I'm an atheist skeptic in the Bible Belt. Often tempted to leave family and friends and light out for the territory where people have a little more sense and tolerance.
It's hard to feel free here. You feel like if everyone knew what you thought, you'd be an outcast. In my case, my job would be in danger, and many in my family would disown me if they knew the full extent of my "unbelief", that I am unsavable and unrepentant -- I'd have no access to my niece and nephew, no chance to give them my perspective on things.
Meanwhile, the Xians go on about how they're "persecuted". Hell, that's like saying white people are persecuted, or men are persecuted, or rich people are persecuted, although you can certainly find fringe pundits willing to sell that bill o' goods, too.
Still, we can't just shut up and sit down. We can't sit idly by and let the "God squad" erode our liberties, teach nonsense to our kids, and stuff the pockets of charlatans.
But in the last week I've had two encounters that put me in a quandry.
The details don't matter. But here's the gist....
Most folks who believe in all that religious claptrap are sincere. They can't see past it. And they're never going to.
They're never going to.
Obviously, the tendency toward religious thinking is built into our brains. We are pattern-seeking, meaning-creative, anthropo-centric critters. If all memory and evidence of religion were destroyed at midnight EST tonight, it would rise up again spontaneously tomorrow. People would "see" and re-invent God all over again, and nothing we say could stop them.
So my question is this....
How can one be a compassionate skeptic?
CAN one be a compassionate skeptic?
Hello Piggy.
Sorry to be joining the debate so late. Some interesting things have been said on both sides. I will say that I think it
possible to be a compassionate skeptic in the sense that you seem to be interested in (of being able to clearly disagree with theists without hurting them) but that (A) I have never been able to figure out how to do this, and (B) it does not seem to me to have ever been very effective. I have pasted in here a little illustrative story that I wrote a few years ago, which seems to address your question. I then got a little carried away and added some more to the end of it.
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'The Cuddly Kitten'
You are standing by the side of the road with a stranger, who we’ll call Mr. X. A car comes down the road, and Mr. X steps out in front of it and gets run over. So now he is lying there very badly injured, and you ask him “why the hell did you step out in front of that car?” He answers: “Well, I’d had a terrible day. All sorts of bad things had happened to me, and it occurred to me that it would make me feel a lot better if I just had a soft little kitten to cuddle. So when that thing, which I must now admit to have looked like a car and sounded like a car, came down the road I so needed it to be a cuddly kitten that I just assumed that it was, and stepped out in front of it to get it to stop so that I could pick it up”.
What do you say to Mr. X? Think well before you answer, as his position - belief against reason on the basis of desire - is qualitatively identical to all positions of irrational religious and ideological faith. It is more overt and extreme, but in fundamental principle it is the same. Do you say to him “There there…. I understand entirely; and how could a person who was in your terrible position have done otherwise”? If so then you would have substantial company, as this what ‘we’ - in the rational philosophy/science/engineering community - have been saying for hundreds of years to those who still live mainly by ‘faith based knowledge’. We have been watching them kill each other and die, torture and be tortured, succumb to easily preventable famines and easily curable disease epidemics, and be ruled/exploited by an apparently endless succession of blatantly self serving human monsters; throughout Africa and the Middle East, and to a slightly lesser degree in all of Asia and Latin America. Our “there there” understanding and sympathy, and careful avoidance of any hint that we might think them better off without their irrational beliefs (to be, of course, desirably ‘politically correct’, ‘post-modern’, and solicitous of their sensibilities) does not seem to have been of much service to them. To bring the problem back to the relatively simple case of Mr. X: Might it not be kinder, in the ‘long view’ of trying to prevent a repetition once he gets out of the hospital, to say to him “Well, I’m sorry to be giving you this bad news, but I’ve got to tell you
that belief against reason just can’t fly. Reason is nothing but the output of our newer and higher ‘executive level’ brain structures. It thus provides our most reliable understanding of reality. It is predicated directly upon our observations of the behavior of our knowledge in relation to reality. [Basically, how well can it be seen to work? What kind of knowledge can be seen to work best?] It is thus not a separate ‘procedure’ or ‘faculty’, to be heeded or overridden at the whim our older brain structures and thus older mind components. In this sense –
that it is observable that we simply have nothing better – attempts to override it are a little like attempts to cut with a wooden saw that which you are having trouble cutting with a steel saw. They must necessarily end badly.
If we can see that we owe this consideration to Mr. X then can we avoid its extension to all who are now damaging themselves and others, and our planet, through their maintenance of ‘faith based knowledge’? Can we point to any qualitative difference between the cuddly kitten belief of Mr. X and, for example, belief that the universe is being maintained by an ‘omnipotent loving father God’ who
uniquely favors
each one of the opposed national or ethnic or tribal groups who now hold it? Are not both beliefs just as obviously false and insane? In our story Mr. X runs up against reality in the form of the car. But just switch on your TV news station and you will see Palestinians and Jews, and Serbs and Albanians, and Hutus and Tutsis; and even - it has to be said - US soldiers and Islamic Jihadis in Iraq, running up against reality in the form of each other. Are not the underlying causes, and the results, identical? Are these people really being killed by our old catch-all excuse “the human condition”; or are they being killed by obvious and preventable stupidity? At root; by nothing grander or more mysterious than criminally lousy educational systems?
If we continue to download into our children’s minds all sorts of irrational garbage (for example, about invisible supernatural beings, who are at the same time both one being and three beings) as a special form of knowledge that is superior to what can be criticized through reason (in being instead representative
of the actual state of reality) then we can expect our species developmental history to continue as the kind of road demolition disaster movie that it has obviously been for about the past 7,000 years. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ applies to biological computers as inexorably as it applies to electronic computers. And Voltaire’s dictum, that: “Those who continue to believe absurdities will continue to commit atrocities” is graphically illustrated every time we turn on CNN. We have been promoting wars, pogroms, famines, disease epidemics, and localized environmental disasters for as far back as we can see. I think that we are now headed for ‘the big one’, with our foot trying to mash the accelerator pedal through the floor.
To get back on topic (compassion for Christians and Christianity). No! Move away. Fight against Christianity (and Islam and Judiasm and the rest) to the limit of your ability. I don’t know how much time we’ve still got - within which to effectively turn or hit the brakes – but the indications that it isn’t long are coming in thicker and faster every day. Our 70 year old ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with institutionalized irrationality (called ‘postmodernism’, and ‘separate magisteria’) has been breaking down for at least the past 15 years (ref. ‘The Fundamentals of Extremism’ and ‘The Republican War On Science’), and whatever was left of it fell – along with the towers – on September 11th. The intellectual battle lines are now clarifying fast. Those who staff the Discovery Institute, and many similar corporate funded ‘independent think tanks’ throughout the world understand clearly what they are trying to achieve, and why. Our intellectual leaders (Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson, Rees, ….) are taking their battle positions. And the old ghosts - of Voltaire, and Tom Paine, and Robert Ingersoll - are stirring. If there was ever really a good time for solicitous compassion towards institutionalized irrationality, I think that it is now past.
Enough for now. I will write more if you, or others, wish to respond to this.
BR,
Scimystic
