“How would you feel if we started policing makeup,” extremely irate Redditor asks in epic rant

@Imaginary Petal

Religion will never end or be eradicated, unless we can somehow make all people be perfectly rational at all times, as well as always interpreting all facts of reality entirely correctly. Which we can’t. So let’s move on to something more productive.

Related: if you go to Dawkins’ website, you’ll be subjected to one of his catch phrases regarding religion – “together we can find the cure”. What an idiot.

sadly you’re right and and i said it too

i don’t consider it possible

but i’m not a perfectionist and my (well not truly mine!) solution is very practical.
i said before, i’m no fan of him(which probably nobody believed), new atheists lack philosophical knowledge and don’t notice how religious their scientism and atheism is.

@kupo

Sorry, but I also have to object to the implication that religion is both irrational and incorrect. That’s a huge assumption right there.

ok, would you care to say what you mean by religion, rationality and correctness?maybe we can agree on something.
also i’m more critical of religious thinking rather than religion itself.

Debunking this crazyrant would be giving it too much credit. I agree with the synopsis that OP needs a diaper change and a nap. Poor thing, he’s so ANGRY.

@wwth

Didn’t he promise not to spill over into other threads? Or was that the other identical guy.

@Imaginary Petal

Didn’t he promise not to spill over into other threads? Or was that the other identical guy.

come on, don’t be mean
http://mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Dr.-Who.gif

Didn’t he promise not to spill over into other threads? Or was that the other identical guy.

That was One True Dingleberry. arash has made some non-tedious comments, not related to religion/atheism, in other threads recently (such as arguing with the troll in last week’s “gotcha” memeday thread). I’ve also not noticed them using the argument “you’re wrong because [youtube link]“.

i think another illusion is that the problem of religion in the west is “solved”. well it’s subdued but not “gone” and the only reason is that people stand against its advances.
it doesn’t stop, it doesn’t vanish, it doesn’t “go away”, it’s just in every human soul and if people forget how dangerous it is, if they let it thrive in public domain and if there is no organized force to restrain it, it will take over the society.
when there is a constant danger there is a need for unrelenting watchers.

How does one identify as “not with” the “Dawkins/Maher branch” of atheism? Say, “No, I’m not an atheist. I am an Atheist+?”

You can just say that you’re an atheist and if clarification is needed, then provide it.

Would you deny that when people self-identify as atheists, that they have to explain that they are not Dawkinsites?

I’ve lived as an atheist for a good long time now and that has come up exactly never. Maybe it’s happened to other people, but frankly, because atheism is so low on my list of how I define myself, it honestly wouldn’t bother me in the slightest to have to clarify it to someone. *shrugs*

That is entirely analogous to Muslims constantly having to explain that they are not like their worst actors, even if their worst actors are numerous. It is entirely analogous to Muslims saying, “please stop saying that these theocratic bigots are the voice of Islam,” for atheists to say, “please stop saying that Richard Dawkins is the voice of atheism.”

I think we’re talking past each other here. If there’s a context in which Dawkins is somehow the atheist equivalent of, say, Bin Laden, then you have a point. However, apart from the fact that they’re public figures, I view these contexts as so different that any comparison will be deeply flawed.

It is entirely analogous to progressive Muslims wanting to reform their religion, even in parts of the world where it looks impossible right now.

See, that’s where I differ. Some theocratic regimes like the one in Saudi Arabia are propped up over here. Over there, they enjoy little popular support. In other cases, US intervention was a contributor to the rise of theocracy, like Iran and Irak, for instance. The problem with religious extremism in these countries can partly be traced back to western intervention. Doesn’t absolve the criminal acts of anyone, but it does suggest a course of action.

The problem with letting the Richard Dawkinses of the world remain the voice of “movement atheism” unchallenged is that most people, and especially most journalists in mainstream media, don’t make that distinction. Outside of our bubble, Dawkins, Harris, and Maher aren’t seen as the voice of “movement atheism”; they are seen as the voice of atheism.

Which is why I argued for branching off rather than remaining on the same boat as them. The Dawkins, Harris and Maher branch have become or are in the process of becoming immune to reason and evidence: they won’t change their mind and there is no point being affiliated with them.

You disagree that the world would be a better place if religion disappeared overnight. Reasonable people can disagree on this. I happen to fall somewhere in the middle on that argument. At my heart, I am a co-exister. But I do believe that the world would be a more peaceful place with less religion, especially less patriarchal religion.

See, the distinction I make is between orthodoxy, dogmatism and rigid fundamentalism. These things are hardly unique to religion, nor are they inherently part of it, and I also think that what makes fundamentalism, be it religious or non-religious, appealing on a broad scale is largely a combination of social, political, and economic factors.

And I also recognize that the fact that my atheism is unimportant to me is something that does indeed come from a place of privilege.

I don’t know about that: Dawkins, Harris and Maher all come from a place of privilege and yet, there they are.

That bit I wrote about the ex-Muslim woman that you dismissed?

I dismissed it because it had nothing to do with anything I wrote, and it still has nothing to do with anything I wrote, so no, I don’t feel compelled to address it.

It is a fact that many people would continue to be assholes without religion. But for many people, especially women and sexual minorities, religion is indeed the yoke of their oppression.

