Guest post: Reasoned debate was lumped in with proselytizing
Originally a comment by Sastra on In a free society.
Back when New Atheism was a ‘thing,’ liberal believers and liberal atheists criticized it for being simply the flip side of religious fundamentalism. New Atheists were attacking people’s faith; New Atheists weren’t making the proper distinction between good religion and bad religion; and, worst of all, they were trying to get people to agree with them. Reasoned debate and rational persuasion on the truth and benefits of religion were lumped in with proselytizing and conversion. It was saying “I’m right and you’re wrong.” The unforgivable sin.
People have the right to be who they are.
A lot of conservative religionists were guilty of manipulative tactics and double standards when it came to attacking faith, granted. But I remember there were plenty of conservatives I’d call “liberal,” in that they played by the rules, respected the doubter, and believed, deep down, that truth mattered. “If you became convinced that Christianity wasn’t true and God didn’t exist, would you want to change your mind and become an atheist?” And in between the epistemic meltdowns, the topic-changings, the gruesome scenarios, and the flat denials of the bare possibility, there were cool voices saying “Of course. And I’d still be me. And I’d still care about the same things. And I could just be wrong about God..”
There’s being a parent (“We must protect the weak”) and then there’s being an adult (“Follow the evidence and be damned.”) I understood some of my opponents better than I understood some of my friends.
Very well put. It explains agreeing with an article and seeing it come from a source you’d rather not be in agreement with.
Me: My favorite writer on foreign affairs was an arch conservative editor of The American Conservative of all places. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/
Larison was frankly terrible on many other issues (League of the South-ugh!) but damn he nailed the One Party State that has ruled the United States since the 20th century. The party of Wall Street and War.
Religion, as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim maintained, is the glue that holds social groups together. It does not matter what we believe, even atheism, as long as we all believe it together. As any number of preachers will tell you, ‘the family that prays together, stays together. (They will also recommend that you pray in their church, temple or whatever, and to their god; otherwise you risk your immortal soul’s eternal damnation, in Hell’s fire, outer space or wherever.)
But humans are genrerally born into their set of beliefs, and they are generally ancestral ones. Direct ancestor worship as is found among the Chinese, is probably the most clear-sighted religious belief around.
America was founded by the Puritans; my native Australia by the convicts and their overseers. Fortunately for Australia, religion’s chief representative in the new penal colony of New South Wales post 1788 was the Reverend Samuel Marsden, popularly known as ‘the flogging parson’. Those he flogged were mainly Irish Catholics, with a fair contingent of Irish rebels against English imperial oppression. He probably did more for atheism than a whole flotilla of philosophers ever could.
So well done, that man, I say. And so should all of us.