Ah, my angry blogger strikes again.

[sciolist]

It's all good stuff about certainty, or the obvious lack thereof, in atheism and other theisms. We don't need absolute certainty to operate and it's useful to underline that to avoid hyperbolic stuff.

The thing that made me smile and re-post was this:

"(The flip side of this fallacy is the theists' claim that they cannot supply atheists' demands for absolute certainty about claims of a god's existence or properties. We do not demand absolute certainty. We'd like to see a case made beyond a reasonable doubt, but at this point I'd settle for probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.)"

Which I thought was cute. After that the tone of the post gets slightly ruder, but the content's still nice (in its meaning as accurate). Which is why I read it.

"The problem is that every day I read this or that atrocity against human well-being and happiness — atrocities that shock my conscience to the core — being not just perpetrated but proudly perpetrated by people in name of their god. It's not just the "newsworthy" atrocities — acid in a young girl's face, the murder of an abortion doctor, the rape of a child — it's the systematic and persistent efforts of so many religious people to marginalize, oppress and exploit some large segment of the population: heretics, foreigners, homosexuals, and of course women.

All of this would be irrelevant if it were true that a god actually existed. The truth is the truth; nuclear physics is still true even if it means we can incinerate tens of thousands in a heartbeat; it's still true even if we annihilate the entire terrestrial biosphere in a nuclear holocaust.

But it's not true. There is no god. We're on our own, a microscopic speck of life in an indifferent universe that cares nothing for our happiness or our survival. "

http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2010/09/atheism-conviction-and-certainty.html

PS - Someone please tell me how to use cut tags here - I bet they don't use lj-cut as a syntax.

Comments

[ankaret]

AFAIK lj-cut still works: it certainly seems to when I crosspost from LJ with Semagic. I think the DW syntax is just 'cut text=', though.

I do wonder whether some of the reason people keep accusing atheists of dogmatism is that they're worried about being thought dogmatic themselves, in much the same way that the worst insult ever is 'immature' if you happen to be fourteen, or, if I'm going to be a bit more provocative, that it always seems to be the pastors with the most militant anti-gay stance who get caught with their pants down in motels with young men.

Of course it must be infuriating if you've spent a lot of time in honest searching in order to arrive at your faith and people assume you just picked it up because you're too stupid to know any better, but I do wonder if there's a bit of projection going on.

Assumptions

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

I don't assume theists are too stupid to know any better, I know they're too stupid... or more precisely ignorant or incompetent at logic, which is not a trivial discipline. Sorry, but after discussing apologetics for more than a decade, I've yet to see an apologetic argument -- even from professional philosophers -- that wasn't utter bollocks.

Re: Assumptions

[jang]

Or, you're merely* confident of that. They might be perfectly competent at everything except presenting a coherent argument.

* "merely" being merely an ill-applied piece of idiom, as opposed to having any larger connotations of the "evolution is merely a theory" type.

Re: Assumptions

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

All of them? Seems unlikely.

Re: Assumptions

[jang]

That's funny, that's exactly what I thought about the idea that they're all useless at logic.

You rail against bullshit (very entertainingly, if I might say so, although entertaining me is obviously not the point), which is fair enough, and a decent target. I think you over-egging it: I don't really care what bullshit people spout, buy into, or even really use to justify their actions. There are lots of other aspects of bad behaviour that I'd sooner see done away with: impoliteness, for instance. This is likely an opinion largely garnered from the culture I was raised in, admittedly, but I think we could go a long way with a simple empathic regard for each other, even if it was based upon a semi-rational worldview.

(Proper politeness comes from empathy in large part; but I don't care either if people fake it and just display the outward symptoms, because - just like the existence of a nonphysical god being a pretty moot question - I don't really care about the metaphysics so much as the observable effects.)

Re: Assumptions

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

That's funny, that's exactly what I thought about the idea that they're all useless at logic.

Well, there's would be several actual reasons why theists might be incompetent at logic (especially self-selection), whereas I'm hard pressed to figure out how theists could be generally good at arriving at the correct conclusion yet categorically bad at describing how they got there.

Re: Assumptions

[jang]

Aquinas was a pretty competent logician, even if he was rather encumbered by a love of Aristotle. It's not the mechanics of proof*; it's the initial axioms.

* well, alright, perhaps it is, rather. I've heard a few "you can't do X from first principles" which often turns out to be a declaration that the speaker has a fairly broken notion of what it is to "do X" (that neatly complements their wrong set of first principles) rather than a tautology.

Re: Assumptions

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

Perhaps incompetent is not precisely correct. Most of the pros get the logic right most of the time, but they all make rather obvious mistakes. They're semicompetent, which might be worse than incompetent.

Re: Assumptions

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

There are lots of other aspects of bad behaviour that I'd sooner see done away with: impoliteness, for instance.

Bah! Politeness is the first refuge of the incompetent.

Re: Assumptions

[jang]

Oh ho! That's exactly the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from a motherfucking wanker.

Re: Assumptions

[jang]

Also, whilst I was at it I just took a dump on your car. And marginalised, oh, let's say, the gays.

Re: Assumptions

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

May a thousand syphilitic camels vomit in your couscous, you insufferable prick. ;)

[lurkingcat]

ankaret is dead right about the cut tag stuff :)

Slightly ruder

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

Only slightly ruder? I'll try to do better next time. :D

[jang]

Putting aside the simple enjoyment garnered from the activity, I think WOPR put it best.

WOPR?

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

Do you mean, "The only way to win is not to play?"

Re: WOPR?

[jang]

Yeah. I'm not what you call accommodationist; I've just got better things* to spend my spare energy on.

On the other hand, it's friends and acquaintances that I'm dealing with; we all overlook small things like philosophical differences (well, except at the pub) because doing so greases the social wheels. I don't tell people "I think you're an idiot for thinking that" because - actually, because I don't think those people are idiots: I've lots of evidence to the contrary, and anyway, their holding of an irrational belief costs me bugger-all.

Telling Ratzinger where to stick his rhetorical invention of "atheist extremism" might be a different matter, but I don't tend to bump into the pope over coffee at lunchtime very often.

* obviously you're smart enough to read this as a subjective value judgement of my hobbies as opposed to an objective assertion.

Re: WOPR?

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

I'm very polite in person: You have to be really good friends with me for me to be impolite to you in person. Then again, all of my friends are good Right Thinking folks, and I don't debate anything in person with people who aren't my friends.