Pride and prejudice
So, I'm pissed off. Only slightly though, I'm too tired and too caught up in actual problems that I don't have the energy to be actually pissed off. Still. Irritated would be a good word.
The thing is: people often forget that I've been an atheist for ten years, before I did the whole 'falls-off-horse-on-route-to-Damascus' thing. And most of my ideas on how the world works and how it should work were formed during that period, since my entire uni carreer falls into that time slot.
On the interwebz, but also in real life amongst colleagues and friends, I often feel that people reduce me to the whole 'catholic religion teacher' thing. Friends sometimes become uncomfortable when the subject of my faith comes up, mostly because very few of them are religious; and colleagues often react with hostility, defending themselves while I would never attack. I'm not a missionary, I'm a teacher. There's a difference, I think.
On the interwebz, it's mostly hostility, and belittlement. Nothing I say gets taken seriously, or it takes an incredible amount of time to get some credit, and then one poorly phrased sentence can take that all away.
And while I shouldn't care about people's opinions, I do get very upset when people assume that because you openly take one position, you are unable to understand another position.
What triggered this little ranty-thingy, is a remark I made about how nonsensical it would be for atheists to feel the need to immediately worship one scientist because he happens to be a best-selling author or something or other (I've never seen the appeal in Dawkins, but then again I tend to not like sociobiology as a theory, as I believe I've said before). Anyhoo, I said atheism was a negative stance, answering no to one single question (is there a God?) and this is not enough to formulate a decisive world view.
Of course, this was interpreted as me saying atheists have no world view. Which is clearly not what I said.
Atheism (and theism for that matter) are not a positive formulation of a world view, they are a theological or metaphysical position on the basis of which a world view can be developed or postulated, depending on what you'd like to have your world be like. But there is little to nothing in atheism (or theism) that gives you actual answers, or suggests a positive project.
Compare it to Nietzsches discription of nihillism: this isn't a world view, it's just an analysis of where science and philosophy (and society) have arrived in his day and age. A lot of people who read Nietzsches work will mistake his discription for his world view, while it's clearly not. Nietzsche formulates very positive answers to this problem of nihillism, and that's where his world view is.
Similarly, Dawkins' atheism is not his world view. That's a kind of sociobiological materialism, I suppose, and his answers to all the important questions are to be found there. But atheism can also lead to humanism, objectivism (God forbid) or the raging existentialism of Sartre and Camus. It can lead to the Great Romantic Pessimism of Schopenhauer, which has nothing at all to do with Richard Dawkins. So to think that just because you discovered God is dead and no one cares, you have to suddenly leap at the chance to become a slave to exact science, is indeed nonsensical.
For me, my atheism was combined with a great love for all things postmodern: in the absence of any deities, man created the fabric of the world from language. And that hasn't changed one bit: it's still the basis on which I operate. For me, Derrida is as important as any gospel or even more important, because that's where my basic world view lies. Does my passion for postmodern thinking follow from my atheism? Of course not, to think so would be nonsensical.
People who know me well know how much I hate to be underestimated, especially when I think it may be rightly so. But in this case, what angers me is that I'm labouring against a prejudice that I'll never be able to fully overcome. Which fucking sucks.
The thing is: people often forget that I've been an atheist for ten years, before I did the whole 'falls-off-horse-on-route-to-Damascus' thing. And most of my ideas on how the world works and how it should work were formed during that period, since my entire uni carreer falls into that time slot.
On the interwebz, but also in real life amongst colleagues and friends, I often feel that people reduce me to the whole 'catholic religion teacher' thing. Friends sometimes become uncomfortable when the subject of my faith comes up, mostly because very few of them are religious; and colleagues often react with hostility, defending themselves while I would never attack. I'm not a missionary, I'm a teacher. There's a difference, I think.
On the interwebz, it's mostly hostility, and belittlement. Nothing I say gets taken seriously, or it takes an incredible amount of time to get some credit, and then one poorly phrased sentence can take that all away.
And while I shouldn't care about people's opinions, I do get very upset when people assume that because you openly take one position, you are unable to understand another position.
What triggered this little ranty-thingy, is a remark I made about how nonsensical it would be for atheists to feel the need to immediately worship one scientist because he happens to be a best-selling author or something or other (I've never seen the appeal in Dawkins, but then again I tend to not like sociobiology as a theory, as I believe I've said before). Anyhoo, I said atheism was a negative stance, answering no to one single question (is there a God?) and this is not enough to formulate a decisive world view.
Of course, this was interpreted as me saying atheists have no world view. Which is clearly not what I said.
Atheism (and theism for that matter) are not a positive formulation of a world view, they are a theological or metaphysical position on the basis of which a world view can be developed or postulated, depending on what you'd like to have your world be like. But there is little to nothing in atheism (or theism) that gives you actual answers, or suggests a positive project.
Compare it to Nietzsches discription of nihillism: this isn't a world view, it's just an analysis of where science and philosophy (and society) have arrived in his day and age. A lot of people who read Nietzsches work will mistake his discription for his world view, while it's clearly not. Nietzsche formulates very positive answers to this problem of nihillism, and that's where his world view is.
Similarly, Dawkins' atheism is not his world view. That's a kind of sociobiological materialism, I suppose, and his answers to all the important questions are to be found there. But atheism can also lead to humanism, objectivism (God forbid) or the raging existentialism of Sartre and Camus. It can lead to the Great Romantic Pessimism of Schopenhauer, which has nothing at all to do with Richard Dawkins. So to think that just because you discovered God is dead and no one cares, you have to suddenly leap at the chance to become a slave to exact science, is indeed nonsensical.
For me, my atheism was combined with a great love for all things postmodern: in the absence of any deities, man created the fabric of the world from language. And that hasn't changed one bit: it's still the basis on which I operate. For me, Derrida is as important as any gospel or even more important, because that's where my basic world view lies. Does my passion for postmodern thinking follow from my atheism? Of course not, to think so would be nonsensical.
People who know me well know how much I hate to be underestimated, especially when I think it may be rightly so. But in this case, what angers me is that I'm labouring against a prejudice that I'll never be able to fully overcome. Which fucking sucks.