Religious people: This post mentions the nonexistence of certain things the majority of religious people believe exist, such as God, an afterlife, the supernatural, and any nonhuman force that rewards good and punishes evil in the world. If your form of religion doesn’t believe in those things, that’s very nice for you and I’m not talking about you. If you are upset at the suggestion that these things don’t exist or that the majority of religious people do believe they exist, I suggest you look at Cute Roulette instead, because this post will not make you happy.
Today I would like to complain about the phenomenon of Asshole Atheists. Let me be clear here: when I talk about Asshole Atheists, I’m not talking about people who are loudly atheist. While some people have a tendency to consider you an asshole if you say, loudly and without caveats, that God doesn’t exist, I don’t think that’s true. Of course there are times in which it’s inappropriate to bring up the topic of God’s nonexistence, ranging from small talk to funerals. But
Signs that you are an asshole atheist: If your description of the deity involves the words “invisible,” “sky,” “daddy,” or “fairy.” If you make pedophile jokes about Catholic priests. If you appropriate the struggles of Christian queer people and Muslim women to prove that religion is always and everywhere terrible, without acknowledging the queer people and women who use their religion to defend their liberation. If you believe there is absolutely nothing good that religion has ever done ever, no good moral teachings in the Bible or Koran or Torah or Bhagavad Gita, no Dorothy Day or Oscar Romero or liberation theology (can you tell I’m an ex-Catholic?). If you describe religious people as stupid, blind, deluded, or sheep. You get the idea.
Some people seem terribly smug about being right about one thing. It makes me wonder if this is, in fact, the only thing they’ve ever gotten right in their whole lives.
Atheists are not necessarily any more right than other people. There are atheists who believe vaccines cause autism, homeopathy has any benefits other than the placebo effect, alien abductions happened, the stars control our destinies, alternative medicine is superior to regular medicine because it’s natural*, sexism is over, “I’m colorblind, I don’t see race,” mentally ill people are monsters, and if poor people just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps they would stop being poor. All of those things are factually wrong statements that huge numbers of atheists believe!
Religion is a result of the same cognitive biases that affect every human everywhere. Do you think you’re free from confirmation bias, you who get all your news from fifty people on Twitter who agree with you in every particular? Do you think you have never assigned a mind to something that doesn’t have a mind, you who constantly plead with your computer or your car when it isn’t working right? I’m sure you don’t believe in the Just World Fallacy, which means you’ve never said that with hard work and sacrifice anyone can get ahead, or that cheaters never prosper, or that if that horrible thing happened to someone they must have done something wrong to deserve it.
For, lo, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of rationality.
And let’s be clear here: I’m not exempting myself from this. I’m wrong. I’m wrong a lot! I’m incredibly cognitively biased! I’m a regular victim of the planning fallacy, and reactance, and the unit bias, just to pick a few random examples. I have been wrong about things in the past (look through the NSWATM archives if you’re curious) and I am wrong about some things now. (Hell, I might even be wrong about some of the things I said were wrong up there.) I am on a lifelong quest to try to be less wrong about things.
The world is a million-question test. The problem with Asshole Atheists is that they look at the first question, bubble in “No” on “is there a God?”, lie back in their chairs, and are like “I got an A!” That’s very nice for you, getting the first question right. Now it’s time to deal with the rest of them.
*Some alternative medicine treatments have been shown to work for some illnesses; mindfulness meditation is actually part of the standard, evidence-based treatment for borderline personality disorder. In addition, it makes sense to take advantage of the placebo effect for certain illnesses, such as colds or mild depression or pain, and altmed may offer the best placebo effect with fewest side effects. Therefore it is not correct to state that alternative medicine is less effective than regular medicine in all circumstances.
L: I don’t even know your father, and I want to hit him over the head with the Cluebat. Repeatedly. His “skepticism” sounds like my Catholic father’s attempts at “thinking for himself” which tend to revert to whatever Fox News tells him.
“Because I’m sure being Wiccan or Hindu or Vodoun or Catholic in a Southern Baptist family is a fuckin’ breeze.”
Thank you so much for this sentence! Being Wiccan in a conservative Catholic family can cause serious problems, which I would think atheists could at least sympathize with. Imagine being told by your parents that your personal stance on religion was “just a phase” and that you needed to stop “trying to be weird.” My mother said both those things to me, then ended the discussion (such as it was) with the sentence “I don’t want to hear about it.” I have not changed my stance; I have simply respected her wishes by not talking about it around her.
