So a horse-loving, feminist-hating Roosh V fan popped into my Twitter mentions today, defending Roosh against accusations of rape by noting that he’s never actually been charged or convicted of rape. Which is true, though not actually proof of his innocence any more than OJ’s acquittal in criminal court is proof that he didn’t murder his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend.
When Phil pointed out that his belief that Roosh is a rapist seems to be supported by Roosh’s own words, Ms. Smith declared that Roosh’s own words didn’t count, because they appeared in a post of mine. And that’s when, for better or worse, I entered into the discussion myself.
And then I asked the questions I ask everyone who accuses me of taking quotes out of context: Have you read the original quotes in context, and if so, could you tell me how I misrepresented them?
I don’t think anyone I have ever asked these questions to has given me a satisfactory answer. Most slink off at this point, their bluff called.
But others continue to bluff and bluster onward, doing their best to avoid answering the questions — either because they have read the quotes in their original context, and know full well that I didn’t misrepresent them, or because they haven’t read the quotes in the original and don’t want to admit it.
Still, I don’t think I’ve ever run across a bluffer quite as brazen or as persistent as Ms. Smith, who somehow managed, over the course of several hours of on-and-off “debate,” to avoid saying whether or not she actually read any of the books she claimed I was misrepresenting. Or even the post of mine she was ostensibly critiquing.
As the hours went by, her attempts to wriggle out of answering these rather basic yes or no questions took on a kind of Dadaesque grandeur. Read on, if you have the patience for it.
Seeing the name “Mina” so often in my mentions made me think of the Bollywood classic “Eena Meena Deeka,” which is certainly more entertaining than Mina Smith’s “arguments” above.
@ Scarletathena
Atheism is a belief system in the same way that ‘not stamp collecting’ is a hobby.
Wwth,
Re: a persons a person no matter how small,
Gah! I didn’t know right wingers were using that! I always loved that quote because of the social justice implications. How date they hijack it! I also love the hawtch hawtcher watchers job is to watch the lazy town bee “a bee that is watched will work harder, you see…” Lol, love it.
Ugh. She just wanted to suck you in to wasting several hours of your time. Don’t give people like that what they want.
Whenever I find myself in these kinds of debates, always ask the question (and I totally pilfered this technique from someone else): “WHAT KIND OF EVIDENCE WOULD IT TAKE TO SATISFY YOU?” It has a very nice BS-slashing quality to it which forces your opponent to either quit or admit that the debate is basically just semantic noise. It’s also a defense against the technique employed by this woman (I’m sure it has a name but I don’t know it), which forces you to do a lot of work with no discernible benefit — such as writing pages and pages of definitions and explanations at the demands of someone who doesn’t CARE what you say anyway and will dismiss your answers with a shrug.
@Nitram
Yeah, and beyond that one line, the pro-lifer rationale breaks down completely. No one was forced to care for the clover with the speck on it. Horton did it voluntarily. When at the end, all the other animals agreed that the speck was populated with tiny creatures, again, the kangaroo volunteered to watch over it. Funny how the life-long progressive Dr. Seuss was supposedly “divinely inspired” in spite of himself to write what right-wingers embrace as an anti-choice screed, yet God apparently forgot to inspire him to write the part where someone’s life gets involuntarily derailed on account of being forced to care for the speck.
@Alan
It’s not a belief system, but organized atheism would be considered a movement. Some branches have goals and beliefs much the same as some branches of religion.
“I don’t like/want to participate in stamp collecting.” is an opinion.
“Stamp collecting is harmful to society and people need to be talked out of stamp collecting” is a position.
That’s my two cents, at least. *shrugs*
Something dawned on me about mina’s attempts at debate: It reads very much like someone who’s learned about a technique to disrupt a conversation by bogging it down in irrelevant details and causing the other party to put far more time into the responses than them. In this case, when the tactic plainly fails, they then don’t seem to have any idea what to do about that. You can almost see the subtext floating underneath each repetition: “but… but… but… you were supposed to let me recurse!”
@Catalpa
The problem with the stamp-collecting analogy is that stamp collectors don’t have massive institutions that wield a disproportionate influence over public policy in countries that are nominally secular. Stamp collectors don’t have a history of persecuting non-stamp collectors, or requiring all others to collect stamps upon pain of losing their basic civil rights. There is no such thing as a de facto lithmus test for high public office based on stamp-collecting. Religion isn’t a hobby; it’s a way of life and more importantly, it’s a way of governing other people’s lives.
