{"id":540,"date":"2012-03-08T17:11:50","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T15:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/?p=540"},"modified":"2012-03-08T17:11:50","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T15:11:50","slug":"10-things-christians-and-atheists-could-but-mostly-dont-agree-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/?p=540","title":{"rendered":"10 Things Christians and Atheists Could (but mostly don’t) Agree On"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend linked to this article from Cracked.com <\/a>entitled “10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (and Must) Agree On”\u00a0on her FB page the other day, and after reading through it I felt the need to respond.<\/p>\n

Summary: \u00a0No, we don’t and shouldn’t.<\/p>\n

A lot of the arguments are actually pretty disappointing \u2013 I would have given Cracked\u2019s authors a little more credit for researching stuff in advance, being smarter, and to be honest, funnier.\u00a0 It\u2019s more of a milquetoast \u201cCan\u2019t we all get along\u201d apologetic piece for the conflict between religion and atheism.<\/p>\n

Long answer to the premise is:\u00a0 no, I\u2019m afraid we can\u2019t.\u00a0 Not when there are religions actively going out of their way to legislate and harass atheists and others into acquiescence<\/em>. \u00a0Not when bible-thumpers are trying to make discrimination against gays legal.<\/a> \u00a0Not when they leap to the defense of their mentally defective children who think it’s okay to bully children to the point of suicide<\/a>. \u00a0The author actually pegs the good reason why this is so:\u00a0 we\u2019ve had enough.\u00a0 Over the last umpteen thousand years religion has had its chance, and burned\/tortured\/imprisoned those that disagreed, even when it was in the wrong.\u00a0 The breaking point for the current storm is correctly pegged as being the events of 9\/11.\u00a0 A lot of us realized that religion isn\u2019t just some benign quackery that a lot of people get into, it is outright dangerous, and something needs to be done before it gets us all killed.<\/p>\n

Before I go into detail, I need to make sure that something here is clear:\u00a0 religion and the people who are religious are two different things.\u00a0 The organizations that interpose themselves between the believer and the subject of belief (whether I follow that belief or not) are the religion, the individual persons who are members of them are a separate quantity. I can\u2019t help those people who identify so closely with their faith as to feel that this amounts to some sort of personal attack, so if you\u2019re one of those, you might want to leave now before reading further.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get cracking!<\/p>\n

#1 \u2013 \u201cYou can do terrible things in the name of either one.\u201d\u00a0 Bullshit. \u00a0There\u2019s no \u201catheist manifesto\u201d that instructs us to bury ourselves elbow-deep in the blood of believers (as the Koran does for infidels) or \u201cbring those before me who believe and let me see them be slain\u201d (as Jesus does in Luke 17).\u00a0 I threw this one overboard as soon as I saw the name \u201cStalin.\u201d\u00a0 Aside from having come within millimeters of violating Godwin\u2019s Law<\/a>, it\u2019s simply a straw-man: a fabricated position.\u00a0 Stalin didn\u2019t kill people in the name of atheism, he killed people in pursuit of total power, in the name of Stalin<\/a>. \u00a0That’s the most fucking moronic argument there’s ever been, aside from the outright false one that the Nazis were atheists. \u00a0Thirty seconds with a history book would cure this author of his nearly terminal idiocy.<\/p>\n

We must agree on this? \u00a0Fuck you.<\/p>\n

I have never seen, in my recollection, a mass murderer claiming to be a crusader of atheism.\u00a0 I\u2019m actually a little surprised that this is the lead-in for this article \u2013 the writers at Cracked are usually pretty smart, and this is a about as low-quality an argument you can find. \u00a0It’s been debunked more times than I can count.<\/p>\n

#2 \u2013 \u201cBoth sides believe what they\u2019re saying.\u201d\u00a0 For the most part, probably so.\u00a0 So what? \u00a0BFD. \u00a0Show me how that matters. \u00a0I don’t care that they believe it. \u00a0I could believe that my dog can do quantum physics after watching “The Elegant Universe” with me. \u00a0How does this matter? \u00a0(He gets to it on #5.)<\/p>\n

#3 \u2013 \u201cIn everyday life, you\u2019re not all that different.\u201d True.\u00a0 We\u2019re all humans.\u00a0 Which is why us non-believers are so grossed out when we see believers running around trying to pass laws that legislate their fairy-tale buddies commandments<\/a>, discriminate against gay people<\/a>, or restrict<\/a> the freedoms<\/a> of us non-believers<\/a>.\u00a0 Last we checked, that\u2019s not justice, that\u2019s batshittery.\u00a0 And we on the non-believer side don\u2019t think that belongs in our faces.\u00a0 That whole bit about \u201cbeing good as if there was some invisible rule\u201d or that sex somehow translates into religion?\u00a0 Sorry, that\u2019s gassy horseshit.\u00a0 I\u2019m good because my mother brought me up right, to police my own actions and wipe my own ass. I don\u2019t need a god to do that for me. That others attribute their good behavior to a divine source is part of the problem \u2013 because they can find divine guidance in their books for practically any behavior, and they\u2019re already pre-conditioned to accept the \u201cword of god\u201d as if it meant something more important than reality.<\/p>\n

