Hey guess what! Did you know that gnu atheists are obnoxious? No? Neither did I! I’ve never heard that before. Yet alas, my darlings, it is so.
most of those in the movement formerly known as “New Atheism” seem to share the following characteristics. They are atheists. They believe the world would be a better place if religion would go away, becoming nothing more than cultural history and cultural tradition. They think that any religion that claims to be anything other than just cultural tradition is incompatible with science and the scientific world view. They believe that if somebody aims to accept science and is intellectually honest and consistent, the success of modern science must necessarily lead that person to accept philosophical materialism. They use the word “reason” as a synonym for “application of scientific reasoning”, thereby making anybody who is religious by definition guilty of thinking without reason. (As well as a lot of other people, for instance all faculty at a University who aren’t in a science or engineering department…
No. That last bit is wrong; entirely wrong. I told him so – for it is a he: Rob Knop, physicist and Christian – on the post.
We use the word “reason” to include “consistent with scientific reasoning,” but certainly not as a synonym for it.
He replied by moving the goalposts. But enough of this; back to the post itself and its useful new information about the badness of gnu atheists.
a subset of them are incredibly strident and combative. They think that any religion at all is a threat to science. They do not hesitate to call non-atheists idiots or childish. They will crap the comment threads of posts like this one with all sorts of (frankly) bigotry hiding under the clothing of assumed “reason”…
And then go home and eat a neighbor for dinner. It’s all so unfortunate.
Comments
85 responses to “Strident n combative”
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Sometimes I get a little worried. When I look at a blog post such as the one you refer to, there are comments about how atheists really aren’t that strident and don’t believe this (scientism), or don’t insist that (God’s non-existence can be proved), and I mentally see myself putting up my hand and saying “Sorry. Excuse me. I do!”. It’s like that business a while ago about the (im)possibility of evidence for god. I almost feel like I want to set up a support group for truly fundamental atheists. But only for nice, well-mannered, fundamentalist atheists, of course.
I love the smell of fresh gnu bashing in the morning…
Like every other “gnu atheists suck” piece that gets published in print or on the Web, we can be 100% certain of this: No right-thinking people (who are not themselves atheists) will spring to our defense waving the “Tolerance” banner and taking Knop to task for piling on an already marginalized group. Nick Kristof will not write an op-ed about the spread of anti-atheist sentiment, and how terribly insidious and unfair it is. Because we’re the villains.
Yes my unbelief is so fundamental, I take it to an extreme!
Sounds a bit like old accommodationism to me, very old! Really waiting for the new ‘nice’ accommodationists to take the place of these fanatics!
I’m glad Rob Knob, sorry Knop is annoyed, he should be annoyed, but he’s annoyed at the wrong people. He should be annoyed at the fundamentalists [sic] like the bishop of Phoenix. Instead, he’s annoyed because he perceives (quiet wrongly and fallaciously) that we’re rude insulting and not nice, when in fact we’re exercising our metaphorical jaws and speaking up.
Rob Knob doesn’t construct an argument, he simply describes (mistakenly) what we are, then says we’re in the way and he doesn’t like us. That’s not an argument!
Here is an argument: religion is in the way of science and reason and even moral concerns because it’s irrational and unreasonable and even immoral.
But I guess we can’t make such arguments because that’s too unpleasant to hear. And so we must simply shush and be quiet instead, so that nice Christians can claim that there really is no conflict!
I notice Hammill once again rides into town to stir trouble, this time cheerleading on Rob’s blog.
In terms of the compatibility of science and religion, how can a religious scientist assume naturalism or materialism is true when he or she is doing science and then may not true when he or she isn’t? If you believe nonmaterial beings can influence the material world, why would you ever trust science? If you are a Christian, don’t you need to believe your god intervenes in the material world? I can’t see compatibility as true.
That piece was just terrible. It’s like he was angling for assholes. “I tried to issue a reasonable call for civility, and look. Look.” Rieux:
That about captures it for me.
And comments are closed. If you don’t want to have a discussion, why bring anything up in the first place? Mr. Knop seems like the kind of person who smacks a hornet nest and then complains when he gets stung.
