RichardSRussell (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} richardsrussell) wrote,@ 2008-03-10 01:25:00 |
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Atheists Are Your Friends
Yesterday I discussed Kurt Williamsen’s sign-off (blessings for the faithful, not so much for everyone else), so today I offer up my own last word — a summation of what I hope I’d been able to demonstrate over the course of a month’s worth of commentary:
I’ve been ragging on Kurt Williamsen pretty hard these last couple of weeks. I should state for the record that I’ve never met the man, have no idea what he’s like, and have never read a thing he’s written other than the essay that somebody pointed out to me that got me going on this forum.
My guess is that he’s probably a good guy. That’s based on the odds I’ve encountered in my own life, where the nice folx outnumber the jerks at least a thousand to one. And, as Will Rogers said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”. (Actually, I think that probably tells us more about Will Rogers than about the men he met, but still ….)
Furthermore, I’d be willing to bet that Williamsen is probably pretty competent in his chosen line of work. I have no idea what that might be, but let’s say he’s a carpenter. He could undoubtedly tell at a glance which is a roofing nail and which a finishing nail, and he’d be able to say exactly where to get them and when and why to use them. And so forth.
But all the good will in the world, and all the competence in some specific areas, does not change the fact that he is almost ridiculously obtuse about atheism and science (particularly evolution and cosmology).
Now, sheer ignorance, in and of itself, is nothing to be particularly ashamed of. None of us can know everything, or even a tiny fraction of everything, let alone be an expert on a whole flock of different things. It’s an age of specialization. You may know one subject tremendously well and many other things at a kind of shallow level, and some things not at all — and that’s OK. We’re all in the same boat.
For example, I have essentially zero domestic skills. It’s a challenge for me to make instant oatmeal. Anything beyond that, and I’m hopeless. But my utter incompetence in the kitchen doesn’t make me a bad person. What would make me a bad person — or at least a foolish one — is if I tried to write a cookbook and sell it to people as if it contained anything of value.
And that’s what Williamsen did a month ago when he had the temerity and chutzpah to trot his ignorance out before the world as something to be admired and emulated.
Now, why exactly did this rouse my ire? It’s because he’s spreading lies about a minority group — atheists — that I happen to belong to. And we atheists are really pretty sick and tired of it.
We’ve seen where things like that lead. Turks lied about Armenians. The Spanish conquistadors lied about the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. American whites lied about blacks. Straights lied about gays. Prohibitionists lied about drunks. And, most notoriously, European Christians lied about witches and Jews.
Start off with small lies, work your way up to big ones, move on to considering certain categories of people savage or stupid or smelly, eventually label them as subhuman, then dangerously subhuman, then ghettoize them, then persecute and torture them, and the final remaining step is genocide.
You may think I’m exaggerating, but that’s exactly the lesson of history. Let people get away with those original small lies, and you’re already on your way down the slippery slope.
If you ever want a real stomach-turning experience, read up on the Malleus Maleficorum. That’s Latin for Hammer of Witches. It’s essentially a how-to-do-it manual for slowly dismantling a human being, in the most excruciating manner possible. Officially published and approved by the medieval Catholic Church, it may well be the most loathsome and odious work ever penned by human hands. It was used to exterminate about a million people — predominantly women, particularly old women living alone — over the course of centuries.
And it was based on a lie (that there are such things as witches) and a Bible verse (“Suffer not a witch to live.” Exodus 22:18).
= = = = = =
“Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg, Nobel-winning American physicist
= = = = = =
It’s easy to spot some minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, and children. Many of them are color-coded for your convenience; the rest also have obvious physical symptoms of otherness. This makes it easy to discriminate against them. But, in a perverse kind of way, it also means that they all have an obvious vested interest in sticking together to fight against discriminatory treatment. That is, it’s just as easy for them to recognize each other as allies as it is for the powerful to recognize them as targets.
It’s harder in other cases. Light-skinned mulattos passing as white, non-observant Jews, closeted gays — all can fake it well enuf to get by in the larger world. But the same principle of self-recognizability applies here as well. It’s hard for a gay person to make common cause with another gay if they aren’t both out. Furthermore, since so few people in these traditionally oppressed groups feel comfortable openly proclaiming their minority status, the rest of the world gets the mistaken impression that there really are very few of them — and the ones who are obvious are flamboyantly so, which tends to exacerbate the impression of “otherness”.
We atheists fall into the latter grouping. You can’t tell just by looking whether a person is an atheist. And, if the subject never comes up, you’ll never find out. Even if an atheist is hit with a direct question like “What church do you go to?”, most people will be satisfied with some vague response like “Oh, I don’t go very often any more.”.