Ozy: I can totally understand a person having a powerful aversion to something experienced as a child, though, and wanting to basically avoid that group/activity for life. When I was in college, my parents made going to Mass every Sunday a condition of continuing to live in their house. It was horrible for me, because I wasn’t Catholic anymore and couldn’t stand the New Mass with its horrible emphasis on how everything is “my fault, my fault, my own grievous fault” (occasionally you’ll see me using the Latin version of this phrase when I describe my clinical depression to people). Mass made my parents feel wonderful and connected to their god, and they simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the concept that not everybody feels that way about the Mass.
This Christmas, I went to Mass with my family for the first time since I’d moved out. I was given a choice; I chose to go, because this was their first Christmas since my brother had moved out, and I thought it would be a nice gesture for us to all go to Mass together one last time. The familiar, comforting scent of frankincense was the first thing I noticed when I walked into the church. The second thing I noticed was that the feeling of intense discomfort and guilt was back, and it didn’t go away until we left at the end. I decided then and there that I’m not setting foot in a Catholic church for anything short of baptisms, weddings, and funerals; Christmas isn’t a big enough reason to go back.
Volte: I don’t see anything in L’s post saying she dislikes honesty. What I’m seeing is that she dislikes the movements and organized groups centered around athiesm. It is possible to dislike a group without necessarily disliking the people who fall under the category that group is ostensibly for. Yes, there are countries where not following the state religion is hazardous to your health; however, L was talking about atheism in the United States. While the US occasionally falls short (most notably WRT Muslims, atheists, and Neopagans), it is, de jure if not de facto, a place where people of any faith or none at all can live free from fear of religious persecution.
Furthermore, there is a difference between policing anger and policing the manner in which one expresses that anger. It’s ok to be angry; it’s not ok to use that as an excuse to be mean and insulting to other people.
Krause: I’m a godsdamn college professor, and I still have no idea what you’re trying to get at here. The idea of consciousness being solely materially-based is, by nature, unfalsifiable, because if non-material things exist, then they, by definition, cannot be measured by scientific equipment. Thus, it has not been solved, because it cannot be solved.
Jayferd: Sounds like you have the same stance on religion and converting people that I do.
Well met, sir. (It is “sir,” right? Your avatar is male, but avatar-gender doesn’t always correspond to user-gender. Sorry if I got that wrong!)
The L: ” I’m a godsdamn college professor, and I still have no idea what you’re trying to get at here. The idea of consciousness being solely materially-based is, by nature, unfalsifiable, because if non-material things exist, then they, by definition, cannot be measured by scientific equipment. Thus, it has not been solved, because it cannot be solved.”
Well… if it could be shown that there’s an EXACT correlation between neural events and thoughts and emotions (like, if and only if someone thinks the sentence “Wonder what I’m gonna have for dinner today”, there’s a particular series of neural events), then one might argue from Occam’s razor that the best theory would be materialism regarding consciousness. But we’re pretty far from that point, and I don’t think there are any a priori reasons to suppose we’ll eventually get there.
Adding: You don’t have to choose though between a) consciousness is material in nature, and b) some kind of religion.
Not sure how an appeal to emotions can possibly be “rational.” Anyway, the Dadaists, surrealists, countless poets actively rejected the rational.
“anything to say about whether or not materialist attitudes are bad or whatever, but please, people. Just because something isn’t available to the poor now doesn’t mean that nobody should have any interest in it”
Not the point. The point is that cell phones, tablets and laptops are built in appalling conditions and require raw materials that plunder places that are already full of miserable people.
@Dvärghundspossen: Yeah, I’ve seen this before. Somehow the belief in objective truth exempts them from simple human bias and philosophical thinking where very unscientific things, like irrational human constructs (which are inescapable), are concerned. It’s as if they’re above interpreting things.
“Adding: You don’t have to choose though between a) consciousness is material in nature, and b) some kind of religion.”
Yes, we kind of know that. It’s not like all religious people are strong-armed into being religious against their will. Wrong crowd, buddy.
@Benlehman: Yeah, I’m not going to reply to them again. The great thing about my beliefs is that they permit me to leave discussions with assholes who think they’re right about everything without saddling me with the shame of not being intellectually robust enough, as much as they’d like to convince me otherwise. Because, seriously, who wants to deal with an asshole?
@The_L: It’s a frustration I know all too well. Fortunately, it only lasted a few years in my early teens for me.
@The_L: ” The idea of consciousness being solely materially-based is, by nature, unfalsifiable, because if non-material things exist, then they, by definition, cannot be measured by scientific equipment.”
