Perspective and Apologetics, Part 3

I love Christmas.  Okay, the last couple of years it kind of sucked on the “in 2010 I was stuck in Dallas and in 2011 I was living with family and holyfuckI’mtiredoflivingwithmyparents” levels.  But Christmas, in general, is something for which I profess a great deal of appreciation.  This is why I get annoyed with a certain sub-set of Christmas displays.  You know the kind.  They get displayed on public property and end up being the subject of all kinds of controversy and frothing at the mouth.




Yeah.  This kind.

Now, I have absolutely no problem with the idea of atheists, y’know, doing stuff in the public sphere.  I’m supportive in all ways (except monetarily) of a large number of the atheist billboards and bus ads I’ve seen.  The ones that I support are generally the, “Hi, we’re atheists and we’re your neighbors,” subset of the atheist ad campaign.  I consider something like this to be pretty innocuous and an overall good effort:




I consider something like this, on the other hand, to be a load of bollocks:




I separate all publicity in to three basic categories: awareness, advocacy, and apologetics.

Awareness, in this context, can be a net neutral or a net positive.[1]  Basically, I consider the net neutral to be things like, “Wear pink to fight cancer,” or anything involving setting your picture on Facebook to something else.  It’s just a silly thing that people do to make themselves feel better that doesn’t change reality one bit.  It can be a net positive, however, in the situation where someone who feels different and outcast can see an announcement that says, “You’re not alone,” and feel better.  I am all for this kind of awareness.

Advocacy can run the gamut.  It’s basically awareness with an agenda and the moral viability of the advocacy is directly related to the goals of the agenda.  I am, in short, in favor of atheists working to keep the Establishment Clause in full force because the state has no business in the activities of religion.  If atheists were advocating to push religion entirely out of the public sphere so as to outlaw religion and hunt down the religious, however, I would be against that particular ridiculous strawman.

Apologetics, in my humble opinion, are almost wholly negative at almost all times.[2]  Apologetics work to do three things: 1. establish in-group/out-group thinking, 2. establish superiority for the in-group, and 3. set up the opportunity to play the persecution card.  The persecution card, for the record, works in both directions.  If everyone dogpiles on you, you get to cry about being persecuted.  If everyone dogpiles on the now-Othered, you can use this to push that Other around.

This is the key place where the issue of perspective makes an impact on the question of apologetics.  In order for apologetics to ultimately work in the sense the apologist claims to want things to work everyone needs to share a perspective.  If they don’t it just becomes a masturbatory exercise in trying to call the other person a bigger idiot.

As much as the atheist movement, such as it is, wants everyone to believe they don’t engage in the same activities they decry, there’s plenty of assholery coming from godless apologists.  I’ve got a few theories as to why that is, too.

Most atheists who are prone to want to be involved in atheist outreach have three qualities in common: they’re intelligent, opinionated, and intellectually arrogant.  Arrogance is a requirement for all apologists.  If you’re going to go up to strangers and tell them, in effect, “You’re a fool for not agreeing with me about this issue,” you have to be arrogant.  Someone who lacks arrogance is going to lack to motivation to tell strangers they’re morons.  It’s that simple.

In general, too, atheists have reasoned themselves out of religion.  The average atheist’s backstory is, “I was a believer, then I started to study it and I realized it was crap.”  That’s an abbreviation, for the record.  My own backstory for this is a series of events over the course of a couple years.  The fact is, though, that to this day I know more about the Bible and Christianity than most people who would come to me and tell me I really need Jesus in my life.  I know what the Bible says.  I know what the history of Christianity is.  I know what the history of the Bible is in context.  I didn’t wake up one morning and say, “You know, I don’t believe this anymore.”  I spent a long time learning and studying and eventually drew a conclusion.

For a believer, then, to come up to an atheist and say, “You just need to read the Bible more/the right way/after praying for the proper perspective,” is incredibly arrogant on the part of the apologist.  The would-be atheist apologist, however, needs to realize that this exact same dynamic is going on from the other direction.  Regardless of the reality of, well, reality, the average Christian knows the Bible is real.  They know this as either a form of intellectual assent to an idea or a matter of default assumption, but reality as understood by your average Christian includes the fact of god and Jesus and death on the cross and that entire flibbertigibbet.

So to just walk up to a Christian and say, “Hey, you believe something stupid, you stupid stupidhead,” is incredibly annoying, offensive, and ineffective.  The terrible thing about that is that your average atheist knows this.  Why?  Because your average atheist has been bombarded by that exact message from the opposite direction.

Some atheist sign makers get this.  The Freedom from Religion Foundation tends to put out signs that stay on the awareness and advocacy end of the spectrum.  I’m totally on board with this one, for instance:




And I find this one amusing as hell:




Anyway, where was I?  Oh, right, intelligent, opinionated, and arrogant.

This is a toxic brew when it comes to any public discourse.  Someone who possesses all three of those qualities will tend to not give a shit about what other people have to say and instead just assert reality as he or she understands it and leave it at that.  I think that the fact that atheism is, by and large, a movement of the internet doesn’t help.  Atheists hang out on atheist blogs and discuss atheist things and make fun of the random wannabe evangelists who pop by from time to time to try to witness and then eventually they get out in to the real world and think the same exact style of argumentation and discussion that works on the internet will work with people in the street.[3]

The irony, of course, is that churches facilitate that exact same attitude among the faithful.  I knew a lot of people who literally did not know (or know they knew) a single non-believer.  They’d sit around talking about god and Jesus and how great the Bible was and theorize about how to get those non-Christians to admit they believe what they know to be true.