But we’re everywhere. Reputable surveys show that about 1 American out of 7 doesn’t have a religion. Now, that’s obviously small in comparison to Christians, who dominate the US population, but it’s larger than the total number of Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarians, Wiccans, etc. combined! If the non-religious were a denomination of Christianity, we’d be the 3rd largest in America, behind only Catholics and Baptists. (You could look it up. Try adherents.com.)
But, in part because we don’t have buildings or rituals or holidays or vestments or funny jewelry or secret handshakes, we’re largely invisible.
Nonetheless, as I said, we’re everywhere. Think about the 200 people you know best. Odds are that somewhere between 2 and 3 dozen of them are godless heathens (unless you only hang out with a churchy crowd).
You’d probably be surprised to learn how many clergypeople are atheists. Part of the training in divinity school involves exposure to a variety of different beliefs and an examination of Biblical criticism. This is ostensibly to enable the novices and seminarians to learn how to refute those positions when they encounter them, but often it has the reverse effect and gets them to thinking. Then they get exposed to all the tribulations and occasional horrors of the real world, and they spend some more time thinking. Then they finally conclude that all the supernatural parts of the Bible are just fairy tales.
So then what? Well, it’s not easy to abandon a job you’ve been trained for and may be good at, especially if you’ve got a family to support and are convinced (not without good reason) that you’re really in a position to help people out. So you just keep chugging along, choosing to focus your sermons on the parts of your religion that speak of love and kindness and good deeds and leaving out the bad parts (a form of cherry picking that’s been going on since before the Council of Nicea).
So I leave you now (“Finally!” someone must be saying) with the thot that we atheists are indeed your friends, nabors, relatives, co-workers, teammates, fellow citizens, and co-signers of the lease on this wonderful planet of ours. We too are nice folx, just like virtually everybody else you know. We’ve got the same basic needs and desires that everyone else has: a roof overhead, 3 squares a day, love and companionship, good health, some good times, a little spare cash, a decent reputation, a chance to make the world a better place, some ambitious young kid to shovel the sidewalk, chocolate, and a Packer championship. That’s not so much to ask, is it? Give no grief, get no grief. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?
So please don’t lie about us. Please don’t put words in our mouths about what we think and feel and believe. We’ve got brains and tongues as well as personalities and quirks. We’re capable of speaking for ourselves. You wanna know what an atheist thinks, just ask one. We don’t bite.
Atheists are your friends.
And that wraps up this series. Thanks for your patience if you’ve been following along.
Yesterday I discussed Kurt Williamsen’s sign-off (blessings for the faithful, not so much for everyone else), so today I offer up my own last word — a summation of what I hope I’d been able to demonstrate over the course of a month’s worth of commentary:
I’ve been ragging on Kurt Williamsen pretty hard these last couple of weeks. I should state for the record that I’ve never met the man, have no idea what he’s like, and have never read a thing he’s written other than the essay that somebody pointed out to me that got me going on this forum.
My guess is that he’s probably a good guy. That’s based on the odds I’ve encountered in my own life, where the nice folx outnumber the jerks at least a thousand to one. And, as Will Rogers said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”. (Actually, I think that probably tells us more about Will Rogers than about the men he met, but still ….)
Furthermore, I’d be willing to bet that Williamsen is probably pretty competent in his chosen line of work. I have no idea what that might be, but let’s say he’s a carpenter. He could undoubtedly tell at a glance which is a roofing nail and which a finishing nail, and he’d be able to say exactly where to get them and when and why to use them. And so forth.
But all the good will in the world, and all the competence in some specific areas, does not change the fact that he is almost ridiculously obtuse about atheism and science (particularly evolution and cosmology).
Now, sheer ignorance, in and of itself, is nothing to be particularly ashamed of. None of us can know everything, or even a tiny fraction of everything, let alone be an expert on a whole flock of different things. It’s an age of specialization. You may know one subject tremendously well and many other things at a kind of shallow level, and some things not at all — and that’s OK. We’re all in the same boat.
For example, I have essentially zero domestic skills. It’s a challenge for me to make instant oatmeal. Anything beyond that, and I’m hopeless. But my utter incompetence in the kitchen doesn’t make me a bad person. What would make me a bad person — or at least a foolish one — is if I tried to write a cookbook and sell it to people as if it contained anything of value.
And that’s what Williamsen did a month ago when he had the temerity and chutzpah to trot his ignorance out before the world as something to be admired and emulated.
Now, why exactly did this rouse my ire? It’s because he’s spreading lies about a minority group — atheists — that I happen to belong to. And we atheists are really pretty sick and tired of it.
We’ve seen where things like that lead. Turks lied about Armenians. The Spanish conquistadors lied about the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. American whites lied about blacks. Straights lied about gays. Prohibitionists lied about drunks. And, most notoriously, European Christians lied about witches and Jews.
