The Hard Sell

[tongodeon]

I've heard - often, from lots of different people - that atheists like Dawkins or Hitchens or the other atheist horsemen are rude, shrill, belittling, dickish, abrasive, and generally offensive. Fine, they're awful. Who's good? If they're negative examples, who in present or past history can serve as a positive example of what to do

Comments

[serai1]

Easy - Carl Sagan. He was someone deeply committed to science and rational thinking, who nonetheless managed not to be either rude, shrill or condescending. He often said he understood the impulse to religion very well even though he himself did not share in any religious beliefs, and showed a lot of sympathy for those who did. And not only did he made it clear that he felt people would be better off without religion, but was also able to explain, in precise and accessible terms just why he felt that way, and the reasons for it. He not only made science understandable to ordinary people, he presented clear terms for why it was superior - all this without making people feel stupid, belittled, or ridiculous.

I'm a very religious person myself, but I'm clear about my religion being a symbolic system that uses metaphor, poetry and imagery to put into satisfying order all those things that I, as a human, will never be able to understand or encompass. I'm certainly not egotistical enough to think that humanity is ever going to be able to answer the largest questions, and I don't believe that science and religion even deal with the same things. Those that do - the religious people who try to "scientifically" explain the physical world and the science-oriented atheists who try to debunk religion as if it can only be taken literally - are working at loggerheads, in my opinion. Each group is also dismissing out of hand everything that can be truly enriching and ennobling about the other side, and sometimes even their own side.

This is why I miss Prof. Sagan so much, feel his absence so keenly. The chasm between religion and science seemed to widen so much farther and with so much more rancor after he died, and I think it had a lot to do with the absence of that voice that everybody knew, that calm, rational, polite point of view. I wanted to like Dawkins and his type, since fundamentalism of any kind is extremely puzzling and unsettling to me, but unfortunately I do find them to be unpleasant, mostly because they completely discount the idea that religion can be anything other than blinkered, literalistic belief in fairy tales used as a cover-up for rancor and hatred. In doing so, they are taking the fundamentalists at their word that they are the only truly "religious" people who exist, and the rest of us are not to be dealt with at all. When I hear the sneering talk about "religion", I simply tune out, because I know that anyone talking that way is simply functioning on a plane that is just as fundamentalist as their opponents - they're just talking from the other side of the same wall. No, thank you.

[angel_boi]

some very nice points & good observations