I’ve been discussing this with my girlfriend a lot lately. We’re both in the hard agnostic / soft atheist realm, and thought we find a lot of merit with Dawkins and even Bill Maher’s Religulous, we both consider them to be the worst kind of ambassadors and are doing as much harm as good.
Atheists have an enormous image problem. We’re aware that we are generally the most despised and mistrusted minority. It stands to reason that if an individual is despised and mistrusted, any arguments to further our own belief system (or lack therof) will not only fall on deaf ears, but be perceived as an attack. Nobody likes to be made to be wrong, but the religious have a lot more skin in the game if they are wrong.
For the faithful, religion isn’t just a component of their lives, it is often the foundation of their lives, and attempts to chip away at that foundation can understandably frightens them and endangers everything they’ve built on that foundation. Their “fight or flight” mechanism kicks in, their defenses go up and the more we batter away at their walls, the more they strive to reinforce them.
I think that one of the reasons Christianity was a “hit” is because some of it’s core tenets — “Sermon on the Mount”-type stuff is what people wanted to hear. It went down easy. It wasn’t threatening. On the other hand, atheists’ message — there is no loving God, there is no heaven, there is no ultimate punishment for the wicked is downright terrifying to the religious. And if we do hope a religious person makes a terrifying journey, with someone outwardly compassionate (which a Humanist should be anyway) or someone hostile?
In my fields — graphic design, advertising & marketing — I learned about the “Buy-In Bench,” as a way to sell unconventional ideas to resistant minds. The underlying premise is that depending on how different a new idea is, it can be unrealistic for a person to warm up to that idea in one setting. So you seek to only take them the distance that is realistic and leave the rest for later. Once they’re comfortable with a new position, you can move them further down the bench.
Or maybe more succinctly, if you want a person to dine on your dinner, give them bite-size pieces rather than choking them with all four courses at once.
Personally, I find the arguments against God so compelling that my preferred tact is to — in a mock-naive manner — ask those questions that planted doubt in my mind (I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school and was even an alter boy) and let those same questions roll around in their heads.
I understand the anger and resentment that breeds militancy that we non-believers continue to endure in the face of the religious world. But we are poor ambassadors of our group at our own peril. The whole situation reminds me of an old Onion article “Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years” We have a quite a hole from which to emerge, but I do have hope.
