Posted by Jim Henderson on: 02.26.2006 /
Christians who are part of this diablog have become familiar with some of the key issues Ahtiests wish they would consider improving on.
I’m interested in hearing Atheists tell us what they wish other Athiests would either start or stop doing.
In your opinion,where do your fellow athiests need to improve, grow or otherwise consider changing?
Comment by: Siamang
1Great question!
I wish atheists would start an orginization like the Jewish group the Anti-Defamation League, or the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, GLAAD. Such a group would attempt to foster a greater understanding of people who call themselves atheists, freethinkers, agnostics etc.
I would really like that group to engage in a dialogue that is modeled on interfaith dialogues (but what do you call it when one side eschews faith?). Faithless-faith dialogues? Differing belief dialogues?
I would like atheists to adopt the interfaith model when dealing with people of faith.
I’m striving, as an individual, to adopt the kind of approach that I would like to see from people of faith. That approach is to treat my own vision of God (non-god) as a tentative personal approach that could be wrong. Not that I stop believing what I believe, but to treat others in a way I wouldn’t be ashamed of if God tapped me on the shoulder tomorrow and proved I’d been wrong the whole time.
Comment by: Jim Henderson
2I like this idea - maybe we can creat a “different dialogues” group and let groups who typically react to each other or have perceived competing agenda find a way to help each other and learn from each other
I call this humility
Wht do you call it ?
Comment by: Siamang
3Humility could be part of it. Respect for others is it also.
But I third think is also respecting a mystery for what it is. A strong Atheist could say that there is no mystery, God simply doesn’t exist. Similarly a strong Christian could also say that there is no mystery, they know exactly what’s really going on.
But then the mystery becomes people, and how we all come to this point in time in our lives where we live in such different worlds, each with our own individual absolute certainty.
With so much absolute certainty among people with differing faiths and beliefs the mystery is…. how can we learn to live together?
Comment by: Winn
4Siamang,
Just a thought, could it be that both Atheist and Christians have “faith.” One has a faith that there is no god while the other has faith that there is a God. So it wouldn’t really be a “Faithless-faith dialogues.” We all profess faith, just pointed at different targets.
Comment by: Jim Henderson
5Siamang
I agree that given all of the mysterious happenings of life (death, wars, meaness and unaccounetd for acts of kindness) there is way too much certainty going on out there I know for sure among Christians and from what I read in this blog it also seems to affect athiests.
It would be fun to tell each other what we don;t know rather than what we do
Comment by: Siamang
6Winn, you could say that about atheists, except that me, this atheist, doesn’t believe that there is no God. A lot of atheists don’t know for a fact, or believe for a certainty that there is no god/gods/really powerful aliens.
The reason I say that i personally eschew faith is that I have come to the conclusion that for me, faith doesn’t tell me which religion to choose. I could have faith, but in WHAT? Which God or gods should I choose? You could say “The” God. But you mean Yaweh. What about Allah? He might be the same dude, the god of Abraham. What about Brahma and Vishnu?
Faith makes the exact same argument for being a Muslim as it does for being a Mormon or a Methodist.
And so now here I am as a person with an opinion that faith is a broken compass.
How did I come to atheism? Well, by the word atheism I don’t claim to know if there is a God or not. I merely do not choose to worship an image of God, because I cannot choose among the entirety of the human pantheon. To choose Allah dooms me to Christian hell, and to choose Yaweh dooms me to muslim hell should the opposite turn out to be correct. And both doom me to Scientologist hell and who knows what horrors Shiva the destroyer might inflict upon me.
I’m having a little fun with Pascal’s Wager there, but to prove a point. That point is, as an atheist, I make no faith based claim. I am not trying (actively at least) to make any conversions or deconversions. I do not argue that there is no God, for my puny mind does not reach that far into the cosmos.
I merely say that I have not yet seen sufficient evidence to convince me that a personal God intervenes in my life.
It does not require faith to make that statement.
Comment by: Siamang
7Agreed Jim.
