Ask An Atheist

Got this one from that video-focused wretched hive of scum and villainy, and thought I would share it with our lovely website readers without forcing people to wade through YouTube comments. Not everyone has my sense of humor.

NEVER HEARD A BULLSHIT , LIKE THIS ARE YOU GUYS OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS , BREASTFEEDING MEN . JUST FOR COMMON SENSE WHO WHO DRINK MILK FROM A WOMAN BREAST EXCEPT A CHILD , WOULD YOU?
TALKING ABOUT FATWAS . GO DO YOUR HOME WORK YOU HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUTS. YOU ARE NOTHING BUT PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO LAUGH ON OTHERS . GO AND LOOK AT YOURSELF BALDHEAD SIT YOUR ASS IN THE LIBRARY AND READ

About a news segment all the way back in our second episode. The user, “imtiazf10″, didn’t get around to watching until recently, I’m guessing. I wonder how he found it.

Also, we got this doozy from “davitodude” over here, who I’m pretty sure is not actually Danny DeVito:

Who else can imagine these guys forming a group and lynching believers of God?

Seriously? Getting the show together is hard enough– running a hyper-violent criminal enterprise is just out of our league. As, you know, this is exactly what we had in mind when we thought of a show to introduce people to atheism and the idea of an honest, truthful discussion that allowed for skeptical awareness.

And people honestly wonder why we felt we needed to do the show.

The A.P. ran this story today, in response to a poll that states that the number of Americans who believe that Obama is Muslim has grown from 11% in 2009 to 18%. But don’t worry:

“The president is obviously a Christian. He prays everyday.”

When distilled, the article’s main thrust is that his Administration’s PR machine is working overtime to fight the perception that Obama is a Muslim. An “expert” asserts the following explanation:

Andrew Kohut, the Pew Research Center’s director, said the confusion partly reflects “the intensification of negative views about Obama among his critics.”

What I get from this is that Muslim is just a synonym for “person we don’t like” or “someone who isn’t one of us.” Not only does this illustrate the particular flavor of bigotry fueling the populist conservative political current, but also the profoundly ignorant and uninquisitive nature of it’s adherents. I doubt any of those 18 precent bothered to crack open Obama’s autobiography, Dreams of My Father, and read about joining the congregation at Trinity United in Chicago, or his explicitly stated Christian faith in his follow up book, The Audacity of Hope. For those that are unwilling (or unable) to read them, one need only watch the McCain/Obama debate, moderated by Rick Warren, to see how much Obama is willing to fall all over himself trying to be more Christian than the other guy.

Of course, one could make the highly unsubstantiated argument that Obama is “posing” as Christian as the necessary adjunct to gaining power in national politics. This would just be one of a long list of supposed secret allegiances ascribed to Obama (terrorist, Socialist, crypto-Maoist… take your pick) that have no evidence for them other than a McCarthyesque accusation.

I find this apropos in that a similar argument has been made in favor of Obama’s “secret” atheism. Obama freely describes being raised in a secular household, having a father that was an “affirmed atheist” and a mother who had no religious preference whatsoever. Considering that running for a national office all but requires you to be a devout Christian, one could easily assert that Obama merely “poses” as a Christian because expressing his true belief (or lack thereof) would destroy his career. But I, unlike other fellow atheists who’d love to count Obama among the ranks of prominent non-believers, am not willing to go this far; believing as such would constitute precisely the same kind of unsupported belief that us atheists and skeptics deride.

Personally, I think the proposition “Obama as Secret Atheist” falls somewhere on the spectrum of plausibility between Likely and Moderately Likely. But, in doing so, I can detect a twinge of irony in that the now infamous 2006 University of Minnesota poll which identified that Americans distrust atheists more than they do Muslims, gays, Hispanics or even Jews (have we all forgot about the Elders of Zion?), makes little sense. Why not accuse Obama of being an atheist? Americans clearly hate atheists more than even the alien, blood-thirsty, terrorist Muslims. At least Muslims believe in (roughly) the same deity as Christians. The very existence of atheists seems to undermine the stability and nobility of Creation.

I don’t want to be misunderstood, I am very far from a card-carrying Liberal apologist. I find the Presidential approval polls, with their binary nature, a similarly dishonest measure of reality. I largely disapprove of Obama’s job as president (mostly on matters of foreign policy, Executive power and economic policy), but clearly not for the same reasons as your average Teabagger, and certainly not in the zero-sum way where I would prefer McCain, Palin or Romney in his place. But in the binary logic of approve/disapprove, there is no difference between my grievances and that of the rube holding the “Keep Gov’t Out of My Medicare” sign.