Rieux
I don’t know who that person is, but he/she clearly has a black-belt in Internet-Fu and delivered one hellacious ass-kicking in that thread before it was closed…
Fun while it lasted, though.
I enjoyed this comment from Knop:
Uh, and just how did they find out they’d been fooled? It wasn’t exactly because they were so diligent about fact-checking, so properly skeptical. Rather, it was because other people, who were properly skeptical, did the detective work after the fact. (Also the benign phrasing of “what had happened”—as if this terrible calamity had somehow been visited upon poor, defenseless Mooney! Excuse me, but nobody forced The Intersection to elevate TJ the way it did without properly fact-checking the guy’s story. That was a choice.)
I used to call myself an atheist. Then an anti-theist. Now, I am a Gnu atheist. But I guess I will transition to Anti-Accommodationist. But I’m wondering if Pro-Reality-ist wouldn’t be more accurate (I’d say Realist but might be mistaken for an artist).
To the tiny (sorry, miniscule) extent that hating atheists per se has become less universally acceptable as our numbers continue to rise far beyond our influence (especially when compared to much smaller and vastly more influential religious minorities), our enemies (and some who ought to be friends) are more than making up for it by reserving special demonisation for the Gnus.
Egbert @ #5 – yes I noticed “Hammill” yet again turning up to stir the pot. I’m getting increasingly suspicious of “Hammill.” It claims to be new to the whole subject, and I think it’s telling a whopper about that. It’s way too interested and informed for that to be plausible. It’s also suspiciously interested in me and in Jerry Coyne. It’s also suspiciously careful not to comment here or at WEIT or as far as I’ve seen at any gnu blog.
OK, this obvious harm thing needs challenged. (That’s Pennsylvania dialect, by the way.) First off, neither religion nor a perceived conflict between science and religion has anything to do with lack of public support for initiatives to confront anthropogenic climate change. That’s a completely different kind of deception. So our shared cause pretty much comes down to wider acceptance of the evolutionary process, a far less politically urgent goal.
In this, the heavy lifting is done by the religious through initiatives such the Clergy Letter Project and BioLogos. The principals involved in these initiatives are concerned that, if their religious traditions are perceived as denying obvious facts about nature, they could lose the next generation of Christians. An awareness that many scientists find science and religion incompatible does not discourage them. It motivates them! So, in fact, the gnus are making a real contribution to the effort. This is the point that Michael Dowd makes. Granted, Dowd’s and Spong’s goals are more radical than those of BioLogos, but the understanding is the same: If you ignore the conflict between science and religion, religion loses.
I understand that people, like Josh Rosenau, who collaborate with these initiative, will feel an obligation to push back on behalf of their collaborators. Still, NCSE ought to be paying Jerry Coyne a retainer for playing bad cop.
I think I finally understand the accommodationist position. Religious person who accepts evolution and criticizes atheism >good. Nonreligious person who accepts evolution and criticizes theism > bad.
This is…interesting. He simply declares it a “complete misrepresentation” that these movements represent a threat to “the interests of business.” But corporations are going to keep fighting these movements regardless of how unthreatening some try to appear. And many in the FSM and related movements do in fact see their actions as a (one) threat – indeed, aspire to be a threat – to capitalism. Neither their views nor their actions are accomodating to corporations. Knop’s basically telling them to shut up, too – they’re hurting his idea of the free software cause just like the gnus are hurting his idea of the science cause. At least he’s consistent in his cowering before power. I think he should read some Bakunin, Goldman, or de Cleyre.*
*But then I think everyone should read some Bakunin, Goldman, or de Cleyre.
Uh, have you googled “religious right” and “agw” or related terms?
I don’t think accommodationists have a ‘rational’ position, rather it’s a kind of neurosis or anxiety born from paranoia.
I wasn’t arguing that the religious right isn’t filled with climate change deniers, only that their denial has nothing to do with their religion. (Though they may claim otherwise, inasmuch as they like to think that everything has to do with their religion.) Climate change denial is something that the religious right shares with the libertarian right, by the same rationale: Climate scientists are pursuing a socialist agenda to undermine free enterprise. Whether or not those scientists are “faith-friendly” is irrelevant.
