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.

[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.