A common trope I see in atheist circles are people (often claiming to be atheists themselves, and I’m sure many genuinely are) going around chiding other atheists for being mean, rude, or otherwise disrespectful to believers. It’s counterproductive! It doesn’t work! It paints us in a bad light!

Often enough, these criticisms are an example of concern trolling, someone telling us what to do because they don’t agree with what we’re trying to do. Greta Christina correctly pointed out that when they do us, they’re trying to get us to lay down the weapons we use to fight back against what’s done to us. They’re trying to get us to surrender our power.

Atheists are often caustic, sarcastic, and generally unpleasant with believers. I built up quite a reputation for snark in my days on reddit, and I have no doubt I’ll continue that tradition on lemmy. Why is that? Because reciprocity is a fundamental aspect of morality. We give back what we get, and in places like the US atheists are not treated very well. So a lot of atheists will either hide or they’ll fight back. Personally, I switch between them depending on my mood and circumstances. I also observe that for centuries, atheists did their best to stay quiet and get along without any reduction in the abuse they received. This quote comes from Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists:

I’ll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive.

And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.

So what’s the point in being a dick to believers? It can have more utility than people realize. Sometimes being a dick to dickish people helps contain them. Sometimes there’s utility in tactical dickishness. This is a problem that needs to be attacked from multiple different angles, not just the one that you think best.

I think Daniel Dennett said it best:

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

  • @rustyspoon@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0•1 year ago

    I’m not a member of this sub, this just popped up on my feed. I disagree with the general sentiment of this post. I stopped calling myself an atheist years ago because many atheists I interact with are bitter and antagonistic, kind of like how anti-natalists attack people who choose to have kids. People aren’t concern trolling, this is a legitimate and common experience. Maybe it’s a minority but they’re the ones making noise, and I find that these voices take over in atheist spaces.

    I’m anti-religion because I dislike the institutional power religious organizations, and because these organizations often champion causes which I believe I prejudiced and harmful. It’s not because I believe people putting faith in a higher power are unintelligent, or because I want to wear a shirt that says “if you believe in God, fuck you.” And those are the attitudes and actions that made me distance myself from atheism.

    • spaceghotiOPMEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      You’re welcome to make that choice. It’s when people lecture me about how I choose to respond to religious provocation that the snark comes out. You don’t wanna do it my way? You don’t have to. I’m not saying you do. I’m saying it’s a valid choice, and shaking your finger at me isn’t going to make me see it your way. I’ve helped a lot of people see the ridiculousness of religious belief over the years, and it wasn’t always because I was kind. Sometimes provoking people into defending their beliefs forces them to do the research they never bothered to do before. And sometimes it just makes them double down. In the latter case, kindness doesn’t move them either.

      So excuse me if I’m not interested in being lectured on my tone.