Debating atheists, Part 2: Open mouth, insert foot

[ljwrites]

As previously discussed, a commenter on a site I frequented at the time, EJ, seemed to be advocating a horrific curtailment of religious liberty. Partly due to the conversation but mostly because of other real-life stuff, I made two mistakes: First, instead of staying away from the internet in my impaired state I grabbed my phone to check on new comments on the thread. Second, I had a serious case of reading comprehension fail and identity confusion.

First there was this comment from Lea, addressed to me:

Pussypowertantrum,
Yes, the pushback against atheists can be that bad. [This was in response to an earlier question from me about whether atheists are that persecuted in the U.S. when they seem to be a thriving, even strident movement. It was stupid of me in retrospect, since having the right to speak and suffering social backlash can in fact coexist.] Though it depends on where you live. The US is very different from state to state and even county to county.

I agree with EJ. Telling kids they'll only go to heaven instead of hell if they believe in a magical being isn't fair to those kids. To my mind the only difference between God and the Easter Bunny is that the kids won't grow up trained carefully from the cradle onward to be afraid of losing faith in the magical bunny for fear of damnation. There is a great deal of emotional manipulation that goes into raising kids to be theists. Some of it is cruel.

I also don't think it is fair for missionaries to go disrupt established cultures and push their beliefs on indigenous people. It's usually done with fear-mongering and things like food, education, medicine and other badly needed aid being used to "persuade" people. The effects can be devastating. Look what missionaries did to Uganda.

Calling me "like Stalin" is incorrect and just plain mean. Stalin also wore shoes, as do I. That doesn't make me anything like a mass murdering shithead.

As someone who'd been taught as a child that I would go to hell if I didn't believe in God, and coming from a culture that was in fact heavily Christianized by Western missionaries, I agree with Lea that these things can be unfair. I also do not believe that either of these things on their own is a reason to infringe on religious liberties. Sometimes people have the liberty to do unfair things; a free citizenry can use their freedoms in hurtful ways, within boundaries, and having a free society is not compatible with government making sure nothing bad or unfair ever happens between private citizens. I have many more thoughts about Lea's comments, but they got long and involved and the focus of this post is on my idiocy so let's move on.

As a lead-in to my giant blooper, did you notice the subtle drift at the last paragraph of Lea's comment? When katz said EJ sounded like Stalin, she was only addressing EJ and, I think, the fact that he seemed to be in favor of outlawing religious instruction of children--you know, sort of like Stalin. While, as I said above, EJ by no means advocates the rest of Stalin's policies, he was either advocating a totalitarian-lite policy or had worded his posts so sloppily that it would take a feat of mind-reading to discern otherwise.

In Lea's case on the other hand it's far less clear that she actually in favor of outlawing religious instruction and conversion beyond calling those activities unfair, but she imputed the "Stalin" comment to herself and treated it as an indictment against anti-theists in general, not just EJ's seemingly terrifying position.

And then yet another commenter enters into the story, weirwoodtreehugger (WWTH), the only person on the thread whom I apologized to and who deserved every word of contrition and more. What weirwoodtreehugger said was this (emphasis mine):

It would go way too far to outlaw raising one’s children in their religion. But I think whether or not it’s ethical to do so is a fair point to debate.

I look at as similar to the debate over circumcising boys. Dawkins was an asshole for comparing taking your kid to Sunday school to sexual or physical abuse. Anti-circ people and MRAs are assholes for comparing snipping off foreskin to FGM.

But just as one can argue that circumcision is wrong because it’s a violation of a boy’s bodily autonomy (unlike a parent making a child take medicine and get shots which is necessary for the child’s health) since it’s more of a cosmetic procedure. You can also argue that it’s a violation of a child’s autonomy to socialize them into one belief system rather than allowing them to look at the options and decide for themselves when they’re old enough to understand.

I’m not planning on having kids, but if I did, I wouldn’t raise them to be atheists. I’d raise them to think for themselves. I’d openly discuss why I’m an atheist but, if they decided they wanted to check out church, they would be free to do so. Although I’d be sure to pick out a progressive one.

And I, flipping through the comments too fast with my heart dancing a jig and my head clouded with anxiety-fueled rage, somehow thought Lea's "shoe" comment was from WWTH and inflated Lea's agreement with EJ beyond what she may have intended. And hence followed my epic foot in mouth:

@WWTH, EJ Well, I think it’s fair to point out some of y’all seem to have similar tastes in shoes to Stalin, specifically the anti-religious boots.

"[Stalin] officially adopted the Russian Communist Party’s stance on religion, claiming atheism and continuing the tradition of teaching atheism in schools and propagating the idea that religion was only damaging to a perfect communist society. http://hollowverse.com/joseph-stalin/ "

Also, I find it interesting that atheists insist that nothing unites them when atheist shenanigans are brought up (Stalin et al.) but evidently think there’s more than enough to unite them when it comes to representation.

@Lea I happen to agree with Katz so feel free. This is a bit surreal actually, how a thread about mass murder in a church became all about the evils of organized religion. I mean, the murders are evil and all, but the late Rev. Pinckney really shouldn’t have been allowed to instruct his two children in religion.