Then they’d find out that the vast majority of the time all their techniques didn’t work when confronted with an actual, honest-to-nothing non-believer.  Why?  Because they didn’t understand that, “You know the Bible is true, you’re just rebelling against god/still feeling hurt because of something/an unfortunate soul who hasn’t met the right kinds of Christians,” doesn’t actually make a lick of sense in reality.

Atheists need to realize this cuts both ways.  Nobody’s ever changed their mind when confronted by condescending, arrogant assholes who tell them what they actually know about the world.

One of the problems that then comes up, though, is that this idea gets wrapped up in a larger fight amongst atheists: the question of accommodationism.  Folks like PeeZed and the commenters over at Pharyngula tend to decide that this is a binary issue: either you’re an out, proud, and in-your-face atheist or you’re just bending over backwards to let the religious people have their say.  This is absurd.

It’s possible to be accommodating without being an accommodationist.  The issue boils down to what Phil Plait talked about in his now-internet-famous “Don’t Be a Dick” speech.[4]  It’s possible to stand up for science, rationalism, and truth without being a dick about it and if you manage to not be a dick about it when confronted with someone who disagrees you might just make some headway.  He came to this brilliantly obvious realization when he realized that he doesn’t like it when people are dicks to him and he doesn’t listen.

It’s…it’s not that hard, really.

It also helps to realize that perception and perspective matter far more than reality.  If you attack someone they’ll just dig in and fight back.  Quite frankly, atheists don’t need that.  They get enough crap in America as it is.

We need fewer apologists and more advocates.

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[1]It can also be a net negative, but that largely depends on who is running the campaign.  The Nazis ran an incredibly negative awareness campaign on the Jews, to pick an easy example.

[2]I’m willing to accept an extremely wide definition for apologetics that can include any form of sales-related activity: ergo, if I tell you that Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers are an awesome band and you should listen to them that can be considered a form of apologetics.

[3]The two big counter-arguments that I know will come against this one are, “But we’re surrounded by Christians every day,” or, “But you just pointed out that most atheists were Christians in the past, so what the fuck, dude?”  That’s quite true.  But most people simply don’t talk about religion openly.  I had an entire conversation with a table full of religious people yesterday and we didn’t mention religion once.  Politics came up, but that’s because IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO NOT TALK ABOUT POLITICS IN AMERICA ANYMORE.  Bleh.  Religion, however, did not come up except for a guy who knows my parents asking, “So where do your parents go to church now?”  He didn’t even ask me where I go to church.

[4]Three-part YouTube of the speech.  It’s a half-hour, but it’s totally worth it:

Comments

[The Everlasting Dave]

"In order for apologetics to ultimately work in the sense the apologist claims to want things to work everyone needs to share a perspective. If they don’t it just becomes a masturbatory exercise in trying to call the other person a bigger idiot."

I think you hit on something really important here. I dunno if it's just arrogance, as you said, or if it's some kind of latent solipsism that refuses to acknowledge that people are different and sometimes believe different things. You've made plenty of references to the "echo chamber" mentality- not in those words, that's just how I see it- and it's dangerous. You were inside it at one point, and I saw it from the outside- I've got just about the bare minimum of intellectual curiosity, but even for me it was off-putting. You get your beliefs reinforced enough times, they stop being beliefs and start being a factual basis for all your interactions with the world. When real facts don't line up with that- "Like OMG, you don't think Jesus is Lord??" Or "Haha, you believe in a skydaddy, how retarded."- That's when shit gets ugly.

It was nice to see you put both atheist and Christian apologetics on the same playing field here. I don't think a lot of people get that, cause if they did, they would Stop Being A Dick. I guess this is what you're building up to, but I'm now interested to see some ideas for productive disagreement.

[Geds]

I dunno if it's just arrogance, as you said, or if it's some kind of latent solipsism that refuses to acknowledge that people are different and sometimes believe different things.

I tend to think that arrogance and solipsism go hand-in-hand, at least to a certain extent, so you're probably not talking about completely mutually-exclusive categories. But that might be a worthwhile angle to pick at for a while.

It was nice to see you put both atheist and Christian apologetics on the same playing field here. I don't think a lot of people get that, cause if they did, they would Stop Being A Dick.

One of the problems that I keep noticing is that critics of both sides use the words that make the most sense to them, so a lot of what happens is simple, "Nuh uh, we're not like that," evasion and everyone argues over semantics. So someone who sees the New Atheists using the same tactics as Christian fundamentalists says, "You're both just fundamentalists," and the New Atheist side says, "No we're not, by definition we can't be fundamentalists." This is true, but not in any way that actually defeats the argument.

That's why I'm trying to hit this from a completely different angle and break apart the actual activities. It's nice to hear that I'm actually succeeding so far. I was worried that the esoteric nature of the awareness/advocacy/apologetics categorization would obfuscate the overall point I'm trying to get to.

I'm now interested to see some ideas for productive disagreement.

Um...hmmm. Uh, oh.

[The Everlasting Dave]

I don't think that's esoteric at all. It's a way of describing why people write/say/think the things they do and I learned a little sump'm sump'm from the post. I just see it as posing a problem: "How do you get people out of black-and-white thinking and into something closer approximating sympathy?" which is what I meant by "productive disagreement".

All in all, though, nice work getting me to think about something other than intoxicants, cartoons, or boobies for a while.