But you’re just saying that. The connection between the two terms in “Religious Right,” and the church-state-capital nexus more generally, runs very deep.
They might, but the RR often frames the issue in religious and not economic terms.
Whether or not AGW activists are “faith-friendly” isn’t a non-issue to the accomodationists. They spend a lot of time arguing that gnus should appreciate that not all religious people are AGW deniers and that some are “inspired by their faith” to “steward” the natural environment and thus are our allies, so we shouldn’t alienate them with our stridency.
But you’re just saying that. Give some evidence if you think you have a higher standard.
so we shouldn’t alienate them with our stridency.
Especially at CONSERVATION EVENTS!!! :)
An extreme one of about a million: Pinochet’s Chile, and the support of this and other rightwing, neoliberal regimes and movements by the RR in the US. Authoritarianism is the basis of all.
Some AGW deniers have claimed that God will not destroy the earth again because of a promise made after the flood to Noah. That’s why we have rainbows – so it must be true. James Watt stated something like we don’t need to worry about conservation because the 2nd coming is nigh.
and the support of this and other rightwing, neoliberal regimes and movements by the RR in the US.
Alongside, of course, the US state and US “business interests” (these are often the same people, as Knop notes). (I’ve done some blog posts about this.)
Sorry — what has Pinochet’s Chile got to do with AGW and the religious right?
There’s surely a power elite. No doubt, the interests of a whole glut of capitalists converge. But then that’s consistent with Ken’s point. As a matter of fact, the power elite, and the convergence of their interests, can (and often does) manifest itself in anti-religious/atheistic rhetoric. Michael Crichton’s pathetic AGW stance, for example, is motivated on a comparison between environmentalism and religious fervor.
That’s the biggest helping of Pissy Whiny Baby-tude I’ve had in quite a while. It’s embarrassing to watch grown-ups like Rob Knop parade how fussy and fragile they are. Seriously.
Christians and conservatives, at least in america, share many traits: women must be submissive; preference for patriarchal structures and institutions; need for authoritarian rule; obedience to authority, etc. Nonconformists not welcome.
It has to do with the depth of the connection, with authoritarianism at its heart. The link of neoliberals and the RCC (and RR in the US) to authoritarian governments is a perfect illustration.
AGW denial is another example of the coinciding of religion and capitalism, not capitalists with one another.
No, Ken’s point was that AGW denial has nothing to do with religion.
That’s irrelevant. I didn’t say no other bases for AGW denial existed, just that the RR has a politically-powerful religious one. Even if you think, as I do (agreeing with Ken), that the primary driving force is corporations and neoliberal ideologues, that doesn’t make it have nothing to do with religion. And, as I noted, the issue of religion isn’t irrelevant to critics of gnus. “And often does”? No, and the “example” you offered…isn’t.
Seriously, I’m not in the mood. If you’re going to “respond” to my comments, please read what you’re responding to. My first comment in this discusssion suggested googling some search terms, which serves up thousands if not millions of examples of AGW denial having something to do with religion. I later made a broader point, to which you were allegedly responding.
AGW, religious right, big business – they may not be identical, but they often display shared interests and stick up for each other’s agenda due to the overlap. That about the fate of the planet being solely in god’s hands no matter how we treat it has been heard often enough and we know very well who benefits if natural resources are allowed to be exploited without such limiting considerations as how much of it the planet can take before certain systems start to collapse. It may not be a monolithic block of players, but the strategic alliances are pretty blindingly obvious, as well as having quite a few overlaps of individual players.
There are several ways in which science may be considered the enemy by some of these interests, at least some of the time. I consider that fact to be a somewhat awkward one for accomodationists, as it makes rather a mockery of their trope that it’s all about not frightening the moderately religious away from science by waving atheism at them.
Was Crichton an atheist?
His use of “Exhibit A” in that thread was funny.
(Speaking of that thread, I agree that Hammill is suspect.)