Atheists, at least in the US, aren’t particularly active in talking people out of religion. There is no atheist equivalent of religious proselytezation. What atheists focus on is checking religious institutions’ relentless encroachment on policy, education and the public fisc. This has less to do with atheism per se and more with secularism.
@ Catapalta
Yeah, purely by definition atheism cannot be a belief system as it is an absence of belief.
Of course semantics can play a part. Consider these two statements:
I do not believe in gods.
I believe there are no gods.
Do they amount to the same thing? I would say yes. Does the fact that one terms is expressed in terms of someone holding a belief make that a belief system? I would say no; not is the sense that we normally use the term ‘belief system’. it would of course be less confusing if we stopped using belief as a synonym for faith.
Someone may believe in mythical creatures; like unicorns or tigers.
I believe someone who does is mistaken. Does that mean my opinion as the existence of such creatures is a belief system. I would say no.
Of course it’s in the interests of people who are against atheism to promote the view it’s a belief system as then they can conflate belief and faith and say “Oh you have a faith based position too” with all the consequent arguments for equal treatment in education, the law, politics etc.
@ catapalta and amused
I think you may have missed that I referred to *not* collecting stamps.
@Scarlettathena:
I agree that dictionary atheism is a not-position; however movement atheism tends to borrow many positions from secularism (for instance insistence on secular schooling and an end to religiously-mandated homophobia) and from Humanism, which is very much a viable ideology of its own. Most of the trolls and evangelical nihilists, however, will tend to shun these more positive aspects of atheism and concentrate purely on tearing down religiosity.
A good example of this is the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast, which is a fantastic series that I cannot recommend enough and which does great work; however every time it strays away from holding superstitious people’s feet to the fire and starts encouraging its listeners to help something productive, attracts barrages of complaints.
As for which atheists I’ve seen make ugly, ex-recta claims about the way the world works, I’ve seen a few. I was just getting into atheism when Elevatorgate kicked off; I was definitely there for when Jen McCreight dropped her famous post in February of 2012 and got harassed off the web as a result; I was involved during the Atheist Bus Campaign, the Slymepit thing, and then the furore when Michael Shermer was outed as a rapist. I took a long break from atheist circles when Gamergate started, and have just started to get back.
So yes, unfortunately I have seen such things occur within atheism. It attracts a lot of horrible people who relish the prospect of using it as a banner under which they can punch down viciously upon those less educated and privileged than themselves. This doesn’t mean that opposing dominionism isn’t vital, as you point out; and doesn’t mean that the movement isn’t composed of many excellent people with noble intentions; but a number of the people involved seem to be there for motivations different from mine.
Ohh yes there is. The Internet assholes who butt into every single religious discussion, even non-religious news articles where somebody just happened to thank God for surviving a tragedy, with “LULZ SKY WIZARD! CHRISTIANS/MUSLIMS ARE SO [r-worded].” They obviously don’t affect anything offline, unlike their religious equivalents, but online, the only difference is whether they scream “Sky wizard” or “Going to Hell.”
(I’m not religious, but that shit pisses me off regardless of who it’s from or who it’s aimed at.)
@Amused:
Not to mention that in Horton Hears a Who, there were literally small people living on the speck. Like, scaled down children and adults. We’ve been past the homunculus theory of development for quite some time now.
Really!? First Lamarckianism, now this.
If the experiments at CERN don’t confirm the existence of The Aether I’m probably going to have to buy a new set of Encyclopaedias.
From what I heard, a member of 8-Chan was claiming responsibility for the threat, but I haven’t heard anything since. (Of course, we’ll be blamed for it in the long run, because it suits their narrative, and it’s easier for them to assume it was the “SJWs” instead of one of their own.)
And considering that many GGers were talking about boycotting or not going to Airplay, it would make sense. They’ve never really been able to rally all the troops behind one thing or another.
@Scarlettathena: “Theists make a claim: there is a god/gods. They have a burden of proof.”
That right there? The “they have a burden of proof” part? That assertion implies a belief system.