If there existed some force (weather a soul, force X, or the Force) that interacted IN ANY WAY with the material, we could detect that interaction. That is how we detect thing like Quarks, neutrons and the Higgs Boson. If there was a force that had any influence on our thoughts, we could detect it by fully characterizing the other physical effects and looking for the holes.
So any thing that can not be detected, can not have any effect on anything that we CAN detect.
If non-material things exist, then they, by definition, don’t matter.
Furthermore, there is a difference between policing anger and policing the manner in which one expresses that anger.
But pretending the latter is the former is such a useful way to shut people up if they dare to suggest you’re being unconstructive!
To further complicate things, it’s not quite clear what kind of stuff qualifies as being “non-material”. Like, is “the kyriarchy” a material thing or not? It’s obviously not a super-natural entity, but whether it’s a material thing or not seems to depend on what you mean by “material thing”.
Take a theory of the relation between the mental and the physical such as Donald Davidson’s. Does it contradict the claim that consciousness is material in nature or not? Davidson argued that the mental can’t be reduced to the physical because:
When I think something, there’s just ONE event (not two events whereof one is neurological and one is, uh, soul-ological). However, that single event has physical as well as mental properties. The physical properties might be “neuron A fires electrical charge B at neuron C” or something like that. The mental properties might consist in the experience I have thinking “I’m queer” (just to connect this discussion to another post of Ozy’s…).
Now, suppose that Ozy also thinks “I’m queer” and that this also coincides with Ozy’s neuron A firing electrical charge B at neuron C in Ozy’s head. Then my thinking-event and Ozy’s thinking-event have exactly similar physical properties. However, it might be that to me, “queer” means “part of the HBT community” while to Ozy, “queer” means “non-binary gender identity”. The MEANING of this word as me and Ozy respectively use it depends on a much larger context, it depends on what other things we’ve said and thought about the topic of queerness, what conversations we’ve had with other people, the stuff we’ve read and so on. In this example then, we have two events, one where Ozy thinks that zie’s queer and one where I think I’m queer, which has exactly similar physical properties but different mental properties, because the meaning of a certain word differs depending on whether it’s me or Ozy thinking that word, and the meaning is part of the mental properties of the event. (The example would work just as well if it was just me thinking the sentence “I’m queer” at different points in time, and the word acquired a different meaning for me in the meantime.)
Now, one might argue that the physical properties of this event should include not just the momentary neural firing but also previous neural firings, previous conversations and so on, everything that goes to make up the context that gives “queer” a particular meaning to a particular person. However, if that’s the case, we can imagine that both Ozy and Cliff thinks “I’m queeer”, and the word “queer” has the exact same meaning to both of them, so the mental properties of these events are precisely similar. But the physical conversations, previous neural firings and so on that made “queer” have a particular meaning to Ozy and Cliff differ between them. In that case, we would have two events that have the same mental properties but different physical ones.
And all this supposedly proves that the mental can’t be reduced to the physical, since two events might have similar physical properties but dissimiar mental properties, or the other way around. Although it’s obviously no proof, and not intended to be a proof of, the existence of immaterial souls or anything supernatural.
Anyway, it seems to me that if “the material nature of consciousness” were to be PROVEN, it would require either that a) the above kind of theory is shown to be false. That could never be shown by empirical means alone (i e by showing that everytime someone thinks “I’m queer” something specific happens at the neurological level), it would also require that one had found the true theory of the meaning of words and solved other philosophical/semantic/linguistic issues, or b) one has somehow proven that if the above theory of the relationship between mental and physical properties is true, that’s compatible with consciousness having a thouroughly materialistic nature. That kind of proof would be philosophical rather than empirical in nature and, in part, rest on an analysis of the word “materialistic”.
In any case that hasn’t happened yet, so the material nature of consciousness isn’t proven.
Dvärghundspossen: “You don’t have to choose though between a) consciousness is material in nature, and b) some kind of religion.” This is also a good point. The fact that there are atheists who believe in ghosts would appear to back it up. I chose religion for reasons unrelated to the consciousness problem, myself. I’m not really sure how this relates to our discussion, though.
The L, I wasn’t really thinking about atheists who don’t believe in God/gods but still believe in various supernatural things – I was rather thinking about stuff like that really long post I made above (which probably nobody will wade through
). Even if you don’t believe in immaterial souls, you might have reasons for believing that people’s mental lifes can’t be neatly reduced to events happening in their brains.
