Attitudes Toward Atheists & Beliefs About Atheists

parmalee said:
I seem to recall some kid asking me such a question in P.E. (gym) class way back when. But apart from that--yeah, nada.

I don't know what, specifically, it is about forums which are ostensibly "science oriented" and the seeming inability to appropriately contextualize, but it doesn't happen nearly so much on, say, philosophy oriented--or even philosophy of science--forums. Sure, you get the preachers--at both ends--but they're usually shut down fairly swiftly for the sake of fruitful discussion.

Not saying it doesn't happen here, but it's kind of rare.
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^^^
Where I am now & other places I have lived in the US it is quite common.

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i remember this man who was talking about religion and he was pushy about it, not as in a let me share with you info about god but obnoxious.

what i noticed was that his intent was not about god so much about his fundie version of god with an added touch of megalomania of himself. so in essence, he was pushing himself and his values (far right) as god. there was an intent to subjugate any other idea or religion as inferior. i felt intensely and personally violated, like he intended that, like they want to crowd you out or infect/force you with theirs so no other is allowed to exist. something about his attitude made me wish the ground would open up and swallow him.

it's a pattern. same type of person/nature as my family. like i would know if they had met, they would even unconsciously identify with eachother. it's like a breed/type of person. different race, different looks, same inside.

now, to be clear, there are far right like this who are exactly the same except they aren't christian or religious so it's not so much the religion as much as the type of person.
 
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StrangerInAStrangeLand said:
I said:
I seem to recall some kid asking me such a question in P.E. (gym) class way back when. But apart from that--yeah, nada.

I don't know what, specifically, it is about forums which are ostensibly "science oriented" and the seeming inability to appropriately contextualize, but it doesn't happen nearly so much on, say, philosophy oriented--or even philosophy of science--forums. Sure, you get the preachers--at both ends--but they're usually shut down fairly swiftly for the sake of fruitful discussion.

Not saying it doesn't happen here, but it's kind of rare.
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^^^
Where I am now & other places I have lived in the US it is quite common.

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My last sentence was referring to the immediate preceding paragraph--preaching of extremists vs. fruitful discussion on science forums--not the random questioning about belief.

iceaura said:
Well, about three years ago I had a Christian fundie I was working with (factory production line) threaten to get his gun from his car and "blow my head off" because my response to that question was noncommittal rather than affirmative. (He got fired. Not his first offense.)

The question isn't common. But it is serious, when it shows up. Fundies are actually not ok, not right in the head - as with racists, crossing them in the real world involves taking some risk.
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I've lived for a couple of years in a few Southeastern U.S. locales--a misguided consequence of my love for the works of Flannery O'Conner, E.A. Poe, and Faulkner--and traveled throughout a good deal over the years. European bands often have this fascination with touring the American South and I'm obliged to... oblige.

It was never all that clear to me whether Southern Fundies animosity towards me was a product of my not being God fearin', or more a consequence of what that implies to them, i.e., having "New York values," not being sufficiently racist, homophobic, sexist, and the like. Once, while biking through a fairly posh neighborhood in Asheville, NC, with my dog, Parmalee, a woman started shouting at us from her yard, telling me to put my dog on a leash (his discipline and devotion to the task at hand were unparalleled) and calling us a "menace" and a blight on the neighborhood. I told her to "fuck off" and continued on my way. Two minutes later, her husband was literally trying to run me over with a pickup truck.

I think a lot of those guys are just itching to antagonize the Other, and will use any excuse to justify their actions.
 
parmalee said:
My last sentence was referring to the immediate preceding paragraph--preaching of extremists vs. fruitful discussion on science forums--not the random questioning about belief.
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^^^

Sorry if I misunderstood. Some atheists seem to be insulated from what seem common experiences to me.

parmalee said:
I've lived for a couple of years in a few Southeastern U.S. locales--a misguided consequence of my love for the works of Flannery O'Conner, E.A. Poe, and Faulkner--and traveled throughout a good deal over the years. European bands often have this fascination with touring the American South and I'm obliged to... oblige.
It was never all that clear to me whether Southern Fundies animosity towards me was a product of my not being God fearin', or more a consequence of what that implies to them, i.e., having "New York values," not being sufficiently racist, homophobic, sexist, and the like. Once, while biking through a fairly posh neighborhood in Asheville, NC, with my dog, Parmalee, a woman started shouting at us from her yard, telling me to put my dog on a leash (his discipline and devotion to the task at hand were unparalleled) and calling us a "menace" and a blight on the neighborhood. I told her to "fuck off" and continued on my way. Two minutes later, her husband was literally trying to run me over with a pickup truck.
I think a lot of those guys are just itching to antagonize the Other, and will use any excuse to justify their actions.
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^^^

I have had such experiences in the South. And the North, West & Midwest US.

