Tips for Atheists

In the last few days I have had the misfortune to come across a half-handful or so of largely unrelated discussions in which various atheists demonstrated to me once again why theism/atheism "discussions" on the internet are a waste of time in general, and a waste of time for a polytheist like me in particular.

I mean, sometimes I comment in them anyway, but for the most part it's like I didn't say anything, because I'm not engaging According To The Rules, which rules are apparently defined by conservative Protestantism. I am not feeling as sarcastic about this as I was when I first ran across it a few days ago, but I would like to muster a few points about cultural awareness.

I know a number of completely personable atheists, including a few who are happy to have serious and in-depth conversations about not only theological theory but my actual religious experiences. Not a single one of them participates in theism/atheism discussions on the internet; most groan and don't want to know when I mention stumbling across one.


So, my angry and offensive opinions:

1) You may very well want to express contempt for "so-called holy books", but do not mistake revealed scripture for religion. Not all religions have scripture at all. The ones that do interpret in different ways than you are obviously used to; the Tanakh is read rather differently than the Old Testament, and those are, technically, mostly the same words. Try to apply the same standards to the Principia Discordia and you might understand why that scripture includes the line "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads." Your mission, if you choose to accept it: The Oresteia.

2) Similarly, condemning "belief" as a category does not get you anywhere useful. Not only does it slam things like "I believe that my husbands love me", but you are presuming that belief is a fundamental and important factor in religion. Orthodoxic religion is familiar, yes, because Christianity is more orthodoxic than most religions, and Christianity is, well, pretty popular in the English-speaking world. But that whole "more orthodoxic than most religions" thing means we cannot actually have a meaningful conversation. This feeds into the ridiculous and pernicious cultural angst about whether or not Judaism is a religion, a culture, or an ethnicity; contemplation of this may be enlightening. (Condemning "faith" is sufficiently similarly problematic that I will not make another bulletpoint for it.)

2b, though) Also, you're ignoring theistic or religious agnostics when you dismiss religious people as "believers".

2c) Not to mention nontheistic religion.

3) And on the subject of that religion, culture, ethnicity thing: when you talk about your utopian future in which there is no religion, you are expressing a position that is, at best, colonialist. It is rooted in a culture that grew up descended from the Roman notion of "religion" as a category that could be pointed to as something disinct from or other than "the way we live as a people", a notion that Christianity inherited. When you say you want to wipe out "religion", what you communicate to many people is that you believe that their culture and heritage should be destroyed. The people you may hit hardest with this particular colonialist club are likely, of course, the members of surviving indigenous colonised tribes who have been on the butt end of Christianisation used specifically as a tool for destroying them as people with an independent identity. Be careful of the company you keep.

3b) Also, if you are basing your anti-religion-X argument on the way that religion-X treats its women, children, sexual minorities, etc., fucking listen to the religion-X people who are women, children, queer, whatever else rather than stomping all over them with your I-know-better-than-you-poor-deluded-people-who-haven't-escaped-the-trappings-of-your-oppressive-religion boots, okay?

4) Yep, "supernatural" is a big fancy word for stuff that doesn't exist. The relevance of this point to religion is questionable and both 100% dependent on a privileged definition of "god" and a complete avoidance of the concept of orthopraxy. For a trivially obvious couple of examples, an animistically inclined religious person can entirely agree with you that there is no supernatural and still have boatloads of gods kicking around; a religion that is primarily defined on the social practices and behaviours of a community does not go away even if gods do.

5) On that "disproven" thing, yes, gods are not scientific axioms. People who try to use them as such are idiots. Most religious people do not think their religion is science, and trying to tell them that their religion is not a substitute for science will mostly get you an, "Why are you telling me this rather than join me in doing something about the idiots who want to get 'intelligent design' into my kids' textbooks?"

5b) Science is not the full range of reality, either. I like art and music and other subjective experiences! I bet you do too! I'll bet that sometimes you do something daring like eat some chocolate or have sex or listen to Bach sometimes without engaging in a peer-reviewed study of the process by which your neurons fire! I like blue things, and I do it without deriving my enjoyment from the principles of the electromagnetic spectrum!

5c) And regarding that whole "but religion suffuses everything" thing that's part of the arguing with people who want to get intelligent design into the textbooks. Trust me, I hate "God Bless America" played at baseball games at least as much as you do, possibly a little more because it is in my muscle memory as the accompaniment to a tae kwon do kata and I prefer not to accidentally kick people in the head in the seventh inning stretch. (Ceremonial deism is a crock.)

6) By the way, if you start arguing against "omniscience" or "omnipotence" as divine traits, you're basically talking about at best one hypothesised godform, and the rest of us may as well bugger off and have tea. Don't mistake that for a definition of what a god is. (And if you, like one atheist did once to me, respond to someone attempting to point out that that argument is completely incoherent from a non-monotheistic perspective with "What's the point in worshipping a god that isn't omnipotent?", you lose at cultural awareness and probably capability to understand basic polite conversation outside your microscopic frame of reference.)

7) So on that "What's the point" thing, by the way, when you assume that religious people are religious out of fear (fear of death is a popular more-specific version of this), wanting a cookie from some all-powerful parent figure in the sky, or similar infantilising trivialisations, you are probably not going to get a response from the adults in your vicinity. Not because there aren't any, but because the work to disabuse you of your notions just doesn't look worth it, and being a responsible adult bears a remarkable resemblance to being too tired.

8) When you make your arguments about religion, it really helps if you don't use catchwords that indicate you only know about one or two of them. (Hint: "salvation" is a tip-off. "Original sin" too.) Also, saying something like "Your god will eventually vanish into prehistory and superstition, just like nobody worships Thor, Zeus, or Osiris anymore!" will make the polytheists in the vicinity very tired; most of them, however, know that pointing out that they worship Thor or Zeus or Wesir will just get them called childish and primitive or something in the unlikely event that anyone acknowledges their existence at all, and thus don't bother to correct your ignorance.

9) Most religious organisations suck, and institutionalised power leads to abuses. WELCOME TO PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL ACTIVISM AWARENESS, HERE IS YOUR INFORMATIONAL BROCHURE ABOUT WAYS THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO GANG TOGETHER GOES HORRIBLY WRONG. Seriously, are you expecting religious structures to differ from corporate structures? Nations? High school cliques? People form social structures to make levers; people apply levers to get what they want. Some things people want are bloody awful. If you want to end holy wars you'll have more success with it by fixing water rights, health care access, economic security, and all that hope-for-the-future stuff than by trying to abolish gods.

9b) Seriously this is an argument for anarchism not against religion.

10) If you start out your comment or your shiny blogpost by saying "Religion does X thing and I don't want to hear from anyone pointing out religions that don't", posting a comment later on going, "Gee, just about everyone who reads my blog agrees with me on this!" is just - fucking - ridiculous. When you state up front that you're uninterested in hearing counterarguments, only the most bullheaded ideologues will ever bother to make any. (I'm not making this one up, though I will admit it's more of a general Internets Argumenting point than something specific to this particular standing-wave flamewar. I just saw it a day or two ago when catching up on the last few weeks of blogs I read and the resulting explosion led to this post.)


So yeah. There's my inflammatory bullshit. Let it join all of the other inflammatory bullshit about this subject that's kicking around the internets lately.

Running through to drop a link

Ebert's blog: "How do they get to be that way?"

On the painting over the murals of students in that Arizona school.