I’m afraid you’ve picked out a single sentence without absorbing Ken’s actual argument. Ken mused that there’s a third factor that explains both libertarian and religious AGW — a kind of reactionary anti-socialism. That’s the basis for his conclusion that religion is unrelated to AGW — he means there’s no unique relationship. So if you think that you’re involved in that conversation, you have to make a minimal effort to address his argument instead of taking a single sentence and criticizing it out of context. If not, you’re not; you’re just saying stuff about the global network of power and domination, which nobody here denies (minus a few scattered neocon loons who pop up every so often).
As an aside, it’s perfectly fine if you’re not in the mood to provide evidence, just as it’s perfectly fine if everybody else is indifferent to your moods. But then you should stop pretending as though you’re engaged in some kind of conversation.
SC – I ’bout fell over and died when pulled that “Exhibit A.” Couldnt’ have been more perfect. And yeah, I’m squinting suspiciously at Hammill, too.
Ah … I shoulda known.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=michael+crichton+atheism
But this isn’t correct. It’s not the only way they frame it, and it’s not a third factor leading to a spurious correlation – it’s another effect (established churches hate socialism because it threatens their power and capitalists hate it for the same reason). It’s all reactionary, because it’s all authoritarian, in a way that’s impossible to separate. (And it wouldn’t matter if this were correct, because they still frame it publicly in religious terms, which has real effects.)
Which was wrong. Even Marx wouldn’t make this sort of simplistic determinist argument, and certainly no anarchist thinker would. And he didn’t say “unrelated,” but “nothing to do with.” And he was talking about AGW denial, not AGW.
You haven’t read my posts, obviously. They frame it in religious terms, and this is powerful politically, regardless of any root in the final instance. Moreover, it is not irrelevant to accomodationists in discussions of environmentalism.
That network includes churches. But you’re missing the point. It’s not just about the concrete social nexus amongst these forces (which exists), but also the deeper ideological connection.
And you do it again! I didn’t say I wasn’t in the mood to provide evidence, but that I wasn’t in the mood to spend my time correcting misreadings of my posts.
Look, jerk, I had already searched, and came up with conflicting reports (like the third one in your search) and nothing conclusive. I was asking out of curiosity – it’s not particularly significant. Calling environmentalism a religion isn’t necessarily anti-religious; it could be a false religion.
I’m guessing you wouldn’t know C. Wright Mills (an atheist and anarchist) if he punched you in the nose.
Let’s squint suspiciously at Hammill instead of arguing about AGW.
I’ve been doing a bit of lit crit-type close reading. Fakery rises off the screen like steam off horseshit. It’s got this schtick going where it pretends to be terribly concerned that gnu atheists “reflect badly on non-believers”…man that sounds familiar. And fake.
…denial. *runs* Seriously, though, good idea. I’ll even let them get in the last word. Because I’m nothing if not conciliatory.
:)
Yes. I haven’t analyzed it with any care, but it seems closer to like TJ than to Signal.
Could be. On the other hand Signal sounded a lot like TJ at times, and there were other connections. Anyway Signal is definitely a sock puppet – it’s posted here as three different characters. TJ of course is sock puppet x 10,000. What Hammill is………….is pending.
I’m also, like you, slightly suspicious of the drive-by “militants.” I mean, it’s rather silly as it’s about something like calling religious people idiots, and no one should take random blog comments as representative, but they seem quite convenient. Not that the gnu-haters need even that to pearlclutch.
Ken and Moses: thanks for the nice words.
As you can probably tell, my main interest in those kinds of exchanges is pointing out how religious privilege impacts and manifests itself in the kinds of issues that come up in these parts. If you ask me, almost every argument involving Gnu Atheists—whether it’s some tut-tutting believer complaining that we’re too “strident” or an accommodationist declaring that we’re “not helping,” or even Catholic bishops claiming the right to murder pregnant women or whatever—boils down to privilege. I think Gnu Atheism is controversial precisely because it represents a direct challenge at majority privilege, and there’s nothing that majorities feel the need to pathologize and crush more than those.
As a result, I think just about every prominent atheist ought to talk about privilege more, perhaps a lot more. But that’s just my opinion. :-)
It’s strange, though. Signal said she [?] was in a different part of the country (California?), and that you could check it. Since I don’t know as much as you, I can’t say where TJ was and when. I always thought they were probably connected in some way, but not necessarily the same person.
