A common trope I see in atheist circles are people (often claiming to be atheists themselves, and I’m sure many genuinely are) going around chiding other atheists for being mean, rude, or otherwise disrespectful to believers. It’s counterproductive! It doesn’t work! It paints us in a bad light!

Often enough, these criticisms are an example of concern trolling, someone telling us what to do because they don’t agree with what we’re trying to do. Greta Christina correctly pointed out that when they do us, they’re trying to get us to lay down the weapons we use to fight back against what’s done to us. They’re trying to get us to surrender our power.

Atheists are often caustic, sarcastic, and generally unpleasant with believers. I built up quite a reputation for snark in my days on reddit, and I have no doubt I’ll continue that tradition on lemmy. Why is that? Because reciprocity is a fundamental aspect of morality. We give back what we get, and in places like the US atheists are not treated very well. So a lot of atheists will either hide or they’ll fight back. Personally, I switch between them depending on my mood and circumstances. I also observe that for centuries, atheists did their best to stay quiet and get along without any reduction in the abuse they received. This quote comes from Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists:

I’ll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive.

And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.

So what’s the point in being a dick to believers? It can have more utility than people realize. Sometimes being a dick to dickish people helps contain them. Sometimes there’s utility in tactical dickishness. This is a problem that needs to be attacked from multiple different angles, not just the one that you think best.

I think Daniel Dennett said it best:

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

  • @BroBot9000English
    8•1 year ago

    “When two parties are in a discussion and one makes a claim that the other disputes, the one who makes the claim typically has a burden of proof to justify or substantiate that claim especially when it challenges a perceived status quo. This is also stated in Hitchens’s razor, which declares that “what may be asserted without evidence, may be dismissed without evidence.” Carl Sagan proposed a related criterion – “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – which is known as the Sagan standard.”

    If I claim that unicorns, leprechauns and Bigfoot exists; it is then my responsibility to prove it. There is absolutely to reason not to dismiss such outrageous claims.

    Same applies to god and religions.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      I’m familiar with the line of reasoning, I’m also familiar with why it doesn’t apply here. If I said “I believe God exists” that is very different in our language than "I believe in God, or in the existence of God. We use the word “in” here to qualify that we are saying that we believe in something as an idea that we cannot prove. It’s a subtle but extremely important distinction. I would have the same bit of issue with someone saying they know God exists. They don’t, period. I would have the same issue with someone trying to convince you that God exists. It’s not their place, you can make your own mind up what to believe. Neither a firm belief nor a firm non-belief are rooted in logic and reason. These are personal decisions based on internal logic and internal reasoning. In the face of eternally inconclusive evidence, it’s not irrational to make a choice to believe in one or the other, existence or non-existence…it is irrational however to believe one made a choice so right that they should convince others to follow suit.

      Atheism is complicated because both those who simply do not hold a belief either way and those who firmly believe there is no God/creator/whatever fly the same flag. As an agnostic I have no issue with either the theist or the atheist, I take issue with the ones in either camp who pretend they made the superior choice of unprovable beliefs.