Atheists and White Supremacists

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Earlier LMNO asked me why I chose the comparison with White Supremacists rather than some other group. I thought about it as I walked to school, and honestly although the choice was pretty spur of the moment, I could not think of a better example. I've known quite a few White Supremacists. Most of them are perfectly decent human beings who just happen to think less of people who aren't like them.

They just think that brown people are stupid and their ways are wrong and backward, and they don't see why they should be expected to respect them when they're so clearly inferior.

Is all.

I had a little trouble understanding that at first. I thought you must not have a lot of experience with actual atheists, as opposed to their stereotype.
Then you explained and I realized that it was I that had no experience with white supremacists, as opposed to the stereotype. I think most of the indignation in this thread was because, like me, many people thought that white supremacists were terrible people, and that they couldn't possibly be like that.

Also, if you are still curious about those "funny" pictures atheists share with each other, it's helpful to compare it to those apologetics books written by Christians. They like to pretend that those books are made to convince unbelievers, but those books are mostly bought, read and talked about by christians, who are the actual target audience.

Some christians like to discuss those books among themselves because it reinforces intra-group bondings. Roger is understandably horrified by this, because pretending to use reason to justify faith is like blasphemy in his belief system, but when you consider it not as an attempt at justification or proselitization, but simply as a bonding ritual, it doesn't seem so crazy.

My favorite theory that explains the important social function that both Christian apologetics and Atheist "jokes" serve is this one. I like it because it's very neatly explains the very different attitudes taken by different kind of atheists, as well as the very different attitudes taken by different discordians (think Really Real Discordians vs pinealists vs PD).

The most relevant quote in that article is this one, but you should read the whole thing if you have the time:

It's much easier to be charitable in political debates when you view the two participants as coming from two different cultures that err on opposite sides, each trying to propose advice that would help their own culture, each being tragically unaware that the other culture exists.

A lot of the time this happens when one person is from a dysfunctional community and suggesting very strong measures against some problem the community faces, and the other person is from a functional community and thinks the first person is being extreme, fanatical or persecutory.

This happens a lot among, once again, atheists. One guy is like "WE NEED TO DESTROY RELIGION IT CORRUPTS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES ANYONE WHO MAKES ANY COMPROMISES WITH IT IS A TRAITOR KILL KILL KILL." And the other guy is like "Hello? Religion may not be literally true, but it usually just makes people feel more comfortable and inspires them to do nice things and we don't want to look like huge jerks here." Usually the first guy was raised Jehovah's Witness and the second guy was raised Moralistic Therapeutic Deist.

It kind of all boils down to the same reason some of the most heated and rage-filled arguments I've ever seen are those on mom forums about natural childbirth vs. epidurals. People tend to think that anyone who does not make the same choices they make are on some level invalidating their choices, and they feel threatened by that. Of course, background (and backlash) also have a lot to do with it.

I am familiar with those little apologia booklets. Jack Chick, classic, right? They're simultaneously awful and hilarious. And ridiculous. And there is no particular reason for them to exist other than to reassure the in-group that they're doin' it right and everyone else is doin' it wrong; they, too, are a reaction to insecurity.

The one girlfriend I lived with was an atheist (and you know, was never an issue in our relationship, ever. She had no gods I had several, and whatever, lol) but her best friend was a Muslim, and Jack Chick used to fire her up because of the way that he portrayed non-Christians, and specifically Muslims. She'd be like, "What, like [name redacted] never thought to herself whether Islam was the religion she believed in in the face of everything else? So it's all 'I've never heard of this Jesus guy before and based on our very brief and one sided conversation, I see the error of my Islamic ways and am ready for barbaric Arabs to cut my head off, thus making me a martyr.'" I mean yeah it's stupid as shit. Jack Chick thinks that (Protestant specific, he has some funny notions about us statue worshiping Papists as well) Christian Fundamentalism is an entirely logically consistent system that any truly rational person (unlike those scientists of course) would subscribe to if only shown the error of their ways.

Yeah, you can tell those pamphlets are made for "internal consumption only", because they are so completely clueless about how people outside their group actually think. What's interesting about apologetics is that it's not just those hillarious/offensive Chick tracts. There are whole books like Mere Christianity, The God Who Is There, and others that are supposedly very well written, and must have taken a lot of effort. Books like The God Delusion are also in that category.

Interesting thing about you mentioning God Delusion.