Start off with small lies, work your way up to big ones, move on to considering certain categories of people savage or stupid or smelly, eventually label them as subhuman, then dangerously subhuman, then ghettoize them, then persecute and torture them, and the final remaining step is genocide.
You may think I’m exaggerating, but that’s exactly the lesson of history. Let people get away with those original small lies, and you’re already on your way down the slippery slope.
If you ever want a real stomach-turning experience, read up on the Malleus Maleficorum. That’s Latin for Hammer of Witches. It’s essentially a how-to-do-it manual for slowly dismantling a human being, in the most excruciating manner possible. Officially published and approved by the medieval Catholic Church, it may well be the most loathsome and odious work ever penned by human hands. It was used to exterminate about a million people — predominantly women, particularly old women living alone — over the course of centuries.
And it was based on a lie (that there are such things as witches) and a Bible verse (“Suffer not a witch to live.” Exodus 22:18).
= = = = = =
“Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg, Nobel-winning American physicist
= = = = = =
It’s easy to spot some minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, and children. Many of them are color-coded for your convenience; the rest also have obvious physical symptoms of otherness. This makes it easy to discriminate against them. But, in a perverse kind of way, it also means that they all have an obvious vested interest in sticking together to fight against discriminatory treatment. That is, it’s just as easy for them to recognize each other as allies as it is for the powerful to recognize them as targets.
It’s harder in other cases. Light-skinned mulattos passing as white, non-observant Jews, closeted gays — all can fake it well enuf to get by in the larger world. But the same principle of self-recognizability applies here as well. It’s hard for a gay person to make common cause with another gay if they aren’t both out. Furthermore, since so few people in these traditionally oppressed groups feel comfortable openly proclaiming their minority status, the rest of the world gets the mistaken impression that there really are very few of them — and the ones who are obvious are flamboyantly so, which tends to exacerbate the impression of “otherness”.
We atheists fall into the latter grouping. You can’t tell just by looking whether a person is an atheist. And, if the subject never comes up, you’ll never find out. Even if an atheist is hit with a direct question like “What church do you go to?”, most people will be satisfied with some vague response like “Oh, I don’t go very often any more.”.
But we’re everywhere. Reputable surveys show that about 1 American out of 7 doesn’t have a religion. Now, that’s obviously small in comparison to Christians, who dominate the US population, but it’s larger than the total number of Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarians, Wiccans, etc. combined! If the non-religious were a denomination of Christianity, we’d be the 3rd largest in America, behind only Catholics and Baptists. (You could look it up. Try adherents.com.)
But, in part because we don’t have buildings or rituals or holidays or vestments or funny jewelry or secret handshakes, we’re largely invisible.
Nonetheless, as I said, we’re everywhere. Think about the 200 people you know best. Odds are that somewhere between 2 and 3 dozen of them are godless heathens (unless you only hang out with a churchy crowd).
You’d probably be surprised to learn how many clergypeople are atheists. Part of the training in divinity school involves exposure to a variety of different beliefs and an examination of Biblical criticism. This is ostensibly to enable the novices and seminarians to learn how to refute those positions when they encounter them, but often it has the reverse effect and gets them to thinking. Then they get exposed to all the tribulations and occasional horrors of the real world, and they spend some more time thinking. Then they finally conclude that all the supernatural parts of the Bible are just fairy tales.
So then what? Well, it’s not easy to abandon a job you’ve been trained for and may be good at, especially if you’ve got a family to support and are convinced (not without good reason) that you’re really in a position to help people out. So you just keep chugging along, choosing to focus your sermons on the parts of your religion that speak of love and kindness and good deeds and leaving out the bad parts (a form of cherry picking that’s been going on since before the Council of Nicea).
So I leave you now (“Finally!” someone must be saying) with the thot that we atheists are indeed your friends, nabors, relatives, co-workers, teammates, fellow citizens, and co-signers of the lease on this wonderful planet of ours. We too are nice folx, just like virtually everybody else you know. We’ve got the same basic needs and desires that everyone else has: a roof overhead, 3 squares a day, love and companionship, good health, some good times, a little spare cash, a decent reputation, a chance to make the world a better place, some ambitious young kid to shovel the sidewalk, chocolate, and a Packer championship. That’s not so much to ask, is it? Give no grief, get no grief. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?
So please don’t lie about us. Please don’t put words in our mouths about what we think and feel and believe. We’ve got brains and tongues as well as personalities and quirks. We’re capable of speaking for ourselves. You wanna know what an atheist thinks, just ask one. We don’t bite.
Atheists are your friends.
And that wraps up this series. Thanks for your patience if you’ve been following along.
