On being a nice atheist
Friday, 8 June 2012 08:50 pmI have run into a lot of atheists online who annoy the buggery out of me. Not all, of course, and I would never dream of assuming that a noisy minority should be taken as representative of an entire group. But enough to be worth posting about.
These particular atheists sometimes seem to me as if they are treating atheism as another religion, and a fundamentalist one at that. They're evangelical, uncompromising, feel free to treat anyone who disagrees them with enormous disrespect, and they have simply replaced God as an object of worship with Richard Dawkins. They talk of all "theists" as if they are idiots, sometimes as idiots who have not yet seen the light, and see no problem in being outrageously rude about the lot of them. It's the rudeness that gets me, as I happen to believe in treating other human beings with respect as a general principle. I think the thing which makes them closest to religious fundamentalists, however, is a tendency to massively oversimplify very complicated ideas.
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These particular atheists sometimes seem to me as if they are treating atheism as another religion, and a fundamentalist one at that. They're evangelical, uncompromising, feel free to treat anyone who disagrees them with enormous disrespect, and they have simply replaced God as an object of worship with Richard Dawkins. They talk of all "theists" as if they are idiots, sometimes as idiots who have not yet seen the light, and see no problem in being outrageously rude about the lot of them. It's the rudeness that gets me, as I happen to believe in treating other human beings with respect as a general principle. I think the thing which makes them closest to religious fundamentalists, however, is a tendency to massively oversimplify very complicated ideas.
( Read more... )