Like I said, polytheist boyfriend/atheist girlfriend. Her position was, "I have no idea what you're on about, but tell me more." She never once recommended to me to read any atheist literature. I never once recommended Pagan literature to her (though she managed to get really offended when I mentioned something about her face taking on a grey cast. She knew exactly what I meant and countered, "I'm not a greyface" (exact quote. Never mentioned the details of Discordia prior, she took learning about that on herself, even though we had already broken up))

On the opposite end of that, I had mentioned within a comfortable social context that I was going to become Jewish for a while and one guy mentioned offhand that he was atheist, was all hush hush when I brought it up again, since the hosts were Catholic (ermmm.... bisexual PaganChristianJew and they know it....) and he was all sorry sorry people are sensitive about that sort of thing, but read God Delusion, it's really interesting.

Ummmm.....

I've already, on a gut level, decided what my position is. Details may vary from time to time, but you're never going to convince me that there is no some sort of god for longer than 15 minutes, nor convince me for longer than 15 minutes that there is no afterlife. That's just my normal, probably really incorrect assumption, but ask me how I feel during those 15 minutes, as opposed to when I "snap out of it"

[hooplala]

The funny thing is I don't believe in gods but I'm not convinced there's no afterlife. I don't go with the whole evidence argument for gods, just with what I believe... therefor the fact that there's no real evidence for an afterlife doesn't deter me. 

I sort of think its more likely that there's nothing after, but on the other hand I've had a few strange experiences which give me pause... But we don't really know how life works, even with or without gods, so why should we think we know how death works? I can imagine an afterlife without gods.

[hooplala]

Sorry, I guess that was sort of off topic.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't believe in an afterlife, but I couldn't say there isn't one, either.

I can say that if there is one, it is more or less totally irrelevant to my life, so I would like to live my life as if all there is after it is whatever future I can leave for those who are still alive.

[Demolition Squid]

I am also, on an unrelated note, going to add that I won't personally be comfortable identifying as an Atheist until the majority of people who claim that label are taking a stand about denouncing bigotry even when it comes from their own ranks. As a person of color I am very aware of what bigotry looks and sounds like, and I don't know if this is simply invisible to a lot of people, but when you compare them to the bigotry in racist jokes, most of the content on websites like this:

http://www.booksie.com/humor/miscellaneous/city_of_evil_/funny-atheist-quotes-bumper-stickers
http://funnyatheist.tumblr.com/
http://www.atheistmemebase.com/tag/funny/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Atheist-Memes/239047102844505
http://thaumaturgical.com/funny-atheist-memes-part-666/
http://proud-atheist.tumblr.com/

...aren't very funny anymore. So, yanno, maybe it's just my personal crusade of the moment, but I will say that I have friends of various faiths who have had my back against racism and sexism for years, some even decades, and I'm not going to leave the favor unreciprocated.

This makes a massive amount of sense to me.

I was going to say that I wonder if it was some cultural difference that I don't really see this much in the UK. I remembered hearing about a study which said the majority here now identify as atheist. In fact I was wrong, the last census put Atheist at 25% and a Humanist Society poll put 'non religious' at 65%.

But the first result for the string was: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100230985/how-atheists-became-the-most-colossally-smug-and-annoying-people-on-the-planet/

Which is someone talking about pretty much this exact problem, even singling out the memes!

Atheists online are forever sharing memes about how stupid religious people are. I know this because some of my best Facebook friends are atheists. There's even a website called Atheist Meme Base, whose most popular tags tell you everything you need to know about it and about the kind of people who borrow its memes to proselytise about godlessness to the ignorant: "indoctrination", "Christians", "funny", "hell", "misogyny", "scumbag God", "logic". Atheists in the public sphere spend their every tragic waking hour doing little more than mocking the faithful. In the words of Robin Wright, they seem determined "to make it not just uncool to believe, but cool to ridicule believers". To that end if you ever have the misfortune, as I once did, to step foot into an atheistic get-together, which are now common occurrences in the Western world, patronised by people afflicted with repetitive strain injury from so furiously patting themselves on the back for being clever, you will witness unprecedented levels of intellectual smugness and hostility towards hoi polloi.

So it turns out the reason I thought that is purely because I was blind to these issues, not because they aren't actually occurring.

Part of the reason I was annoyed at first because it seemed to me that saying these sorts of people are the same as white supremacists did't seem particularly groundbreaking; it is the same as saying bigots are bigots. But, on reflection, there are some important differences. Mostly, unlike white supremacists, it isn't socially acceptable to spout that crap in public. This brand of Atheist does seem to have successfully co-opted the public voice of the Atheist community.

