On speaking of non-religious beliefs in religious terms

[ciphergoth]

I stopped reading Beware of pushing Catholics out of the progressive club at the point where I reached the phrase "atheist deity, Richard Dawkins".

What makes this sort of talk a total waste of everyone's time is that you can say this about anything. Creationists love to talk about the priesthood of Darwinism, or global warming denialists the acolytes of Al Gore enforcing orthodoxy. By the same standards, Phil Plait counts as some sort of Pope of heliocentrism. It requires absolutely no thought or imagination to speak of a belief you don't like in this way; it shares absolutely no insight into what problems that belief might have. As a form of commentary, or as a form of humour, I therefore have to rank it below sarcasm, below puns, and somewhere just above repeating what the other person said in a high-pitched girly voice.

Comments

[battlekitty]

Perhaps a ploy to bring the "enemy" into the same realm as those speaking? By describing an atheist in religious terms rather than scientific, it's reinforcing the idea that atheism is a belief system itself and hence can be criticised in the same language as other deity based religions rather than it being a rational reaction to a set of observations. (Sorry - I'm failing at making that neutral without risking it turning into an essay of conditional clauses... or in other words "whoops! Are my prejudices showing?")

[zbyszek.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is when one hears that science is a matter of faith, and that hence science is a "new religion". This is presumably intended to a) point out the hypocrisy of athiest critics of religion and b) promote a relativist "well it's all the same so who cares" philosophy. And of course the person saying this sort of thing gets to think that they have wisely seen a profound truth that has eluded the rest of us imbeciles.

Of course there is a certain amount of "appeal to authority" in understanding science -- I don't have time to go and recreate for myself the latest research in spin glasses or whatever. But other people do. And science changes in unpredictable ways, and ideas that were previously held are abandoned. Everything is contingent, much is unexplained, everything has be justified at some empirical level, and is (ideally) open to scrutiny. No faith necessary.

[ciphergoth]

a relativist "well it's all the same so who cares" philosophy - what philosopher Stephen Law calls the "nuclear option".

[alextiefling]

Agreed. What this mostly reveals is that the speaker's ideas of both religion and science revolve around a version of Christianity they picked up as a child and never examined.

[reddragdiva]

OT: email to ciphergoth.org doesn't seem to work at all.

[ciphergoth]

I got the notification email for this comment, so it's not down altogether - describe symptoms in more detail? Thanks!

[reddragdiva]

To ciphergoth@ciphergoth.org or blog@ciphergoth.org:

Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 Unrouteable address (state 14).

Is gmail on your mail server's shitlist?

[ciphergoth]

Not sure either of those are valid email addresses. paul at ciphergoth dot org should do it.

[reddragdiva]

ciphergoth@ certainly used to be. blog@ happens to be the address on your blog and the address it puts in the From: line ...

[ciphergoth]

Have added both to /etc/aliases - thanks!

[reddragdiva]

Whitelists are rather faffy and failure-prone. I tend to just get aggressive with the spam filter. It's gotten very good at spotting cranks as well as spam.

[reddragdiva]

Failure to model others? Believing that failure to make sense according to the person's standard model of other people indicates disingenuity at best?

I recently had a Catholic who objected to my opinions of the Pope demanding I explain or repudiate something Peter Tatchell said. I had to look up who he was first.