This I know, of course. (And I’ll note that I pointed out Signal’s sudden disappearance last summer and how suspicious it was.)
Yup.
SC – yes, and Signal was telling the truth about that much – Josh (webmaster) confirmed the California location. But the discovery that Signal was a sock threw a whole new ton of suspicion on “him.” That combined with all the overlaps and the abrupt silence just when YNH hit the wall – makes me think there is some strong connection, whose nature I can but guess at. You were dead right about the disappearance.
Rieux – no, I agree about privilege – I think that’s a very important angle. I think the “oh you can’t say that” crowd should be called royalists, in honor of all the kind loyal people who refrain from pointing out the emperor’s missing clothes.
Cute, OB. Is “courtiers” already taken?
What gets me is how offended and sneeringly amused Signal acted at the suggestion that it was a sock – how stupid and obnoxious you were to suggest it! – and then it shows up socking here mere months later.
No, not that I know of, but I find royalist even more amusing, somehow…
Oh, and Rieux, you were superb on that thread. Brav@.
Exactly, SC. That bastard had the gall to do a post on me which featured the Loony Tunes logo from the Warner Brothers cartoons – because I suspected him of being exactly what he was!
These people are real shits.
Yes, it is.
Well I knew that…I just didn’t think of that as “taken.”
I think I’ve found Hammill getting confused about its own cover story.
Lots of mistakes going on here, and frankly it’s pretty hard to put it succinctly because you’re an expert at blunders. I’ll just separate my replies chronologically, based on each little nugget of Salty Wisdom.
1. You’re starting to make an argument that engages with Ken for the first time, which is nice development. Welcome to the conversation.
As it happens, now that you’ve actually articulated some kind of considered position, I tend to agree with you — though it depends on how you spell out the details.
2. But now we’re back to old tricks. By continuing to focus on a single sentence apart form the argument, you have once again mischaracterized Ken’s slightly elliptical claim (about religion being “unrelated” to AGW denial) by removing it from the context of his argument. Again: as far as I read him, “unrelated” meant “not uniquely related”. By misreading him, you evidently think there’s some novelty to your claim that religion is a mechanism for AGW-denial. But Ken didn’t dismiss that possibility, he only suggested that it’s a red herring.
(Incidentally, I read “AGW”, wrongly, as “anti-global warming”. The lack of the word “denial” is merely verbal slip.)
3. I read your posts in this thread, which is why I know you’re off base. “They” frame it in religious terms, and “they” frame it in irreligious terms. They do whatever it takes, because a neoliberal hegemony has the ability to use diverse cultural tactics. And you know this. What you didn’t know, or didn’t understand, is that that was what Ken was saying. You just picked out one sentence to poo-poo, without considering what he argued.
4. Arguably, by avoiding the proposal, you’ve missed a deeper ideological connection. Many (though not all) libertarians are contrarians with iconoclastic anti-authoritarian personalities. (I believe that Crichton fell roughly into this group.) They get funded and supported by the power elite, no doubt, but many of these elites also think they are entrepreneurs, which is the deep ideological connection between them and the anti-authoritarians.
There’s a reason why hegemony is complicated. It appeals to many different drives, different mechanisms. I don’t know if you’ve ever met any of these people — gone on strike against them, or shouted at them in parliament, in the media, or whatever — but a fair lot of them think they’re Helping people to become More Free. And they’re usually wrong. But the fact that they’re so deluded should have no bearing on a discussion of what their Deeper Ideology is (unless you are one of those elitists who believe in conceits like “false consciousness” — in which case, uh, good luck with that).
5. You’re the one who is misreading, or (it seems) not-reading. But if you’re serious, then you’ll go about the hard business of bothering to point out where I’ve got you wrong, as far as the exchange with Ken goes. I’m not sure that citation and reference will help you, because your initial injunction (11:59 pm) was just an irrelevant pompous little quip, which you’ve followed up in the usual machine-gun style.
6. Yes, taking a survey, you find just about one site that claims he believed in God, and then the rest of the page that says he didn’t. I just find it amusing that you would first prance into a thread advising people to do a Google Search and then take big offense when I ask you to do the same.