@Dvärghundspossen:
Who says that you and Cliff and Ozy all have an identical mental event when you think “I’m queer”? Who says you even *mean* the exact same thing? I seem to recall a recent post on this very blog pondering the various things that people mean when they talk about queerness.
This even applies to simple words like ‘red’ and ‘green’. We learn simple concepts and words as children, and build up more complex concepts out of simpler ones.
None of this requires a soul.
DysgraphicProgrammer:
a) In the post, I made it very clear that it can be used in different ways, but I also assumed that it CAN be used in the same way (this is probably debatable, maybe two people never mean EXACTLY the same thing with a word). In my example, Ozy and I used the word “queer” differently; that was sort of an important part of the point.
b) I very explicitly didn’t argue that we have a soul.
Volte: “If your description of the deity involves the words “invisible,” “sky,” “daddy,” or “fairy.””
Making fun of a silly idea does not make you an asshole, period.
I often go with the fairy thing, and I ask “whats wrong with fairies?” and this tends to piss the atheists off. They think I am being flip, but I mean it: what’s wrong with outlandish music, wild sex, irrational movies and comic books and/or belief in fairies? (I honestly do not care if someone believes in fairies.)
Fairies are *fun* and lots of people like religion/mythology because it is fun and the irrationality (like playing with conspiracy theories) is a release. Of course religion is irrational … That’s the whole point of it. Religion addresses people’s need for transcendence of ordinary life, which adheres to ‘rational laws’… that’s why people like ghost stories, sci-fi, horror and cartoons, too. I think most people who have chosen a religious belief system (as opposed to having it forced on them) enjoy it precisely BECAUSE it is irrational. As sex, art and music are irrational. I put religion in that category. Of course its silly. The world is too serious and I like to be silly once in awhile (or even more often than that).
Just like “Religion is the opiate of the masses”–I take that and run with it too: What’s wrong with opiates? Can opiates ever be good? Under what circumstances are they bad? What would our world be like with NO opiates or painkillers of any kind? Etc.
Volte: I really don’t buy the idea that religion is what you make of it,
Um, what ELSE would it be? Really, not sure what you mean here. Everything is “what we make of it”…
And finally, I think its weird to bring up science to counter religion. They don’t overlap. They aren’t addressing the same emotional needs in people and have nothing in common. Why do people insist on putting them together? I’ll never understand that.
Wait, somebody else said that first: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html
DaisyDeadhead: If religion is just a game you play, then you don’t believe it. To think of a religion as a preference rather than a set of beliefs (i.e. things that the person thinks are actually, really, factually, true in the real, non-fictional, not-just-subjective, more-than-an-opinion world) is to miss the entire point that movement atheists are trying to make.
If you want to play around with the ideas in the Bible or the Qur’an or the Vedas or the Book of the Dead the way that other people play around with Tolkien or Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I know of very few people who would have any problem with that. Believing it is not the same as having fun with it, as can easily be seen by the people who routinely try to get evolution removed from high school textbooks in Texas (and therefore a large section of the US). These are people who take religion seriously, i.e. people who believe that their religion is true, not that it is a fun activity for their downtime.
There is a difference between an identity and a belief. There is a difference between a hobby and a belief. There is a difference between a temporary suspension of disbelief and a belief.
As for NOMA, religions (by and large) do make factual claims about the real world, ranging from the absurdly impossible (the Earth is 6000 years old) to the basically incoherent (there are supernatural creatures called “guardian angels” who do nothing but watch you all day and all night and sometimes they make a tiny little chance adjustment completely consistent with the laws of physics which averts some tragedy). As factual claims that have an effect in the material world, these are testable, at least in principle, by the scientific method and so lie clearly within the magisterium of science. Since a vast number (though possibly still a minority) of religious believers insist that their particular religion’s claims are true, that means that religion has overstepped the bounds of its magisterium, in many cases by several leagues, and that’s even assuming that religion has some claim on the magisteria of morality and ethics, which many of the new atheists also dispute.
TL;DR: go ahead and be silly if you like, but some people take these silly things very seriously indeed, and that’s downright frightening as well as dangerous.
Dictating other peoples’ identities to them is definitely a totally cool move. No problems with that. No sir.
After all, who should we trust to define the religious experience except a movement atheist?
I didn’t actually say anything about identities, except to say that they are not the same thing as beliefs.
After all, who best to present the definition of a word in this conversation than someone participating in this conversation?
Yiab: DaisyDeadhead: If religion is just a game you play, then you don’t believe it.