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Tiassa said:
Okay, so, this isn't quite entirely a digression or splinter, but still: The hardest book I have ever read, and thus utterly failed to finish, is all of one hundred sixty-nine pages, including notes, bibliography, and index.

I shite thee not. Every one of those pages, even setting aside the words from Arabic, reads like a foreign language.

No, really, I've had the book for fourteen years and never been able to comprehend it well enough to finish. It is essentially a professor emeritus summarizing a thesis derived from something he noticed at some point in his career and then just couldn't let go of because it keeps coming up. And that's actually the reason I keep trying to read it; something about it just keeps coming up in the world.

And it's a book about religion in which virtually nothing is actually a matter of fact other than it is a fact that this is what the record says, or, it is a fact that this object exists at this point in space. That is to say, there is a story that coincides with this place, and this place is right here.
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I've recounted this tidbit countless times, but I'll do so again: Douglas Hofstadter (in G.E.B, I think) recounts how his uncle, Albert Hofstadter--a noted Heidegger scholar and translator--would often try to get Douglas into Heidegger. Douglas, whom I have a lot more respect for than Daniel Dennett, notes that to this day, he can't make any sense whatsoever out of Heidegger. And he's a brilliant guy, it's simply that his mind doesn't work that way.

An awful lot of people (and I won't point fingers) don't seem to appreciate this.

For me, Maturana and Varela's The Tree of Knowledge is like this. There's something there, and it often seems relevant to whatever it is that I am thinking about, but I just can't quite... get it.

For the moment, I would recall a discussion in which an associate noted Devil's Advocate in order to grant that God exists. Something about the point, in the moment, felt really pretentious, and I think it is because the only reason one needs to "grant" anything is that they are operating according to terms that require them to do so.

This provides a contrast to a notion I refer to fairly regularly, the psychoanalytic meaning of history; and it would behoove us to attend the fact that this phrase comes from a classicist.
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Wait--what does this have to do with social stratification? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Because, okay, if you're familiar with J. G. Frazier, The Golden Bough, a 1922 tome on the cult at Nemi and ceremonial magick, imagine compressing all of that—my copy runs 864 pages, including index—compressed into an examination of pre-Islamic myth that runs a thin one hundred sixty-nine pages, including notes, bibliography, and index. Jaroslav Stetkevych, Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), is nigh on impossible.

The thing is, one need not grant shite in order to comprehend the basic process: This is a literary criticism built from what scraps the historical record provides, and does function as an artistic critique reflecting the psychoanalytic meaning of history. At no point does the question of God's existence matter a whit. Artistic, generally, or more particularly literary, or even historical criticism are reasonably appropriate and require no Devil's Advocates.
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Can you imagine all of the disciplines--mostly in the social sciences, but also including literary criticism, strains of philosophy, etc.--that simply would not exist were everybody wholly incapable, or unwilling, to indulge? That's not what i really mean to say, but it really has more to do with a critical examination of one's presuppositions and the willingness to abandon such.

Vicki Hearne is the one writer who has exerted the most influence upon how i think. Her work pre-dates what is now called Animal Studies, or Critical Animal Studies, which incorporate everything from ethology to biological sciences and neuroscience to psychoanalysis, literary and cultural criticism, and philosophy (mostly Continental but also the more thought-prone strains of Analytic, from Wittgenstein to Stanley Cavell to Cora Diamond).

This work demands a suspension, especially amongst academic types who typically have little or no real world experience working with animals, and a coming to appreciate their cultural manifestations (from games and politics to arts and music, and even something akin to religion). This really demands a letting go of the prescribed assumptions.

And, yeah, there's really no need for Devil's Advocacy, or the granting of powers, faculties, attributes--just the simple acknowledgement that Morgan's Canon is as much a "law" as is Occam's Razor (it ain't, and it often stifles critical thinking and the necessary blind leaps).

Toward another aspect, it's my general, not especially refined understanding such that I regard the very word mysticism as derived from mysterium, which, to me, essentially coincides with, say, the idea of an ultimate truth. The relationship 'twixt mysticism and sketpticism seems apparent, but I haven't any subtstantial psychoanalysis of that particular historical evolution. Something like mysticism as an empathy or sympathy toward notions of system and relationship, anthropomorphized as such because that is what people do; skepticism often seems an assertion of control against uncertain perception—perhaps even imagination—of irresolute system. I don't know, call it a quick thumbnail sketch on matchbook cardboard.