7. You have no basis for having that opinion. C Wright Mills was a fine writer, and I enjoy his works immensely. But you’re right that I probably wouldn’t recognize him if he attacked me, because I would not expect to be attacked by the long dead.
*whistles conciliatorily*
<blockquote>because I would not expect to be attacked by the long dead.</blockquote>
I am he
rhetorically
Yeah, I was referring to P.Z.’s popular coinage. I’m trying to decide whether the idea Ophelia described would be better or worse off being connected to that Myers bit; obviously they share the same fable reference.
Perhaps worse off, because an OB “royalist” isn’t, at least by definition, accusing (Gnu) atheists of missing something Very Important about Sophisticated Theology.
Yo, Benjamin, enough with the defense. I’ve been in these intertubes awhile and, when someone concedes, after three sequential comments, that they’ll even let them get in the last word, I accept it gratefully.
*whistles conciliatorily*
…and continues to be amused by people who lecture to me like I don’t have a doctorate in the subject.
Hee.
Rieux, yes, the same fable, but a different discussion – oh the hell with it, I’ll just go find the links.
I’ve been reading old “Hammill” comments until I’m glassy-eyed.
I take it from this post
http://kazez.blogspot.com/2011/01/emperors-gnu-clothes.html
which is all about how wrong and unreflective Jerry Coyne and I are
and this comment
http://kazez.blogspot.com/2011/01/emperors-gnu-clothes.html?showComment=1296576600895#c752565330095783127
which makes me laugh.
That’s just bizarre.
Ken, the post you refer to was made while I was typing mine. So — not really, no. :)
But as it happens, there’s nothing in it that would warrant any more attention, so case closed.
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I’ll say!
Knop doesn’t seem to realize that most religious people are decent and honest because most people are decent and honest. But a common feature of religions, and most especially, of monotheistic religions, is that obedience to the divine is the highest value. The religious answer to the Euthyphro is that God determines what is right and what is true. This usually works out to obedience to the clergy, but it can also be used to justify the compulsions of a madman. The good and the true become arbitrary. Conscience and truth are secondary concerns. This is the problem that gnu atheists have with religion. Fundamentalism just brings the problem to the fore, but the problem lies in the religion itself.
And no, we are not going to be okay with this anytime soon…
I’m so goddamned tired of the Jean Kazezes of the world tut-tutting, characterizing outspoken atheists as nasty-rude-mob-participants, unreflective. . .I can’t go on. Since she and her compatriots go on like broken records, then so will I: You’re just the same as the “white moderate” who characterized right-thinking demands for a place in the conversation as “unwise,” or “inappropriate.” You’re just the same as those bourgeois middle class gays who sniffed and sputtered and told the Act Up protestors they “weren’t helping.” When your value system leads you to spend more time criticizing people who upset the conversational apple cart than you do criticizing the dominant majority’s stranglehold on that apple cart, your value system is perverse. You’re not just “not helping,” I consider people like you to be active adversaries of the worst and most insidious kind – you stand there going, “There’s a time and place to speak out, and you really should have known better” while one of “yours” is getting kicked in the ribs. It’s morally loathsome.
The “Gah!” heard round the world.
Yes, I don’t much appreciate being called unreflective, I must say.
A nasty over-excited name-calling child, of course, I don’t mind a bit.
Oh, it goes much deeper for me than minding being called unreflective (sorry, I’ve just had my fill and it’s overflowing). It’s the disgust of knowing you have to look over your shoulder and wonder if people who-even if you don’t agree with them on everything-you thought were generally friendly toward you are actually going to collaborate with the mugger making his way toward you. Or that they’ll stand there and do nothing. Or that they’ll tell the police, “Well, yes, he was mugged, but I think it’s understandable if unfortunate when you consider the mugger’s point of view.”
Yeah, I really do think it’s that rock-bottom disgusting.
the emperor [!!!]: churches (etc.)
the clothes: “God” and other religious beliefs
the courtiers: the religious
the girl and crowd: the gnus
Is her point that we should not challenge the emperor, the clothes, or the courtiers? Why not?
No, I think she thinks that work has been done, all the grown-ups now accept the truth and the gnus are just upsetting everyone by yelling at the emperor that he’s fat.