I don’t believe I used the word “game”–nor would I. Music and sex are not games to me either, I take em real seriously.
To think of a religion as a preference rather than a set of beliefs (i.e. things that the person thinks are actually, really, factually, true in the real, non-fictional, not-just-subjective, more-than-an-opinion world) is to miss the entire point that movement atheists are trying to make.
I get your point, it is just immaterial to the lives of believers. That’s what you don’t understand.
More to the point, atheists are talking over the heads of most of us and the way superstitious people (I count myself as one) have chosen to channel that deep, lifelong superstition to make it manageable to us (which is what I believe religion is).
If you want to play around with the ideas in the Bible or the Qur’an or the Vedas or the Book of the Dead the way that other people play around with Tolkien or Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I know of very few people who would have any problem with that.
So why are you arguing with me about it?
Believing it is not the same as having fun with it,
Of course it is… do you believe in music and sex? Are they fun?
Why do atheists inevitably want to tell religious people what religious belief should be? (I find that really peculiar) Every time I make this argument, some atheist tells me why I am wrong about what I have said… who is the sky-fairy-believer here, you or me?
Am I messing with your “fundamental beliefs” about religion or religious people? Apparently so.
as can easily be seen by the people who routinely try to get evolution removed from high school textbooks in Texas (and therefore a large section of the US). These are people who take religion seriously, i.e. people who believe that their religion is true, not that it is a fun activity for their downtime.
I believe my religious concepts are real too; I just don’t care if anyone else does.
THAT is the difference… not belief itself, but what you do with it.
There is a difference between an identity and a belief. There is a difference between a hobby and a belief. There is a difference between a temporary suspension of disbelief and a belief.
I know that. I don’t think you do. You seem to think it means it can’t be fun as well and that it means all kinds of things it doesn’t necessarily have to mean. You think you have to be a fundamentalist or crackpot or else you don’t “really” believe. Why? Fact is, I don’t have any problem with evolution and neither did John Paul II.
As for NOMA, religions (by and large) do make factual claims about the real world, ranging from the absurdly impossible (the Earth is 6000 years old) to the basically incoherent (there are supernatural creatures called “guardian angels” who do nothing but watch you all day and all night and sometimes they make a tiny little chance adjustment completely consistent with the laws of physics which averts some tragedy).
Of course there are guardian angels. I don’t discuss that stuff, but of course I believe it. I believe **lots** of fun stuff like that. So? If I don’t interfere with the beliefs of others (and trying to force textbooks to change would be part of that), what is the problem with what I choose to believe? I usually only discuss these things with people who think/believe what I do.
As factual claims that have an effect in the material world, these are testable, at least in principle, by the scientific method and so lie clearly within the magisterium of science. Since a vast number (though possibly still a minority) of religious believers insist that their particular religion’s claims are true, that means that religion has overstepped the bounds of its magisterium, in many cases by several leagues, and that’s even assuming that religion has some claim on the magisteria of morality and ethics, which many of the new atheists also dispute.
I understand all of this. But see, you still haven’t addressed the issue… what about those of us who still believe our stuff and don’t care about scientific “testing” of what we like to think? Why would you want to “test” it? How do we test whether music or sex is good? Isn’t that subjective? The test of whether my prayers are effective is if I feel better or worse afterward.
Atheists talk over the heads of people, just as you are talking over my head right now. Until you learn to actually address what I am saying, instead of telling me what I really believe or don’t believe or that I am doing it wrong, you will never understand why some people regard you as hostile intruders who believe yourselves superior to the regular masses (Note: I take it you are college educated, middle class, etc… I am neither.)
TL;DR: go ahead and be silly if you like, but some people take these silly things very seriously indeed, and that’s downright frightening as well as dangerous.
That’s true… and I live here in Bob Jones University country, so I probably know them far better than you do. I also know how to get under their skin (and make em put up hate pages about me on Facebook) better than you do. I use their own beliefs against them, is how. Until you understand what belief really is, you won’t be able to do that. They are tuning you out.
benlehman Dictating other peoples’ identities to them is definitely a totally cool move. No problems with that. No sir.
After all, who should we trust to define the religious experience except a movement atheist?
Exactly… isn’t that weird? They all do it though.
Religions shift and change and always have (and always will). Atheism doesn’t. Aye, there’s the rub.
Rather than decide “you aren’t doing religion right” (also known as a charge of heresy, BTW) –you need to understand the reasons why people choose to follow religions in the first place.
I don’t think Yiab understands what the reasons are, therefore zie is making arguments that don’t make sense.