All of this is a long winded way of decrying this entire news story (and the sentiment) as both superfluous and idiotic. Article VI of the Constitution explicitly rejects that those who serve in public office be subjected to “religious test,” but despite the protestations of the great unwashed Teabagger masses, very few of them seem to have actually read it. It doesn’t matter whether or not he’s a Christian, Constitutionally speaking. It shouldn’t even matter from a cultural perspective; no one wants to be on the receiving end of discrimination.

As an atheist, it wouldn’t matter to me if he WAS a Muslim, a Jew or even an atheist. What would matter is that he govern fairly, in a way in keeping with the letter and sentiment of the Constitution, and that didn’t favor his religion over any others. And in that vein, all of this ham-fisted, perky insistence about Obama being horny for Jesus is a slap in the face to the ennobling principles he’s sworn to uphold.

When asked the question “What is your religion?”, I wish that Obama would answer in the way that Ralph Nader did: “Separation of Church and State. And none of your business.”

We recently received this criticism on our blog, and I thought it should be seen prominently on the page. However, he and I get wordy, so it’s behind a cut.

Read the rest of this entry »

Despite our brief presence in the online atheist realm, we’re elated to be getting response from the Internets. We also quickly learned that not all (in fact, A LOT) of the feedback is negative; we expected as much. But one criticism that has been pervasive, and been lobbed at us since our very first episode, is that we’ve been derided for being too much like the Atheist Experience.

This too is a critique which we anticipated, but in our discussions last year we mulled over this fact and determined that it wasn’t enough to stop us. We talked with members of AETV and made them aware of our intentions and we received nothing but encouragement. In fact, we prize our unique Northwest perspective: coming from a very liberal, “tolerant” locale, where we think the worst kind of naive theism thrives and lends cover to extremism. We also thought that since a few very large entities, like the Mars Hill Church and the Discovery Institute, lie right on our doorstep that we’d be uniquely positioned to mount a rebuttal. In short, we’ve got game that they don’t… and we’d also have the advantage as the “scrappy upstarts” to quote Pete Campbell.

All that aside, our viewers do act as a sort of barometer for our performance, which is why we take them seriously. We already have our token ALL CAPS TYPING THEISTMILITANT ATHEIST AVENGER(Edit: Sorry, Garry, we now know who you are), and plenty of other nearly incomprehensible rants slung at us. But given the amount of introspection we try to do to measure if we’re “doin’ it rite” (as Libbie would say), I get a great deal of heart when we receive things like this in correspondence:

And, also, thank you for your show. Yes, I’m an AETV fan. But, you’ve demonstrated something that they could never do on their own – you’ve demonstrated that the snowball of reason isn’t just getting bigger, it’s actually moving. Thanks again.

May that snowball become an abominable snowman of Godzillaesque proportions.

After what we felt was a fantastic and lively Episode #6, one accusation in particular surfaced from a viewer, Liz from AZ, that we had not yet had cause to address. Her comments was:

First off, I really like what you guys are about and what you’re trying to do. I like that you’re trying to let people see that there are atheists out there who are not baby eating psychos.

I do wish, however, that you would spend less time mocking people and their beliefs (however crazy they – the beliefs OR the people – may be). It is possible to tell people what you stand for and to be funny and entertaining while doing so without putting other people down.

By all means, feel free to tell me about the crazy people. You can even point out the logical fallacies and inconsistencies and all that. But please, please stay away from the name calling – it’s distracting (and detracting) from your real message.

I decided to answer this one directly, instead of letting it fall into the decomposing pile of unaddressed, anonymous comments. Specifically, I wanted to defend the light-hearted, but lightly vulgar, jives we sling out at bullshitters, asshats and ne’er-do-wells that we believe do more harm than good. I responded:

Name-calling or, in most instances I would refer to it as “calling a spade a spade,” is part of who we are, and part of our perspective. We find that put-downs are needed when public figures not only disparage the things we care about, but especially the ones that maliciously misrepresent us or willfully sow untruths to glorify their image or their organization. Lies and deception should be opposed in strong language, not deferred in the popular sense of “well, that’s just their opinion.”

And if that wasn’t enough, I perused the Atheist Experience Blog only minutes after sending off my retort to Liz, and saw that Matt Dillahunty posted this defense of “being a dick,” wherein he challenges the notion that hurling insults and other ad hominem attacks hurt the cause of atheists. And of course, Herr Dillahunty said it oh-so-much more elegantly (and directly) than I:

When superstitious beliefs are killing people or doing serious harm and some in the anti-science, anti-reason crowd refuse to respond to diplomacy, what do you do? Shrug your shoulders and agree to disagree? Write it off as a difference of opinion? Aren’t we, on occasion, actually going to need to do something…including things that might shock or offend?

Of course, I don’t believe for a second that my repeated instances of calling Pat Robertson an ‘asshat’ does not likely qualify as the kind of grand and noble action Matt describes here, but isn’t our willingness to break outside of old etiquette and call a spade a spade the first of many steps towards this end? No? Well, fuck you then.