It's like, I wonder how many evangelical Atheists who read the fiction of Steven Brust have figured out the secret of Adrilankha and environs.
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In "The Etiquette of Freedom," Gary Snyder describes how "will"and "wild" have a common derivation, yet have come to mean something almost wholly antithetical to one another. Especially in such contexts where they're trying, or pretending, to be real precise-like.
 
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StrangerInAStrangeLand said:
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When you get to the end of the choices is there a "None of the above" or "Other - please specify" options?

One option I would like to see - "Any god who loves me and is a aircraft mechanic - can fix the current problem - and can fly to plane to the nearest airport"

Would I have enough time to type all that in?

:)
 
You know, religious types always say things like "there are no atheists in foxholes" and "When your plane starts crashing you're going to start praying to god." But give any religious type a choice of a parachute or a Bible, and they're going to choose the parachute every time. Because while they believe in God when there's nothing better to do, they know, deep down, that reality isn't amenable to even the most heartfelt of pleas.
 
I wonder how many believers there would be if religious notions were not introduced until a person became an adult.
In most cultures, religion concepts are taught starting long before adulthood. In the USA it usually starts prior to age ten.​

It seems like brainwashing due to being introduced long before a person has developed the mental abilities of even a teenager.

The very concept of the god of most religions must be viewed as supernatural.
 
The atheists I know do not evangelize the POV. The theists I know tend to evangelize when they become aware of my being an atheist, but few do so unless the subject of religion is introduced.

Perhaps they assume that others are believers unless given contrary evidence.​

I think the start of religion was belief in a spirit being associated with many observable objects & phenomena: A tree spirit, a sky spirit, a sun spirit, etcetera.

Being a cynic as well as an atheist, I believe it became organized by Shamen claiming special knowledge in order to gain respect and/or special privileges/power in their culture.​

I tend to believe that he typical minister, priest, rabbi, etcetera is sincere, but question the sincerity of those higher up in religious hierarchies.

Note that the evangelists who preach on television collect huge amounts of money, a lot of which contributes to a much better than average standard of living.

Their motivation & sincerity seems very questionable.​
 
Dinosaur said:
The atheists I know do not evangelize the POV. The theists I know tend to evangelize when they become aware of my being an atheist, but few do so unless the subject of religion is introduced.

Perhaps they assume that others are believers unless given contrary evidence.​

I think the start of religion was belief in a spirit being associated with many observable objects & phenomena: A tree spirit, a sky spirit, a sun spirit, etcetera.

Being a cynic as well as an atheist, I believe it became organized by Shamen claiming special knowledge in order to gain respect and/or special privileges/power in their culture.​

I tend to believe that he typical minister, priest, rabbi, etcetera is sincere, but question the sincerity of those higher up in religious hierarchies.

Note that the evangelists who preach on television collect huge amounts of money, a lot of which contributes to a much better than average standard of living.

Their motivation & sincerity seems very questionable.​
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I strongly suspect most priests, ministers & rabbis are not sincere. They seem to me to be lying conniving con artists. Why think they might be sincere? I suspect most people do not truly believe but they pretend to because they believe that their friends, family & peers believe.

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Atheists tend to be given bum raps.

I & the atheists I know have an excellent code of behavior, which is more than I can say about many of the believers I know.

BTW: Believers expect to be rewarded for their belief. I wonder how many would exhibit good behavior if not promised a reward after death.​

While modern believers exhibit good behavior, historically many of them looked bad.

Consider the inquisition & the Salem witch trials as prime examples. These activities were sanctioned by church authorities.

One almost humorous act was weighting an accused witch & tossing her in a lake. If she drowned, it proved she was innocent & would be rewarded in the hereafter. Otherwise she was executed, usually being burned at a stack.

​
 
Dinosaur said:
Atheists tend to be given bum raps.

I & the atheists I know have an excellent code of behavior, which is more than I can say about many of the believers I know.

BTW: Believers expect to be rewarded for their belief. I wonder how many would exhibit good behavior if not promised a reward after death.​

While modern believers exhibit good behavior, historically many of them looked bad.

Consider the inquisition & the Salem witch trials as prime examples. These activities were sanctioned by church authorities.

One almost humorous act was weighting an accused witch & tossing her in a lake. If she drowned, it proved she was innocent & would be rewarded in the hereafter. Otherwise she was executed, usually being burned at a stack.

​
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Usually, anyone different is given a bum rap but atheists get it worst than most.
There is a play The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me about attitudes toward & treatment of homosexuals. I am considering writing a similar 1 about atheists.

Probably about 98% of the time, she drowned.

Tho there is much in scripture about behavior, the determining factor is belief. Murderers, rapists & child abusers go to heaven if they believe correctly & say 1 small prayer any time before they die.

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