And that’s why I try to be clear here that I do not know if there is a God or not. And if there is a God, I do not know anything about specifically what He is like. I’m even assuming a singular and male description of for my rhetoric, in deference to believers here and the custom of the English language when discussing the deity.
As I wrote Winn above, I make no claims about the existence or nonexistence of God. To me, God is a mystery. Existence itself is a mystery.
I agree, atheists too should spend more time here discussing the things that they don’t know and don’t understand.
The things I don’t understand are hard to ask. If I had God here, I’d probably ask why the square of a number is so powerful in physics. Why is it that the force of a body is the mass times the velocity squared, and why magnetism falls off by the square of the distance. And there’s E=MC^2. There’s something key there with velocity, distance and squares. I can’t quite wrap my brain around it, but it’s something deep about physics. It must all describe some deeper aspect of physics that I don’t get yet.
That’s a wierd nonsequeter, i’m sure. But hey, it’s after midnight.
It also illustrates the kind of thing that makes me wonder very deeply about whether we live in a designed universe. It is also why I get so frustrated at religion as it is often practiced in America. Sometimes it works so dang hard at just killing that wonder for me. When I read about attacks on science by religions, or read about churches teaching children that dinosaurs lived alongside man in stark defiance of reality… I just wonder if I’m living in a world where people don’t care if they find the real God… they just want A god. Any god. The first one who comes along. The one they can fit in their pocket. But most of all, it makes me wonder about myself. It makes me fear that ANY move I make toward a deist belief is not about truth, but about wanting a god in my pocket as well.
This Dover Pennsylvania thing where there was a feud over whether or not to teach Intelligent Design in science class, a parent said something very sad to me. They were quoted in the news as saying they didn’t know too much about the scientific evidence for evolution. They said something like “I don’t care what’s true, I just want my daughter to go to heaven.”
It’s such a human thing to say, and utterly boggling to me. It has the kind of honesty that can only come from a person who doesn’t listen to what they’re saying. It totally summs up my feelings about the current conflict between religion and science.
I could say the opposite: “I care what’s true, and I don’t mind if I go to hell for asking the question.” (plus, I don’t think God would do that!)
Anyway, that’s what just pushes me from religion, is the feeling that it causes so many people to miss the wonders of the world. What could be more wonderous than the massive, massive universe, or the eons of time passing like lumbering ghostly behemoths. What could be more wonderous in its way than evolution, the most fantastic, the most prolific and the most foolproof system, a system that nobody could have devised exept the creator Himself?
I think that as humans we look upon majesty and build myth. Some see God in the myth. I lose God when surrounded by myth. I have to remind myself of the majesty, it’s what I seek, for it’s the thing that brings me closer to the infinite.
I think that may be part of the issue for Rev. George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. He is committed to both God and science, and does not discard one for the other. They are both windows to Truth, for him. He said recently about evolution: “God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity…He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves.”
Comment by: Ir
8Jim wrote: I agree that given all of the mysterious happenings of life (death, wars, meaness and unaccounetd for acts of kindness) there is way too much certainty going on out there I know for sure among Christians and from what I read in this blog it also seems to affect athiests.
I’ve also encountered certainty in Christians and atheists. Some more than others. On the Dawkins TV programs, at one point Dawkins says to a Christian school principal (headmaster) “Evolution is not a theory, it’s a fact!” (I would rather he had said “In my opinion it’s a very well-substantiated theory” - but that doesn’t seem to be his style)
Doesn’t the Bible encourage certainty? According to the Bible, Jesus said the following:
“I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, `Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.”
“I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, `Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him”
“You of little faith [...] why did you doubt?”
(the above quotes are from Matthew 21:21, Mark 11:23 and Matthew 14:31)
I know that certainty can come across as arrogance, especially to those who disagree. But what if someone really is certain? Should they pretend not to be certain, for the sake of not appearing arrogant? It seems to me that that would be lying.