#4 \u2013 \u201cThere are good people on both sides.\u201d\u00a0 Duh.\u00a0 Straw-man argument here.\u00a0 You won\u2019t find a sane atheist alive claiming otherwise. Of course there are good people on both sides. \u00a0On the other hand, how easy would it be to walk into any megachurch and get a battery of volunteers to make up a committee to lobby the state legislature for a law to deny some fundamental rights, or even citizenship, for atheists?<\/a>\u00a0 Pretty damn easy, I\u2019d say, given that:<\/p>\n

– Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, all have law on the books denying atheists the opportunity to serve in public office in spite of such laws being deemed unconstitutional in a 1961 Supreme Court case.<\/p>\n

– Arkansas refuses to allow atheist eyewitnesses in court.<\/p>\n

– Massachusetts has law that punishes blasphemy (i.e., criticism of religion) with up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $300.<\/p>\n

– Massachusetts and Pennsylvania afford special protections to believers in god<\/p>\n

References for the above laws can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You won\u2019t find quite so many atheists making those kind of arguments \u2013 because we just want to be left the hell alone to live our lives, and as the author of this article did point out correctly:\u00a0 a shit ton of us realized after 9\/11\/2011 that we couldn\u2019t just sit idly by and hope for the best.\u00a0 Some of those nutters will eventually get hold of something really dangerous<\/a> – like a biological or nuclear weapon – so it\u2019s time to do our best to drive religion into the realm of being impolite public behavior.<\/p>\n

#5 \u2013 \u201cYour Point of View is Legitimately Offensive to Them.\u201d\u00a0 My response to that?\u00a0 Bummer.\u00a0 Get over it.\u00a0 For thousands and thousands of years, believers have been murdering and torturing non-believers<\/a>, instituting their happy-crappy \u201cGod of love who\u2019ll burn you in Hell if you don\u2019t love him back\u201d horsecrap.\u00a0 Over the last couple centuries (since the aptly-named \u201cEnlightenment,\u201d that is), it\u2019s been steadily shoved back.\u00a0 In the last decade, we\u2019ve made enormous progress in legitimizing the position of atheists<\/a> \u2013 and as a result, in a lot of ways de-legitimizing religion.\u00a0 Which is, in the long run, a good thing.\u00a0 Be happy we\u2019re satisfied just ridiculing your religions into obscurity instead of burning the faithful at the stake as a sacrifice to some bloodthirsty deity (such as was the case with Christianity in the first\u00a0ten or so centuries of the current era, and is the case in several countries today – such as Pakistan and Iran).\u00a0 We didn\u2019t – and in present day in some countries, don’t – get that same consideration.<\/p>\n

This wouldn’t be a damned problem if the religious didn’t seem to think it was their duty to pass off their fairy tales as law<\/a> that the rest of us have to live under, or have their dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers creation stories taught as if it were real science<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In fact, if they kept all that shit at home, and didn’t crowd the entire AM dial, prop up every third ugly-ass billboard on the highway, and populate every streetcorner with their churches, I suspect life would be a lot happier for everyone – believers included.<\/p>\n

#6 \u2013 \u201cWe Tend to Exaggerate About the Other Guy.\u201d\u00a0 In a general sense this is probably true, there are probably a lot of atheists who generalize and exaggerate about the religious.\u00a0 The religious certainly \u2018exaggerate\u2019 about atheists, if calling us \u201cdevil worshipers\u201d<\/a>, untrustworthy<\/a>, amoral<\/a>, etc. still qualifies as exaggeration rather than outright lies.\u00a0 For my part, I try to avoid such crap and stick to the facts, because one incorrect exaggeration can be grasped and used as a life-preserver in a debate.\u00a0 Sticking to the raw facts leaves zero room for misunderstanding, and doesn\u2019t give any gripping area someone could use in an attempt to dismiss the entire discussion over one mistake.<\/p>\n

#7 \u2013 \u201cWe Tend to Exaggerate About Ourselves, Too.\u201d\u00a0 This might<\/em> be true, except that atheists generally don\u2019t talk about atheism or about ourselves among ourselves.\u00a0 It\u2019s not something we do, it doesn\u2019t really come up in conversation very often at all.\u00a0 We recognize that we are atheists, that there are many of us, but there aren\u2019t regular Sunday gatherings of us at a house of non-worship.\u00a0 The fact that we atheists say we \u201clove\u201d our partners just means we use a common word to describe the feeling.\u00a0 See #3 with regard to the question of attribution of source.<\/p>\n

#8 \u2013 \u201cFocusing on Negative Examples Makes You Stupid.\u201d\u00a0 Yes, that\u2019s true \u2013 and I\u2019m happy to say I don\u2019t wander around assuming everyone\u2019s a Fred Phelps.\u00a0 It\u2019s also one of the reasons I don\u2019t tar all religious people with the brush I slap on religion. \u00a0Some people do, but they\u2019re rare \u2013 see #4, generally atheists understand that there are good people among the bad, and atheists (myself included) generally save their ire for the actual members of the religion that are acting out, as well as for the religion that grants them the permission to do so. \u00a0When I see something that makes this point, I point it out.<\/p>\n

