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?")

[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.

[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.