Because it assumes that the alleged existence of supernatural entities such as deities must be logically and/or empirically “provable” in the same way that rational/material entities in the natural world are.
As a rationalist-materialist atheist myself, I happen to agree with that assumption. But just because I believe it doesn’t make it objectively true. That’s the error a lot of atheists fall into when they insist that theists are obligated to “prove” supernatural claims in a way that’s convincing within a non-supernatural, rationalist-materialist framework.
Nope. If it’s somehow possible for a supernatural deity to exist, then it’s also possible that the existence of said supernatural deity might somehow be logically and empirically undetectable. You can’t invoke the ground rules of rationalist materialism to argue against the existence of supernatural entities which, by definition, aren’t constrained by laws of nature and reason as we rationalist materialists understand them.
I think NASA missed a trick when the Mars Explorer mission failed.
Instead of admitting they just got imperial and metric units mixed up; they should have announced that it crashed into a tea-pot.
Not stamp collecting is one of my favorite hobbies! I do it everyday, 24/7/365 or 364. I recommend not stamp collecting for everyone.
If they want to be able to use their base claim (existence of divinity, and usually a specific definition of that deity) as a key premise to support further actions, such as the adoption of specific moral codes, or the alteration (or even sustenance) of the law, then yes, it’s reasonable to state that they have a burden of proof about said existence.
If they are simply saying, “I think there’s a god or gods” and have no real-world plans they wish to advance because of that belief, there’s no reason to bother with it.
Oh, obligatory origin link for “sealion” in this context: http://wondermark.com/1k62/
@Kimstu:
Why is this unreasonable? If a supernatural being affects the world in any way, those effects should at the very least be detectable. If there’s literally no way to differentiate a world with a supernatural being and a world without, then why bother thinking one exists in the first place? How did the idea even come about?
“Proof” is not the mathematical proof, it’s the scientific one. It’s a demonstration that would convince a (reasonable) skeptic that there’s something rather than nothing. It has nothing to do with what ideological framework you’re operating under… The explanation might, but not the thing itself.
If you could show that, for instance, prayer works in a way incompatible with chance or known mechanisms, even the person operating under the “non-supernatural, rationalist-materialist framework” would have to admit there was something going on they couldn’t reasonably explain.
Hey, Gators are all about invented story lines, albeit poorly constructed dumb ass ones.
These master debaters refuse to read or simply ignore that Roosh wrote this in Bang Iceland.
Since, as David points out, that is also rape in Iceland, Roosh is an admitted rapist. It’s pretty fucking straight forward.
I would disagree. It implies a belief, simply a belief in gods. That is not a system.
@EJ
It may be that I don’t pay any attention to what you’re calling “movement atheism”. I’ve seen lots of talk about various atheists organizing through the years. I think it’s neat that like-minded people want to get together, but I don’t pay attention to that stuff.
Sure, there are assholes throughout all society and you can spot misogyny in all kinds of groups of people, and like I said, atheism is no guarantee of rational thought. It is simply the rejection of a claim.
Mainly, my point is simply that a person arguing “as an atheist” can only really assert one thing – their lack of belief in any gods – so there isn’t much positive claim you can start to build up. If they start to say, “I think we should base our reasons for X on science”, then they should absolutely be able to defend why they think that is the case.
btw – to all – sorry if my comments have derailed the thread!
@ Kimstu again
I thought I should elaborate on my response. Let’s say there are people who believe in unicorns and others who don’t.
The only ones who have burden of proof are those who claim unicorns exist. I can’t show evidence for a negative. All I can do is say I don’t believe unicorns exist because I’ve never seen one, never seen evidence for one, even a picture. All I have is some people saying they believe in unicorns.
Right now, that’s not a system. That’s a belief.
Now, if people who believed in unicorns started organizing other beliefs around their belief in unicorns, that would start to be a system. This could entail other beliefs, rituals, behaviors, sacred objects, actions/words/things to avoid. For example, unicornists might say it is holy to walk through the woods in silence under the full moon, have rituals in the clearings where we raise unicorn horns to the sun or chant unicorn songs. I may have to avoid meat or only chew on grass. Or whatever. Now we have a system.
Religion is like that. Theism is a belief in at least one god, but it is not a system. Catholicism is a belief system.