One, two, three…twenty-four
You know how I keep saying (among other things) ‘But why are all these people calling atheists too loud too talkative too militant too out there too much too often too loud too excessive when they don’t call believers that and yet there are a lot more religious books and articles and invocations and devocations than there are of the atheist variety?’ You do know, right? So today I was at the University bookstore and I decided to do a rough quantitative study. The books on religion of course stretched to the horizon, so I made things easy for myself, I counted the space given to ‘Spirituality’ and ‘Metaphysical and Astrology’ (the two are neighbours). Three sections of shelf, four shelves each, for twelve in all. Atheist books take up less than half of one shelf. That’s a ratio of 24 to 1.
So why are we considered too noisy? Really. When even in a university bookstore the spiritual/’metaphysical’ crowd are 24 times more noisy than we are, and that’s before we even start counting the religious books.
These mysteries are byond human understanding. They are ineffable. I can’t eff ’em, not nohow.
Ophelia,
I’m sure that ratio is not to be denied, but out of curiosity, how many of those books on spirituality were telling people what *not* to believe?
Not to defend the content of the gang of 24, but in my experience spiritual and new age literature usually can be counted on to be polite, if nothing else.
Chris: If you can’t tell presenting evidence and arguments that some claims are unsupported or false from someone simply telling you what to believe or not believe, then maybe you should confine your reading to the metaphysical bookshelves. They won’t challenge you, demand any serious thought, or otherwise cause your brow to furrow.
Maybe that’s snippier than your comment deserves, but it appears to me that only clear implication of what you wrote above is that somehow it’s inherently impolite to challenge or criticize any claim. I’m not sure how to respond to such a position besides mockery. Clearly, theists who pick up a book titled The God Delusion or The End of Faith are willing to be challenged – and good for them! (Not that most theists who talk and write about such books have actually picked them up and *read* them. God forbid!)
>>how many of those books on spirituality were telling people what *not* to believe?>>
Everyone of them. They wouldnt exist if they had no interest in steering people away from certain other states of belief or disbelief.
You’re arguing that atheists get a set of insulting and bloodcurdling ‘instructions’ from Dawkins et al on what to believe like with the bible or quran?
Substantiate your claims of ‘lack of politeness’ on the part of atheist authors. Are you sure that you are not conflating rudeness with a lack of deference to the skypixies’ self appointed spokesmen?
Ophelia, interestingly fundie christians on some singapore talkboards have been fulminating against ‘Dawkins and the Gang of 4’ which carries a resonance (nasty, of course) for the Chinese. The insults against atheists just keep getting more and more shrill and I am just waiting for the hitlerian classics to pop up.
These claims of rudeness are a tactic to shut people up and Cif belief has just demonstrated that by banning a regular poster whose scathing demolishments of the lackwits Bunting, Brown, Hobson etc was simply too humiliating for the Al-guardian. More about this at Heresy Corner.
Another classic was this from Brown :
He said this (of atheist drunk drivers), in his usual sloppy, throwaway and insulting manner :
>>Similarly, their right to freedom of belief is no longer absolute. Why should it be? If accepting or pretending to accept a higher power turns them into useful citizens, they’ll just have to give up their atheist beliefs along with drunk driving. Or they can go to jail.<< The second sentence is breathtaking, isnt it? Getting the bollocking he so richly deserves. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/apr/20/religion-aa-therapy-jail
It’s totally different though cos everyone knows “people of faith” are nice and cuddly and all their books are about love and stuff. Right?
—
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com
FUCK GOD!!!!!!!
Thank you for your brevity Davek.
For goodness sake will someone plaese lock this thread?
‘Course, courtesy and decorum are also a matter of perception. And me, I’d say religion is essentially impolite by its very nature. Insofar as lying to people is impolite. Doesn’t matter whether the words you happen to use in doing so are of the four-letter variety or not: it’s rude.