As a point of note, there are also some religions I don\u2019t pound on, because of their genuinely innocuous nature. \u00a0For instance, as Sam Harris pointed out best<\/a>, fundamentalists come in different flavors \u2013 and it’s the fundamentals of the religion that make the fundamentalists dangerous. \u00a0A fundamentalist Jaine is a wholly different animal than a fundamentalist Christian.\u00a0 I might have a healthy debate with a fundamentalist Unitarian, but it\u2019s unlikely I\u2019d find reason to fling condemnation at one.\u00a0 I don\u2019t beat on the Jaines because they\u2019re not a hazard to my health or freedom.\u00a0 Christians are.\u00a0 Muslims are.\u00a0 Even Jews in a distant sense are, because Zionist jews in Israel are a threat to world peace \u2013 which abstractly threatens to drag my country into a war that could kill a great many people.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s these aspects which are dangerous that require the most attention \u2013 I do on occasion find something nice to say about religions, but it\u2019s rare when that happens. \u00a0(I submit that it is quite possible that this is because I’m not looking for it.) \u00a0The religious are another matter, quite often I find nice things to say about them, but not in the context of their religion.\u00a0 It\u2019s that association that I draw a line around, because even normal people can create a hazardous environment.\u00a0 Moderates create an atmosphere where dangerous fundamentalists can hide, and which makes it acceptable for a fundamentalist to act out \u2013 because to challenge a fundy, in essence, challenges the moderates as well, and so you don\u2019t see headlines like: \u201cNeighborhood Churches Form Coalition to Rebuke Local Pentecostals for Their Crazy-Ass Beliefs\u201d or \u201cSo-and-so Church Ejects Three Members For Advocating Violence\u201d when the Pentecostals show up on the news yammering about how they hate The Gay or The Secular Conspiracy To Dominate America. \u00a0I suspect that\u2019s why Christians hate Mormons so much \u2013 Mormons just demonstrate the crazy inherent in both religions, but the Christians can\u2019t outright attack their beliefs, because when you hold the two up, the credibility of the two stories are both seen as nuts.\u00a0 \u201cLocal Felon Starts Polygamous Cult\u201d versus \u201cWoman Claims Mystery Pregnancy An Act Of God, Not Adultery Punishable By Stoning.\u201d<\/p>\n

#9 \u2013 \u201cBoth Sides Have Brought Good to The Table.\u201d\u00a0 Yeah\u2026so we\u2019re supposed to just overlook the evil because of this?\u00a0 Or pretend that both sides have brought equal good?\u00a0 Allow me to point out, three hundred years ago we were an iron-age population flailing about between bouts of the black plague, suffering from countless maladies ranging from measles to bad teeth.\u00a0 Reason got us away from that, killed polio and smallpox, took us to the moon, and brought us all the modern goodies we take for granted today.\u00a0 Every step of the way reason was fought by faith, passively and actively.\u00a0 People are generally familiar with the stories of active resistance, but the one they don\u2019t often notice is the passive resistance \u2013 the accidental complacency that is inspired by the thought that one is already in possession of all the answers.\u00a0 This is usually evidenced as \u201cI don\u2019t know, so God did it.\u201d\u00a0 Neil DeGrasse Tyson had a really good quote the other day about this<\/a>: \u201cI don\u2019t even mind, I don\u2019t even care, if someone wants to say, \u2018You don\u2019t understand that, god did it.\u2019 That doesn\u2019t even bother me.\u00a0 What would bother me, is if you were so content in that answer that you no longer had curiosity to learn how it happened.\u00a0 The day you stop looking because you\u2019re content god did it, I don\u2019t need you in the lab.\u201d<\/p>\n

#10 \u2013 \u201cYou\u2019ll Never Harass The Other Side Out of Existence.\u201d\u00a0 True.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t need to.\u00a0 The natural process of discovery, advancing standards of morality, and education are doing that for me.\u00a0 It\u2019s also not my intent to make it all evaporate \u2013 my goal is to make it well understood that their religion is not a solid foundation upon which to build government or legal frameworks.\u00a0 To get crazy-ass fairy stories out of science classrooms.<\/a>\u00a0 The progressive discovery of how the world really works and is will do the job of pushing religion into the depths of obscurity just fine, it doesn\u2019t need my assistance in that regard.\u00a0 That is, unless the religious people<\/a> who are busy trying to take over the government succeed and end up destroying what was once a free country<\/a>.\u00a0 Or if they wipe out proper public education as they\u2019ve been trying to do since it was first put in place (“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” – Jerry Falwell, 1979), guaranteeing generation after generation of ignorant children grow up with no source of information other than a manipulative religious caste of priests who claim some higher authority from god.\u00a0 If history is any indication, that\u2019s a pretty stupid idea.<\/p>\n

So in summary, the ten things the author of that article seems to think are needed to be agreed upon? \u00a0Not so much.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend linked to this article from Cracked.com entitled “10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (and Must) Agree On”\u00a0on her FB page the other day, and after reading through it I felt the need to respond. Summary: \u00a0No, we don’t … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crazy","category-evil","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}