I’ve observed discussions in which the certainty expressed by one person seems to incite another person into rebutting with corresponding certainty; yet if approached differently, that other person might be more willing to admit they are not completely certain. For example, Mark wrote yesterday;
“[The minister who had just said in her sermon that Unitarians spread lies and deny Jesus] asked if I believed in god to which I replied there is no god. She asked about JC and I said JC never existed. She said there is evidence and I said it was changed after the fact so there is no evidence.”
Mark, I’m curious to know: do you always state your views with such certainty; or were you stating them particularly strongly to this minister in response to her own certainty in making derogatory statements about the group you belong to?
Comment by: Ir
9(FYI Mark has responded to the above question in the comments page of “Why do you call Non Believers LOST?”)
Comment by: Siamang
10Ir,
Of course in human interactions there is always the danger that if you conceed certainty, and try to draw a middle ground, the other person will dig in their heels and declare the middle ground as your extreme position.
I have that tactic applied to me every time I try and discuss science with a creationist. Science presumes that no theory is ever settled. Everything is always open to be proven wrong.
Creationists, Answers in Genesis lovers, IDers take that as a target. “Aha!” they say. “So you ADMIT it’s only a THEEEEORY! But the Bible is a FACT!”
People who discuss science with creationists have taken to saying the phrase “evolution is a theory and a fact” in order to try and block that canard.
If we sound certain, it’s because no scientific theory has ever had more overwhelming evidence for it than this one. If you discount it, you can throw away all vaccines and antibiotics, and in the doing doom the human race. The reason humans are in such deadly peril from bird flu and antibiotic-resistant germs is that evolution happens. We will all perish without an understanding of evolution.
Of that, unfortunately, one can be certain.
Comment by: Jim Henderson
11So… back to my original question for athiests
What do you wish athiests would change, add, stop, modify or start?
Comment by: Mark
12Jim,
Would another post be “What would you christians change about other christians?”
Comment by: Ir
13Mark, I was hoping to see that post also.
Comment by: Winn
14Siamang, Thanks for you reply.
To have a conversation it seems that we have to define terms. I am using faith in the sense of its common first meaning registered at http://www.answers.com/faith which is “Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.”
Another word of interest is atheist. In the Greek language the word for god is theos. I could be wrong but I think that we arrive at the English word “theist” for this Greek word. In Greek when you put an “alpha” (a) in front of the word it negates the meaning of word or it is like saying “not.” So in that sense an “a” theist is one who does not “believe” in god. Since the word “faith” is no a religious word but has be co-opted, I think it is fair to say that and “a” theist is one who has “faith” that there is “no” god. So maybe in your case, would it be fair to find another word that suggest what your faith points toward, or on each occasion of a conversation explain as you did in your previous post make you claim to define it differently in your conversation.
Just some thoughts…
Comment by: Mark
15Or we atheist may interchange god with:
http://www.answers.com/myth
when we ask if we believe in god. The god of myth is what I acknowledge.
Comment by: Jim Henderson
16Is my question about what athiests wish other athiests would change hard to answer?
I will get to the Christians soon - no worries
I just thought I would give Atheists first shot at this
Comment by: Ir
17I’d be interested to hear Hemant’s comments on what he wishes other atheists would change (if anything).
Jim, I suspect that wishing others sharing the same viewpoint would be different is more of a Christian than an atheist thing to do, in general.
Part of being an atheist is getting to choose how he/she lives his/her life. If other atheists choose differently, well, that’s up to them.
Also, atheists don’t have the fear that the behavior of other atheists could have eternal consequences.
Comment by: Jim Henderson
18Ir
That helps but I suspect that you are not an athiest so I thought it would be helpful for practicing (is that an applicable term) athiests to weigh in on this.
I’ll ask Hemant to lead the way for us
Comment by: Cully
19Jim, for some reason this has been a hard question for me to answer. I’ve thought about it for a few days now, and have trouble getting it into words. Here’s my best try:
One of the things that has bugged me quite a bit in the atheist/Christian debates in the last few years is the “Holiday Wars.” Atheists seem to be taking a oxymoronic path with this. We love to point out to the Christians that their beloved Christmas trees are not Christian symbols at all, but appropriated pagan symbology. In the same breath we lament the fact that Christmas trees are erected on government property and decry this as a failing in the separation between church and state. Can’t have it both ways guys. Either it’s an innocuous pagan symbol, or it’s a Christian attempt to take over the government.
