timeimmortal

Vox Day responds to an atheist critic of his book, The Irrational Atheist, with his usual barbed wit.

…the reason no one looks askance at Christian accoutrements is that the Christian who makes a public statement is making statement about himself and his own beliefs. Atheists, on the other hand, are making a statement about everyone else and everyone else’s beliefs. Unsurprisingly, everyone else tends to look on this askance.

Let me see if I can explain this in sufficiently simple terms. If I wear a shirt that says “I like chocolate”, this does not offend anyone who prefers strawberry or vanilla. It is merely providing you with information about me. If, on the other hand, I wear a shirt that says “Vanilla is evil and everyone who likes it is stupid and bad”, then I should not be surprised when those who happen to like vanilla are not favorably disposed towards me. It is not only providing you with information about me, it is providing you with information about my negative attitude towards you. And to those atheists who are so narcissistic as to believe that another individual’s Religion is a statement that somehow concerns them, I merely say: Get over yourself! Life, the universe and everything are not about you!

There are those who wear their atheism in approximately the same way that Christians and other religious people wear their beliefs — matter-of-factly, presented simply as an aspect of character that intends to say nothing about what other people might think or to impose an opinion thereupon. On the internet, at least, such level-headed sorts are a bit more of a rarity, though not impossible to find.

But on the Internet, as in real life, there are also those who are very “out there” in their atheism, to the point that Vox Day describes above. And whereas all but the most hardcore Christian evangelists (and Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses) tend to present their case in the form of a dialogue, it has been this blogger’s experience that evangelistic atheists tend to present themselves as “the learned” dictating “the truth” to “the deluded” proles into the midst of which they have dared to wander.

This is equally true of atheist “accoutrements” that one typically sees out and about. The “Jesus Fish” is relatively innocuous, whereas the “Darwin Fish” is not so innocuous; the “Jesus fish” tells us only about the beliefs of the driver of the car it adorns, while the “Darwin fish” seems to be intended as a “teaching moment” that the atheist in the adorned car would like to offer to all the other drivers around him (the gender pronoun here is significant; it is usually a man in a car thusly adorned).

(The critic to whom Vox is responding is one notable exception, then.)

At any rate, here’s a couple of other good barbs from Vox:

Ethical belief systems are far less similar than atheists would usually have one think, of course, an atheist attempting to compare ethical systems is rather like a deaf man attempting to distinguish between Mozart and Vivaldi.

This is something to keep in mind, I think, the next time I’m having to deal with the old moral relativism canard.

The relevant point isn’t that religious people don’t ever kill - all are fallen - but that religious people are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less likely than atheists to kill when they are in positions that enable them to do so. I suppose it should be expected that Kelly would find this statistical reality to be an incredible coincidence, though, since her entire worldview is founded on a series of incredible improbabilities occurring for no reason at all. Life must be interesting for the atheist, coming as it does as a series of totally unexpected, completely unconnected surprises.

I don’t know about you, good Reader, but if all I had to believe about life was that it was an improbable result of unpredictable reactions that occurred for no particular reason, I’d probably be an alcoholic….like Christopher Hitchens.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

BCF sends in a short little remark about this article.

Hmm how bout a Muslim Crescent variant of the Darwin Fish.

You mean like this?

I don’t know…I don’t think it would fly, personally. People would probably criticize it as bigoted and racist (not that one can be “racist” — according to the proper definition of that term — if one is criticizing a Religion, but nevermind that fact).

Which is kind of a pity, because it would be nice to be able to demonstrate consistency in atheist thinking for once. really, if one is going to take the first step of mocking a Christian symbol with a silly parody thereof, why not move on to likewise mock other religions besides just Christianity? Islam is an easy target, for as big as it is, and Hinduism has more than a few elements which are ripe targets for satire. That modern atheism seems to concern itself only with mocking Christianity (for the most part, especially where symbols and slogans are concerned) says something, I think, about a certain lack of objectivity and intellectual consistency among most atheists.

Jonah comments on a phenomenon that is getting a bit on the old side by now — the “Darwin Fish“. You know, that “clever” little modification of the classic “Jesus Fish” that you see tacked onto the bumpers of some cars, that has taken the classic fish shape and added legs to it, with either “Darwin” or “Evolve” replacing the traditional texts one finds printed in the “Jesus Fish”?

