h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...your comments on the '...False Witness...' thread.

Bravo! I'm a bit sick and tired of the 'That's what you Christians/Muslims/whatever think, you do' attitude myself. If we want to disagree with religion on secular grounds - fine. But let's not leap to conclusions about what others think.

Thanks for that. I found some of the stuff in that thread quite astonishing - how can anyone who is not a Christian declare themselves the arbiter of what Christians think. Quite baffling.

But in a perverse way it's helped clarified a few things for me. As neither a Christian nor an atheist, I didn't really have a 'side' as such, but I think I do now. The real division isn't between theist and atheist, but between liberals and fundamentalists. And the test is simple - if you're prepared to slander those you disagree with (through wilful ignorance or deliberate falsehood) rather than have an honest debate, then you're a fundamentalist.

It's really odd that some of the same people who would scream blue murder at theist guilt-by-association tactics (Stalin was an atheist, therefore... etc) feel no compunction about using such arguments themselves. I mean, I can understand some of the visceral hatred of religion from some researchers who've been on the receiving end of religious persecution because of their sexuality, but for others I have no idea quite what's caused the amount of mouth foaming.

I wonder if there's an island somewhere we could put them all on... although that's not a very liberal thought....

Well...I am, of course, an Atheist Fundamentalist, so I'm not even sure that liberal/fundamentalist captures it. Take, for example, fundamentalist Quakers. From where I'm coming from - I'm absolutely closed to the idea of gods, so I can't even analyse the problem in those terms (and this is what I've been trying to get over to people). The way I look at it is simply as liberal vs illiberal.

You're very welcome to lurk/contribute/whatever here, btw. A4497492 I'm trying to raise the tone of the debate there - discussing Atheist ideas for themselves, rather than in opposition to religion. (Not entirely possible - but an aspiration)

Yeah...I do get sucked into all usual God Threads with all the usual suspects. My motivation, though, even when I'm being strident and argumentative sincerely *isn't* to rubbish or dissuade people - simply to understand the arguments. Sometimes you have to pull something apart to see how it works.

I think you're right - even as I was typing that I was concerned about the term 'fundamentalist'. Illiberal didn't quite seem to cut it for me, but now I'd like to tentatively propose 'bigot' as the opposite of liberal in this limited sense. I wrote a journal entry on this a while ago ('The Shrill of Secular Illiberalism), and sadly it doesn't seem to have diminished.

I've always enjoyed reading your posts, and I'd say that your motivation of trying to understand the arguments always comes through. I've got a half-finished piece on the phenomenology of religious belief that I'll one day get round to finishing and seeing if the Post will publish, although I've been promising that to a number of people for a while now. I don't expect to people to agree, but perhaps it'll give an insight.

Thanks for the link - I'll drop by and try to catch up with discussions so far.

'Secular Illiberalism'. Hmmm. I'm going to have to be my usual perverse self and defend it. I guess its most famously shrill proponents are the Four Horsemen. Of them...
- Harris. An asshole, granted.
- Dawkins - good at taking no prisoners vis a vis the incompatibility of evolution with religion. He's dead right on that. OK - so maybe he doesn't always argue as effectively as he might.
- Dennett - actually, extremely mild mannered. But the very fact of his interest in the phenomenology of religion seems to annoy people.

And then we come to The Hitch. Yes, he's deliberately nasty. Yes, he's wrong about a lot of things. But from his point of view...all he's asking of rligion is that it leaves him alone. Is this shrill and illiberal?

Of course - you might not have been thinking of that lot (but if not - who?). I guess my point is, though, that shrillness can be in the eye of the beholder.

I mean...I'm pretty shrill, aren't I?

Well, once upon a time someone accused Gif of being shrill

I probably shouldn't say this, but I was mostly thinking of a small coterie of people from this site whose frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of religion is such that their aims go beyond a desire for a secular state with no privileged place for religion, to no place for religion at all beyond the tight confines of the private sphere.

To illustrate the difference. I agree that religion should have no special rights in terms of consultation or power in law-making in relation to abortion law. However, a Catholic bishop is perfectly entitled to make statements calling for a reduction in the time limit, and to try to gather support for his position by making secular as well as religious arguments. But for the shrills, this is not enough - they want to silence the voice of religion completely. That's not a level playing field, that's burying the religious voice. And that's a denial of basic democratic rights.

It's absolutely not illiberal to want to be left alone by religion, and after a really odd encounter with some Mormons yesterday I have every sympathy with that desire. As long as the definition 'left alone' doesn't mean 'silence'.

Yes. I think we're on the same wavelength...and some of those people I have pointedly *not* invited over to Atheist Fundamentalism. My only concern is when they're conflated with *any* Atheist who expresses an antitheist position. For example...I recently criticised the Positive Atheism Entry on those grounds. A46904871 http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F12516958?thread=6435049