If the emperor’s clothes aren’t real (“stark naked,” “the [adults] do see that the emperor is naked–it’s obvious”), how is that naive, other than in the sense that she’s challenging power? Hmmmmm, Jean?
Oh dear. The various analyses of “the emperor has no clothes” on that blog seem to be rather convoluted to me. So I’ll add to that, of course.
For me, it’s all about health. However, firstly, we have to deal with the premise of the story. The story as usually given doesn’t work, because when it comes to faith, the “tailors” probably do believe that they have given the Emperor a reasonable outfit. What has happened is that faith as led to the belief that under some situations, nakedness is clothed.
The girl who points out that the emperor is naked hasn’t spend enough time being taught her faith – she still naively thinks that nakedness always means nakedness.
The Gnus have thrown out faith, and do insist that nakedness always means nakedness. If a scientific search for fabrics on a body comes up with no evidence, then we are clearly dealing with nudity. The believers respond that one can’t prove a negative, and there may be infinitesimal bits of cloth hidden in various bodily orifices.
Now, this would not be so much of a problem, if not for the fact that winter is coming, and the emperor’s tailors are trying to launch a new range of cold-weather gear modeled on the emperor’s new garments. They intend to make a lot of money (after all, there are few if any material costs).
The Gnus insist that this new fashion is distinctly unhealthy, and people need to abandon their faith in invisible fabrics.
But then come the apologists for Faith Fashions, insisting that people should not be upset by the Gnus insistence that nudity is not compatible with being clothed. The apologists insist that Faith Fashions and detectable garments deal with different aspects of warmth: Faith Fashions warms the heart. The Gnus insist that this attitude is going to lead to frostbite.
Magnificent, Steve. Can we please start replacing “god of the gaps” with “god of the orifices?”
It’s awful, I can’t switch it off. You’ve got me thinking of people finding god – during a routine visit to the proctologist.
Make it work!
Hey, I just read to the bottom of Knop’s (now closed) comment thread for the first time:
Whoa—he’s totally talking about me! Pissy as he is about it, I actually got through to him!
As for “oppressed minority”—I don’t believe that I, or anyone else I saw on that thread, called us that. I did say “despised minority,” and there’s all kinds of evidence that we are that in the United States (where Knop and I both live), among other insufficiently enlightened places. By several measures, we’ve been the most hated minority in this country since the 1980s—though I wonder if Muslims have lately started to challenge us in that respect.
But if it’s oppression Knop demands, he might want to try looking. If he did, he might discover that atheist parents are routinely discriminated against, in open court, when seeking custody of their kids during divorce—as Eugene Volokh showed in 2005. He might also find that atheists face housing and employment discrimination, to say nothing of brutal consequences during childhood from their sufficiently god-soaked parents; a friend of mine was disowned by his fundamentalist-minister father when the friend’s secularist Letter to the Editor was published in the local paper. And then there are the political indignities—”In God We Trust,” state provisions declaring that we can’t hold public office, George H.W. Bush declaring that we can’t be citizens or patriots, and so on.
None of this can compare to slavery, or the denial of civil marriage rights, or any of the enormous abuses that women routinely suffer (some of the uglier of which Ophelia has documented) worldwide. But they ain’t chicken feed, either, and they’re a hell of a lot worse than poor Rob Knop having his precious ideas slashed up by big atheist meanies on the internet.
And “justifying any behavior at all”? By which he means being unkind to religious people? Oh, please: get a grip. Here’s Greta Christina (in her magisterial essay “Atheists and Anger”) making the obvious point in response to that kind of hyperbolic anti-atheist nonsense:
The level of moral blindness it takes for an American Christian to complain that atheists have found an excuse suitable for “justifying any behavior at all” is just mind-blowing.
Yes, well, because religious people seem to think they have a god-given right to… er, oh, yeah…
How can we get backing that can compete with that?
Maybe he should use the word ‘reason’ the way it’s applied in Philosophy 101. Otherwise it’s not reasoning, it’s just making crap up. No science involved at all.
Ah but using “reason” to mean “process that includes making crap up” is the whole point, innit.
@Steve
Nah you aren’t that strident.