It’s one of those things that I think was meant, by whoever came up with it, to be a witty little statement against religious faith. Of course, instead of being witty, it typically comes off as petty, especially when paired (as Jonah notes that it so often is) with some sort of bumper sticker preaching “tolerance.”

Not that one ever expects truly rational thinking from secular folk. It’s nice to find, when it happens, though. But the “Darwin Fish” isn’t an example thereof.

Update: as a bonus, Michael Coren discusses that other great secular bigotry, tolerance, frameworking the discussion in the story of Magdi Allam, the Italian journalist welcomed this Easter into the Church by none other than Pope Benedict XVI himself. Allam’s conversion from Islam has been treated as controversial in the media, and has been condemned as a move calculated to inflame Christian/Muslim tensions.

Aref Ali Nayed, one of a group of 200 Muslim scholars who claim to be intent on establishing a new, open relationship with Christianity, condemned the Pope’s behaviour as “a triumphalist tool for scoring points.” The group in question tends to say very little about, for example, suicide bombings, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Sudan or Turkey’s closing of a Catholic seminary. But is extremely upset that the Pope has behaved as, well, the Pope.

It’s a spurious, disingenuous critique. Theological dialogue may have been a Muslim tendency 800 years ago but nobody seriously believes that religious pluralism is a regarded concept in contemporary Islam. The denial and double-talk is sickening. Allam had been under police protection long before his conversion because of his staunch critique of violent Islamic fundamentalism. Death threats have increased since his embrace of Christianity and all that allegedly moderate Muslims are saying is that if there is going to be a conversion, for goodness sake keep it quiet.

But why? This is not about changing a shirt but transforming a life. According to Christian belief, Magdi Allam has begun a journey that will lead to eternal life. He has found not interesting opinion but absolute truth. Jesus didn’t say “I may be” but “I am” The Way. The only way. The Catholic Church is far more accepting than many Protestants in the way it views the salvational possibilities of non-Catholic goodness; but it still teaches that the only guaranteed way of meeting God is through the Sacramental structure of a church founded by Christ.

This notion of exclusive truth, however, is not just a problem for Muslims but for secularists as well, what with their fetish for ostensible tolerance. Modern liberalism has not merely abandoned certain commandments but replaced those it has expunged with a set of its own. The most important of which is toleration. I tolerate therefore I am. It’s nonsense of course, in that it is self-contradictory by nature — the tolerant cannot tolerate intolerance and are thus no longer tolerant — but it’s also a grand, great lie. Human rights commissions, student unions and leftist activists remind us every day of the authentic meaning of genuine intolerance.

Yet it still plays to the core of secular thinking. The standard argument, taught in universities and passively accepted in popular dialogue, is that because religion believes that it has the truth it is not broad-minded and broad-mindedness is an indication of sophistication and urbanity.

Magdi Allam said yes this Easter. Yes to a truth and no to its rivals. No to Islam, no to atheism. Which has made many Muslims and just as many of their relativist, secular allies extremely angry. An Easter present slightly more important than a chocolate egg or even a teaching course on why nothing really matters.

Chesterton defined bigotry as the inability to form a rational conception of an alternative to a proposition. To be fair, that definition allows the label of “bigot” to be applied to many a believer…but it can also be applied to many, many more on the secular/atheist side of the equation; only genuine agnostics could be considered exempt.

As a person of faith and a committed Catholic, I can nevertheless admit that I may be incorrect in my faith. I nevertheless choose to practice it, in the expectation that I am not wrong…but, certainly, I might just be. I can, to wit, conceive the alternative to the proposition I make by saying that I am a believer, a person of faith.

I’ve yet to met a self-declared atheist who can admit an ability to understand that s/he might likewise be incorrect. At best, one can expect to be told that is irrelevant and also a poor evangelical tool. Of course, the initial question — that is, the ability to rationally conveive the alternative to the atheistic proposition — did not concern Pascal’s musings at all, and the rejection itself (seen, for example, in the Rational Response Squad’s FAQ section) is evidence of the bigotry of the atheist in question.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers! If you enjoyed this article, you may also be interested in some more recent discussions I am having with a pair of atheists named Joel and Sam!