The thing is, movement atheism isn’t exactly friendly to women and sexual minorities, nor can you paint religion with such a broad stroke.

The women who get stoned or shot for adultery, or have acid thrown in their faces for going to school? That can’t just be chalked up to colonialism, can it? The women who want to escape a culture in which they are required to put bonnets on their heads and can’t protest when their husbands talk about “breeding them” again — surely, we can’t say they are just victims of socioeconomic forces, can we?

Congratulations, you killed that strawman dead. What I actually argued is that what makes a religion benign or toxic is a broader set of circumstances and that changing these circumstances is more likely to have a greater impact than promoting atheism. They are not mutually exclusive options, but it does suggest something about how much effort should be directed where.

Here many of us (but nowhere near all) have the privilege of attending pleasantly liberal houses of worship, or leaving the religion of our birth if it is too oppressive. But for those who feel their only choice is to speak out or shut up and take it, I think we could do better than to say that “making it the focus of one’s strategy to a better world [is] misguided at best”.

The thing is, you can have religion with or without oppression and oppression with or without religion, so I’m fairly convinced that making atheism the lynchpin of one’s strategy to fight oppression can’t find anything but limited success.

What organizations do you propose they form? Ones that don’t promote atheism? Because you disagree that they should want to promote it?

It’s context dependent. In places where atheists have to struggle for their rights, something more activist. In places where they don’t, it’d be more like a social club or support group. Doesn’t necessarily mean that those in comfortable situations can’t lend a hand to those in dire circumstances, but you get the point, I hope.

There just seems to be a lot of this idea going around that “wanting to promote atheism as an alternative and a counter to patriarchal religions necessarily means declaring that all religion is bad and contributes to human suffering, throwing your lot in with Dawkins and Harris, and rejecting third-wave / intersectional feminism and social justice”; and it makes me uneasy.

Eh, I’ll throw my lot in with the movements you mentionned before atheism any day of the week.

Timothy Cardinal Dolan a Catholic asshole who is the Archbishop of New York. He has ~400k google hits. Bill Donohue is a Catholic asshole who goes on FOX News a lot. He has ~800k google hits. If I were a Catholic thinking about leaving that church, I think I would be much more concerned about Dolan than Donohue.

EJ,

It seems like you are or have been “in deeper” with movement atheism than I have, so you may have a clearer sense of the facts on the ground than I do. I think there’s an important difference between a face and a leader, and that a bad leader is often a good reason to leave a group, but a bad face or rarely a good reason to give up a label. I have the impression that Dawkins specifically is more a face than a leader.

A leader gets their power from the group or movement they lead. They may or may not be well known outside the group, but they’re effective because they can ask for and receive money and labor, because they have authority in group institutions, or because they set behavioral norms for the group.

One of the biggest atheist events there is is the American Atheists’ annual convention. The director of American Atheists is a man most people have never heard of, named David Silverman. I can ask David Silverman not to invite Dawkins to the next conference, but I can’t ask him not to invite himself, nor can I ask Dawkins not to invite Silverman. If I buy a ticket, Silverman and not Dawkins will decide what my money is supporting.

A face relies on followers for advertising more than for labor and draws power from both inside and outside the group. Dawkins is wildly popular among atheists, but in some ways he doesn’t even need atheists any more. If every atheist in the world rejected him overnight, he could probably work as an atheist spokesman on TV for the rest of his life because he’s the atheist people have heard of.

I’m not 100% sure what you actually mean when you say “stay” or “leave,” but I don’t think being less active or less visible can do much to weaken the presumption that Dawkins speaks for you.

If a guy tried to take my makeup away from me, I would either punch him or laugh in his face, and then continue to apply it. Especially the new foundation I just got-L’Oreal True Match Lumi Cushion, where the foundation’s in a little sponge in the compact and you push the little puff (like a powder puff but not as thick) down on the sponge and tap the foundation on your face.

David, please delete my previous comment-it was an incomplete thought and I don’t want it up there.

I like how Orion just ignored everyone but EJ there. I guess those of us who haven’t read the sacred texts aren’t worthy of a reply.

@Imaginary Petal
To clarify my earlier post, I just get tired of people using rationality as an instrument to bludgeon others (not that I think you were doing that). For a lot of people, religion is about how they feel, and people are often told they’re being irrational for having feelings of any kind. To say that the only rational choice is atheism of some kind is pretty insulting to anyone who is religious.

I don’t think you see religious people as irrational, deluded people or anything, I just get tired of hearing fellow athiests treat religious people like they’re inferior and this was starting to souls a lot like that. It probably comes from hanging out in a lot of atheist spaces before, where the racist, sexist douche-fedoras would attack anything and everything they disagreed with as being irrational, illogical, and objectively wrong, regardless of any actual facts.

Kupo, dhag, SFHC,

I made an ill-considered and inappropriate comment. I’m sorry for that. In the future I will make sure to refrain from personal attacks.

@kupo

I do believe that religious thought is irrational, and that faith is irrational. But in my mind that doesn’t amount to saying religious people are all irrational or stupid. I recognize that all people have the capacity for irrational thought, and not having faith only means you aren’t irrational in that one respect. Atheists can be irrational elsewhere, including myself.

However, I don’t conflate having human emotions with irrationality. There’s nothing irrational about feeling things.