Telling kids they’re going to hell unless they cave in to your social pressure, go along with the group BS, prostrate ’emselves before the same invisible guy you do? Traumatising the fuck out of ’em, doing so? When you know or should know it’s all BS? Also rude. And pretty fucking uncivilized, assholes… Kinda makes saying ‘assholes’ and ‘fucking’ pale by comparison, y’ask me.
And y’know, it seems to me you don’t really have to be a brimstone-slinging fulminating Brylcreemed loon to be a rude asshole either, in my book. Talk all mealy and relative and cloudy mystical, mush yer entirely too-flexible two faces ’round ‘mystery’ this ‘n ‘unknowable’ that, when you’re really just trying to find any excuse, however intellectually laughable, to prop up the pale, polymorphous undead corpse of your idiot iron age superstition–in doing so making a mockery of reason, teaching people ultimately that reason is to be used to prop up their foreordained conclusion, making it the slave of their preconceptions? Oh, and then to tell ’em that’s a religion of ‘love’?
I mean, ugh. That’s pretty nasty stuff, actually. Offensive, even. Kinda scares me about anyone who doesn’t vomit in their mouths just trying to wrap ’em around that. And it doesn’t matter how nicely you dress or that you’re sipping tea with royalty while you do. And it doesn’t matter if you turn out an anthem in four-part harmony with orchestral backing as the score: if that’s the libretto, it’s ugly, ugly stuff. Wouldn’t want to hear you talking that shit anywhere, chum–hell, not in a biker bar where the annual murder rate is half that of all of Baltimore’s…
I mean, fuck, there may be children present. Or mebbe relatively uncorrupted adults…
Rude, my ass. It’s potty mouths like Mr. ‘Secular humanism is responsible for the evils of the world’ Benny the Rat who oughtta have their festering cakeholes washed out. Thoroughly.
*snerk*
*snicker*
BWAHAAHHHAAAA!!!
Well done, AJ. Well done.
It is, I think, a simple case of confirmation bias. Religion has held such a privileged position for so long that people are simply used to it, if not actively promoting it (and to a lesser but still significant extent, various tangentially-related forms of wishy-washy spiritualityness, astrology, karma etc).
It’s just a background noise except for the relatively occasional fundie on the news. Atheism doesn’t have the same wallpaper-equivalent status in society (and the thinking of Ancient Greece through to the Enlightenment doesn’t really count, as it is less embedded in culture and history, not taught in schools in the same way, and not widely understood in the superficial sense that religion is), so when people see/hear/read atheists it will tend to stick out as different and lodge in the memory, while failing to realise that they aren’t fairly comparing them to the number of religious tracts churned out year after year. This is especially amplified by those – Bunting et al – who have an interest in promoting this idea of ‘noisy’ atheism.
Yeah. So we need to move the Overton window so that people can see the wallpaper more clearly.
:- )
So the light of reason can shine through the Overton window and the houseplant of atheism can grow and thrive? Can we water the houseplant of atheism – a ficus, perhaps? – with the tears of poor theists whose feelings are hurt by insufficiently deferential criticism?
(Once again brought to you by “give me a dead horse and I’ll beat it” school of metaphor…)
By the way…Chris Schoen is a funny one to talk about being ‘polite, if nothing else.’ He’s the guy who said to Roy Brown of the IHEU ‘Cry me a river, Roy’ because Brown is concerned about and working hard to resist the campaign to make ‘defamation’ of religion an international crime. I don’t call that polite.
Ah. Didn’t have any idea who Chris Schoen was. If I’d known that bit of background, I wouldn’t have bothered with the second paragraph allowing him or her an “out” to clarify the apparently very stupid comment…
An aspidistra!
Yeh – Chris Schoen graced us with his presence for awhile a couple of months or so ago. He’s of the ‘What’s all this fuss about religion?’ school, and often quite aggressive with it. He went on a big old campaign of asking ‘What’s all this fuss about the OIC and human rights?’ and got some pats on the head from Steven Poole.