In the end I agree with the separation of church and state whole heartedly but I don’t really see Christmas as a threat to that. I celebrate Christmas, and most atheists I know do as well. Granted we may not be doing it for the same reasons and I’m more likely to say “Happy Holidays” than “Merry Christmas” but there was still a tree in my living room. (Not a nativity scene though, I have to draw the line somewhere ;) ) The Christmas season is much diluted from it’s original meaning at this point and has become a universal holiday with roots in Christianity. Roots that you can choose to emphasize, or not. Thanksgiving is a Christian holiday as well, after all the whole purpose of it is to offer prayers of Thanksgiving to God for the prosperity of the previous year… but I’ve never heard an atheist speak against Thanksgiving.
Going off-topic with this… Christians have to let go of this as well. Having a menorah up alongside the tree, and having a store clerk say Happy Holidays is not a big deal. Get over it. There are 7 major holidays celebrated by various cultures in the month of December, (and that’s just in America if you go international there are several more) and store clerks cannot be held responsible for offering a blanket wish for happiness rather than one specifically geared for the holiday you’ve chosen out of that collection.
So there you go Jim, probably not the most earth-shattering complaint to have about your community, but the first thing that came to mind when you mentioned the topic.
Comment by: Siamang
20I would like atheists to be more respectful when they voice criticisms of faith. I don’t think we make friends that way. I’ve been starting to watch Richard Dawkins’ specials, and I cringe about ten times a minute at something that he phrases too stridently.
Comment by: Ir
21Jim wrote:
Ir,
That helps but I suspect that you are not an atheist so I thought it would be helpful for practicing (is that an applicable term) atheists to weigh in on this.
I noticed you didn’t think I was an atheist and that’s why I didn’t say anything until you’d asked 3 times.
I’ll ask Hemant to lead the way for us
I see that he has and that his comments are as thoughtful and articulate as ever — thanks, Hemant!
I won’t comment on Hemant’s new post on the topic until it’s opened up to Christians, in deference to your suspicions about me :)
Siamang wrote:
I’ve been starting to watch Richard Dawkins’ specials, and I cringe about ten times a minute at something that he phrases too stridently.
You too, huh? :) It’s reassuring to me to hear that.
I’m hoping that when “What Christians wish other Christians would change” gets underway, you will be similarly reassured to see that some of the things you wish Christians would change, Christians wish also.
Comment by: fran
22Here’s the problem . The real reason secular humanists don’t believe is simple. I think that most of the teachings of the churches stem from hocus-pocus supernatural and ghostly ramblings of magically spiritual gooblidigook that has “no ” basis in fact . Perhaps some of the internal content has ,over the years, yielded a normative behavioral model , but it’s all based on compounded lies that are pretty subjective and far fetched. Most christians have a cognitive dissonance that buffers their perception of what truth really is.
Comment by: fran
23Oh , and another note: If I’ve hurt anyones feelings that is certainly not my intent.
Comment by: Ir
24Hi Fran,
Thanks for sharing your views.
When you use the word ‘lies’, are you of the opinion that Christians are, or have, passed along information they knew was untrue?
My impression is that Christians really believe what they would like others to believe also.
I’ve run across a few atheists online who insist on calling Christians ‘charlatans’ and ‘frauds’. But I would say that ‘lies’, ‘charlatans’ and ‘frauds’ are the right words only if Christians are intentionally deceiving others. I don’t think they are. What do you think?
Comment by: fran
25If I tell you a lie and you tell someone else what I told you you are inadvertantly only repeating what I told you and therefor you are unaware that it’s a lie per se’,but if in the interim you are told the truth of the matter and you continue then you to are a liar. Ignorance is no excuse when you know what the truth of the matter is.