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

[xiphias]

Many of us theists are theistic by an act of will. That's no secret -- that's what "faith" is. That's what the term MEANS.

Whether a god or gods exist or no, comfort based on belief in them exists, and, taking away that belief takes away that comfort. You say it's hollow -- but it's COMFORT. Dawkins is trying to take comfort away from people who are using it for comfort.

The joy of being part of the natural world isn't restricted to either atheists or theists. But theists have one more bulwark against the crushing nausea of the awareness of mortality.

When I'm in a non-theistic phase, I spend many hours a night in cold stark terror, gripped by nausea as I ponder the concepts of my own non-existence. It seems to me that there are a lot of atheists who just don't experience that, and don't understand that people DO.

When, as an act of will, and of faith, I DO believe in something larger than myself in which I will, in some manner, have a continuity as self, then I DON'T experience that nausea.

Someone better have a damn good reason for wanting to consign me and millions of other people to hours of bleak nausea every night before they go ahead and do that. It's like proselytizing atheists don't see the COST of winning the argument -- they think that there would be no cost to people losing their faith. It's like they don't understand what the VALUE of theistic belief is in the first place.

And that's an entirely separate issue from making dumb or dangerous decisions based on religion -- religion and theism are separable phenomena.

[mmcirvin]

Someone better have a damn good reason for wanting to consign me and millions of other people to hours of bleak nausea every night before they go ahead and do that.

You don't think there are people losing sleep over the possibility of eternal punishment in Hell for the doubts they're having about the existence of God? A lot of religions don't have this feature, but for the ones that do, it's a nausea-inducer in its own right. You might argue that it would be better to lead these people to a gentler form of theism, but if atheism is the direction they're heading in and atheism doesn't torture them, I don't see why.

[zadcat]

Before you were born, what did you experience? That's what will happen after you die. It is no more to be feared than going to sleep.

Theistic belief offers help that does not come. I can't see founding a life on that, but if you must, go to.

[xiphias]

It is no more to be feared than going to sleep.

And that's where the insomnia comes in.