An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Belief: How Religious Devotion Trivializes American Law and Politics

An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Death

Regurgitation - Wed, Jul 14, 2004

Atheist blogger Under No Circumstances has confronted such arguments as the Argument From Rapist With Nuclear Strap-On (scroll to June 7), but I found particularly entertaining her discussion (scroll to June 17) about arguments themselves. Although she's relating her experience in posting on a current social issue on a political forum, the quagmire she describes is especially common in religious debates:

When I take a stance on an issue and present that stance for discussion my first course of action is to present my reasons and logic, immediately followed by credible sources for any facts or data that I mention. This is ingrained habit for me, stemming from years of work in the sciences, and I would feel my arguments were naked and weak without such supports. In the case of yesterday's debate, I posted over a dozen sources at the end of my somewhat lengthy personal statement, sources available on the 'net for all to see and read for themselves. I thought this was good form and that people would be more likely to understand or even accept my views if I gave solid proof that my stance was valid.

Oh, if only.

Instead, the opposition replied that I was simply "regurgitating," and that, in fact, they were in the right because they came up with their own thoughts rather than simply posting what somebody else said. Keep in mind that I had posted several paragraphs in my own words explaining what my personal feelings on the subject were, and that the citations merely supported the facts I had presented. The opposition accused me of trying to make everybody think like me, trying to force my views on others, and being arrogant.

Now, I'm a pretty reasonable person, so I didn't understand this response one bit. I tried again, pointing out that I had only been trying to show that there was more to my opinions than hot air and that I had intended merely to give people a solid reason to care about my stance. This was answered by the accusation that I was calling opposing stances stupid, that I was (again) trying to brainwash people, and that I shouldn't try to make other people look silly by posting so many sources when they merely posted their personal feelings.

"Stop reading from a book" or "put down the encyclopedia" are demands I've often encountered when trying to outline, in an organized fashion, one of the standard atheistic arguments or defenses. (Never mind that that concept that Books can be inerrant plays a prominent role in their own arguments). It's a twist on the old "get a life" dig. However, instead of the suggestion being that I should stop talking because I've overanalyzed matters, the notion is I haven't been contemplative enough. By familiarizing myself with the scholarship on the subject, I've somehow surrendered my independent judgment. I'm no longer operating with a tabula rasa, that pure, knowledge-unencumbered state of mind from which all originality, creativity and ultimately truth flow. If they're not my "own thoughts," they can't be true thoughts. They don't have the authenticity that apparently only ten seconds of reflexive contemplation on an unfamiliar subject can bring.

The "own thoughts" of the critics fall into familiar categories. They are regurgitation in the fullest sense; the vomiting up of little scraps of "wisdom" picked up along the way but never digested, as unoriginal as they are incomplete: a dash of Pascal's Wager here ("God's the safest bet") and a sprinkle of the cosmological argument there ("the universe requires a creator"). The obvious refutations to these gambits (in addition to being dismissed as someone else's ideas) are frequently countered, inconsistently, with the anti-thought defense mechanisms perfected by the clergy over the centuries, e.g., "but you're forgetting about faith," "you can't label God" or "God is beyond human logic."

The final ingredient in this stew of Absolute Original Truths is a large dollop of relativism (a relativism that stops just short of including your view or acknowledging that your "brainwashing" as merely persuasion). The legal notion of a "right" to believe in anything is conflated into the fallacy that anything believed must be "right." Something is true if it's "true to you," mere feelings are the measure of all reality, and any thought must be respected unless it's actually thought out.

(Top) —Posted by: The Raving Atheist in The Daily Rave · Permalink · 6 Comments

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