I wouldn’t mind Steven Poole – were it not for the fact that when I disagreed with his take on a Johann Hari article he wrote that that must be because I was displeased by his review of Why Truth Matters. It wasn’t; I said it wasn’t; I said in fact I’d been quite pleased with what he said of WTM; that was true. I think in a situation like that, where you are speculating on someone’s motives, there is something really morally disgusting about refusing to be corrected. Poole refused to be corrected. I’ve thought badly of him ever since. He should have simply realized and admitted that he had no way of knowing what my motives were, and apologized for speculating in public. I don’t know what his motives are for acting that way, and I’m not going to speculate about them; but the upshot is, I have a low opinion of him.
He and Schoen made an unlovely spectacle.
You peaked my curiosity with this one, so while out running errands this afternoon I stopped at two bookstores to see if the ratios here would be close to what you found. The first shop is a small, used book seller that would have done better a year or so ago, before the new owners. They scored zero books on atheism and approximately 17 feet of shelf-space devoted to Christian apologetics. Since the current owners took over the place is really only good for cheap paperback genre fiction. It has become my guilty pleasure shop.
The second store was a Barnes and Noble chain outlet. After a bit of a search I found a shelf in the philosophy section titled Atheism / Linguistics. There were a grand total of seven books related to atheism. Oddly, Hitchens was the only representative of the new fearsome foursome. I found Dennett’s book in the general philosophy section, and Dawkins book was with the rest of his work in the science section. I couldn’t find Harris anywhere, though I am almost positive that I bought my copy The End of Faith there. So being generous, that is nine or ten books on atheism.
You were definitely right about the New Agee section being to overwhelming to compare directly (eight cases, with 16 feet of shelving in each case). I chose the ‘turn around quickly and pick the first book to catch your eye’ method of selection to narrow down my comparison. I was drawn to a large volume on crystal healing. Since crystal healing also shares a shelf with another subject (meditation, which also had a shelf all it’s own) it seemed a fair comparison. There were 17 books on crystal healing. Not quite two to one.
So I will be using crystal healers as my ‘canary in a coalmine’. When the number of militant crystalist books has shrunk to around half the shelf space of the atheists I’ll reconsider going along with the framing-tone-ists.
“perhaps The Creator could have assigned the left brain for rationality, the right brain for belief, and built a switch into the top of the human skull to ensure that the two were never both running at the same time.”
Another good line! You people are cooking.
Yes quite – we should devise a militant crystalist/militant atheist ratio-index, and keep it well updated and oiled.
Sigh. . .I have an Internet Crush (TM) on G and AJ for their brilliant posts lately.
I’m such a wallflower…
‘Kay… But you do realize we’re only showing off to impress *you*, right?
Speak for yourself, AJ! I’m showing off to impress Ophelia, *my* Internet Crush (TM)…
Erm… That’s actually who I meant…
(This presumably calls for a duel. Or sumpin’.)
my comment was an attempt at humor. on-topic, even. i was trying to impress ophelia. she is my internet crush too…
or is there some other problem?
“will someone plaese lock this thread” I’m ignorant here. What does locking a thread mean? I assume it means to stop a thread?
Butterfliesandwheels allows messages instantly, without prior moderation, unlike most sites. I suppose there’s the risk in this of not disallowing bad behaviour, though I haven’t seen any (er – well – except a recent bit of trolling.)
BTW, I would not describe davek’s recent brevity as bad behaviour, just a moment of god-rage.
Ian MacDougall, what a wonderful metaphor:
“The Creator could have assigned the left brain for rationality, the right brain for belief, and built a switch into the top of the human skull to ensure that the two were never both running at the same time. (Ah well. Nothing’s perfect. Not even Intelligent Design.)”
I have quoted it in a comment on Tauriq Moosa’s website.
http://tauriqmoosa.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/potato-preacher-a-sceptics-guide-to-angus-buchan/#comment-80
Thanks.
Oh good, I’m not a wallflower after all; such a relief.
Duel! Duel! Duel!
Not really. Put up your bright swords, or the dew will rust’em.
Mags: Aw shucks, ’tweren’t nothin’.