I seem to have opened an unexpectedly raw vein when I complained about atheists. I’d love to have a full discussion, maybe a future open thread?

I regretted the post about one second after I made it, but the thread does not allow deletion or editing of comments (for good reason) and the damage had been done. WWTH was justifiably offended: After all, they'd been nothing but reasonable and had just been compared to Stalin.

[Quoting my stupid self: ]"Well, I think it’s fair to point out some of y’all seem to have similar tastes in shoes to Stalin, specifically the anti-religious boots."

[WWTH's answer: ]Care to explain how saying that I personally find it more ethical to allow your children to decide for themselves what they want to believe is Stallinesque? Even though I specifically said it’s out of line to call raising your child in a religion abusive and I don’t think it should be outlawed. I’ve certainly never advocated for killing people of faith or putting them in gulags.

What the fuck? That’s so offensive. It’s right on the level with calling someone you disagree with a Nazi or comparing a law you don’t like to the Holocaust.

So unless you can find something other than not being a fan of organized religion that Stalin and I have in common, you can kindly fuck off.

And I know a couple of people have expressed an intent to back out of the thread, but I find it personally very offensive that EJ and I are being compared to mass murderer right now, so a little back up would be nice if anyone is up to it.

I could have stuck around to explain myself, that I'd actually meant EJ and maybe Lea and hadn't meant to address WWTH at all, but that would have been a task beyond my mental and physical state. Plus, the only word that really mattered at this point was "sorry." My heart rate spiking and my head in a frantic spin, I managed to make an abject apology and fucked the hell off the thread--and the site--as I should have done hours if not weeks before.

@WWTH I’m very sorry. I shouldn’t have done that and I regret it, and I am fucking off.

As long as the theme of this post is my being stupid, let it be known I went back to check on further comments on the post, mostly to see if WWTH had accepted my apology. They very generously had, which was a great relief. But then I also saw this parting shot from EJ, which pleased me less:

I didn’t take it personally.

I talk to privileged people about their privilege a lot. I’m a white man, so people see me as an ally and then have the shock of discovering that in fact I don’t support white supremacy or don’t support male supremacy. They generally react harshly: “You’re a mangina.” “You’re a race traitor.” “You want to end western civilisation.” “You’re a cultural Marxist.” “You’re a Nazi.” “You’re like Stalin.”

In those cases I try not to take it personally. The privileged person in question is literally seeing the worst thing in the world: a world in which reasonable adjustments need to be made in order to prevent them personally from having their way all the time and to prevent other people from being trampled. It’s a shock because they’ve never considered themselves privileged. Privilege is invisible, after all. That’s just the way things are, and surely you wouldn’t want to change things, would you?

Men really, really dislike being told that they aren’t allowed to catcall or to tell women that they look nice when those women are trying to be taken seriously. White people really, really dislike being told that they shouldn’t tell black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. These aren’t big things, they say. They’re just words. Words don’t hurt. They miss the point: these words are important precisely because they’re insidious and they underlie everything else. They underlie all the more overt and hostile things.

Religious people really dislike being told that they shouldn’t teach their kids religion. It scares them, and they lash out. They call me a Nazi, accuse me of wanting to wipe out civilisation, accuse me of wanting to destroy entire cultures, of wanting to abuse their children, of wanting to take them away so that I can brainwash them. I try not to take it personally.

katz, PussyPowerTantrum, you know what privilege is. You’ve seen it from the other side. You currently have it and you’re speaking from it.

Learn, guys.

This is the absolute last thing I’m going to post in this thread. WWTH, I’m sorry but you’re on your own from here in. If this doesn’t work for backup then I’m afraid I’m going to have to disengage because I don’t want a screaming match with people that I could regard as allies. I’ve had that exact same thing before over in the atheist community and it’s deeply ugly.

My first thought was: Fuck you.

My second, longer thought: Oh-ho-ho-ho, buddy, you're either completely oblivious to or being willfully obtuse about katz's and my objection to your posts. We were talking about the fact that you seemed to be advocating a forcible prohibition on religious instruction to children with all the horror it implies, and refused to say otherwise when pressed repeatedly for clarification.

You don't get to make a proposal that sounds for all the world like it would violate personal liberties and persecute minority groups, and then hide behind words like "privilege" when called on it. Sorry man, privilege discourse was never meant to be a shield for proposing horrific restrictions on personal freedoms. In what world is what you're proposing a "reasonable adjustment?" The solution to the problem of atheists being marginalized is not to make illegitimate intrusions into religious people's homes and communities, any more than the solution to racism is to force white people to stop having children.

EJ's seeming stance on this issue got me wondering, though, if the prohibition on religious education was in fact a mainstream anti-theist position. If that were true then there would be a large cause for concern, so I went researching this issue. What did major anti-theist voices have to say about parents' religious instruction of children?

Comments

[lb_lee]

The thing that makes me raise my eyebrow is EJ talking as though 'men' are a separate class from himself. It's something that always makes me kinda suspicious--because it's talking about a privileged group AS THOUGH YOU AREN'T PART OF IT, and that you're more enlightened than them. Which tends to lead to you not noticing when you ARE being part of the problem.

--Rogan

[ljwrites]

Yup, as you pointed out, the people who think they're "above it all" are often anything but.