Ask An Atheist

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.

This episode, Childhood Indoctrination, is hosted by Libbie and Casey.

Note: Unfortunately, there is no streaming audio for this episode.

Hi, Sam again.

Just as soon as I seem to get the new website out the door, our media server takes a dive.   I’m working on it, and I’ll have it back online sometime in the next day or so, but until that time podcasts will be offline.    Sorry.   Sorry.

Please don’t shoot me.

Sorry.

Also, I’m working on the Blip.TV for Ep 7, encoding now, should be up tonight or tomorrow morning, when I can get somewhere with with worthwhile bandwidth.

Sorry.

Episode seven, hosted by Mike and Case, covers conspiracy theories from a skeptical perspective.

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.