It'd be as though the Taliban were the voice of the Muslim community and no other Muslims stood up to say 'actually no we don't want to impose sharia law on the population', or if Westborough were the loudest voice in the Christian community and nobody stood up to say 'pretty sure God loves everyone, actually'.

Its like I was saying the other week regarding the internet's campaign against female creatives. At least there, though, there are a significant number of people who look at it and are disgusted. This hateful rhetoric seems to have become the dominant one representing Atheism, and I wonder if that isn't partly because most people who consider themselves atheist (as we've seen repeated over and over in this thread) just don't particularly give a damn about the question and so don't want to talk  about it... which leaves an open space for the extremists to step in and blare away without fear of contradiction.

Which of course means that to someone just starting to come round to the idea, the first introduction they find to this school of thought is the hateful 'humor' and ridiculous extremes, and there's not really anyone providing a measured counterpoint to try and balance things out.

Wow. I'm embarrassed it took me four freakin' days to understand where the problem is, but now I see it... 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Thank you for posting that article! I'm really glad to see that other people are writing about it, as much as it seems like pissing in the ocean, and writing far more eloquently that I have. Speaking of eloquence:

Part of the reason I was annoyed at first because it seemed to me that saying these sorts of people are the same as white supremacists did't seem particularly groundbreaking; it is the same as saying bigots are bigots. But, on reflection, there are some important differences. Mostly, unlike white supremacists, it isn't socially acceptable to spout that crap in public. This brand of Atheist does seem to have successfully co-opted the public voice of the Atheist community.

It'd be as though the Taliban were the voice of the Muslim community and no other Muslims stood up to say 'actually no we don't want to impose sharia law on the population', or if Westborough were the loudest voice in the Christian community and nobody stood up to say 'pretty sure God loves everyone, actually'.

Its like I was saying the other week regarding the internet's campaign against female creatives. At least there, though, there are a significant number of people who look at it and are disgusted. This hateful rhetoric seems to have become the dominant one representing Atheism, and I wonder if that isn't partly because most people who consider themselves atheist (as we've seen repeated over and over in this thread) just don't particularly give a damn about the question and so don't want to talk  about it... which leaves an open space for the extremists to step in and blare away without fear of contradiction.

That's a much better articulation of my thoughts than I managed.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

The funny thing is I don't believe in gods but I'm not convinced there's no afterlife. I don't go with the whole evidence argument for gods, just with what I believe... therefor the fact that there's no real evidence for an afterlife doesn't deer me. 

I sort of think its more likely that there's nothing after, but on the other hand I've had a few strange experiences which give me pause... But we don't really know how life works, even with or without gods, so why should we think we know how death works? I can imagine an afterlife without gods.

On topic. The two concepts aren't married to each other. Sumerians basically believed that their purpose was to serve the gods and that there was no afterlife. Buddhists are basically atheists who believe in reincarnation. Better hope my god is the real deal though because it lets you in on grounds of funny. Either way we get a bacon all the time and booze.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Nigel, I've got a hella long thing to post, mind if I start a new one?

[Golden Applesauce]

Nigel, I've got a hella long thing to post, mind if I start a new one?

I certainly vote for letting this thread die and bringing all the good bits out of it into new topics.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nigel, I've got a hella long thing to post, mind if I start a new one?

Go to town! You might want to link to this one for continuity, if it's directly related.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nigel, I've got a hella long thing to post, mind if I start a new one?

I certainly vote for letting this thread die and bringing all the good bits out of it into new topics.

God forbid discomfort be preserved and remembered, right? It's not like it's of any use to anyone.

[hirley0]

YES: &noW that i see 4sure it wAS U , pre pair thySelves.

If I speak, I fear somone will attack me.

This is how I operate most of the time. Regretfully. What does it say that I was hesitant about posting even this?


Also, today has been exhausting. I cried for 20 minutes today about PD and though I am not ashamed, I am really tired.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

The Hirley has come.


Seriously, you fucking atheists are retarded, do you not know that Hirley is a prophet and therefore proof of God?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

NOW WE'RE ALL FUCKED.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

Ones and zeroes will be fucking all over the place. The keys on the keyboard will rearrange themselves at random so no matter what you type, it will be what hirley0 wants to see. Madness will descend from the sky and blanket the ground like a writhing mass of worms suffocating the rebellion from our limbs one wiggling tickle at a time . . .

. . . chaos comes nigh.