That’s an interesting site. I liked the Bron Bates formulation: “If you believe in the lord and do as he says and there is a God (you will be ok), If you believe in the lord and do as he says but there is not God (you will be ok). If you dont believe in the lord and there is a God (you will not be ok)…”
Unfortunately Bron left off the last side of the square. But still, that gives a polytheist like me a total of three chances out of four. Not bad odds.
There’s only one chance in four that come Judgement Day I will have to do some fast talking lest I not be OK, and hope that my suddenly revealed monodeity has not switched off his hearing aid. Well, I’ve talked my way out of worse situations.
Your advice to Tauriq re Bron was apt IMHO: “Bron hits the nail on the head when she says ‘people like yourself try to see logic in something that has no logic.’ Unfortunately Tauriq, she does not mean this as a compliment.”
Quite.
OB sez no swords. So… Snarky quips at 30 paces? Witty rejoinders at dawn? Relentless logical criticism in the squared circle?
O, Ophelia, I didn’t mean to make you feel like a wallflower. I was trying to avoid being accused of sucking up to the site mistress (and G’s and AJ’s comments were really good!). You should already know I think you’re a goddess.
I do wanna see the duel though.
Excellent, Josh! Like Shirley Schmidt? Do you have the doll?
Hee hee.
I take it back about the duel. What instead…I know, I should send you out on a mission, the way the Wicked Witch sent Dorothy – I should send you all out to tease Mark Vernon and Madeleine Bunting. Ha!
BTW, seeing a few of us are off-topic: I have often wondered – how many hits does Butterfliesandwheels get every day?
As I have often seen this site quoted. I would be interested in this statistic.
Occasionally one sees these stats on a site, ie how many are visiting this site at the moment. I’ve also seen cluster maps that show what part of the world visitors are from, and from what site they arrived, though I find these last two a tad creepy, big-brotherish.
Mags, I don’t really know (the server doesn’t count them, as I understand it), but it has a very high Google ranking, a pretty high ‘authority’ number on Technorati, etc. It seems to have a good rep, if nothing else.
But Ophelia, I wasn’t writing in my comment above of the moral superiority of politeness. I was trying to show that you were comparing apples in oranges.
You wrote, in effect, that “militant” atheists get accused of bullying, but look how many books on crystals there are! which is a bit of a non sequitur. If anyone truly feels she has been shouted down by “The Spiral Dance” and “Seth Speaks,” let her come forward.
You quote me out of context re: Roy Brown, as well. I wonder if you have the moral courage to even try to understand the two sides of that argument. I’m sure it’s much simpler to imagine that I (and Poole, who I am unacquainted with outside of that comment thread) am on the the side of wife beaters and genital mutilators.
I wrote “cry me a river” not “because Brown is concerned about and working hard to resist the campaign to make ‘defamation’ of religion an international crime” but rather because what he was really making a fuss about was the right of his NGO to use the Human Rights council as a platform for his own anti-Islamic ideology.
That is my sincere opinion and it’s clear enough from the thread how I came to it, for anyone who cares about facts. Call me mistaken if you like, but don’t put sentiments in my heart there is no substantiation for. Please.
And thank you.
“which is a bit of a non sequitur”
No it’s not, because the whole point is that ‘militant’ atheists are not in fact ‘militant’ and they get shouted at out of all proportion to their tone, their manners, their vocabulary, their numbers, the numbers of their books.
Moral courage nothing. I didn’t say or imply that you are on the the side of wife beaters and genital mutilators. Yes I know why you said that cheap vulgar presumptuous thing to Roy – I realize it’s because you think he ‘use[s] the Human Rights council as a platform for his own anti-Islamic ideology.’ I’m sure that is your sincere opinion; insincerity is not what I object to about it. I said nothing about any sentiments in your heart – I can’t begin to tell you how uninterested I am in your heart. I cited what you had said.
Perhaps you should take a nice spring holiday in the Swat valley – it’s very beautiful there, I hear.