minute interview with Dembski on intelligent design. In discussing it with Christian Guy and the others, I was careful not to be dismissive of ID. I sat through an hour of one-sided Christian propaganda, and limited my remarks so thoroughly that they wouldn’t even have known I was an athiest if my friend hadn’t mentioned it. After doing this, and showing respect for their beliefs, this Christian Guy not only shows zero respect for my beliefs, he shows zero respect for me as a person.
To be honest, I think alot of Christian beliefs are outright nutty. But I don’t frickin’ tell the guy this, I especially don’t tell him this because I’ve known him for just a day, he’s good friends with my best friend whom I’m visiting, and I figured he was a nice guy and deserved better than my being rudely dismissive of his beliefs in his presence. Clearly, it was just asking too much for him to reciprocate.
