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

[mmcirvin]

Dawkins' shrillest moments tend to be in British newspaper op-eds, like the famous one he wrote shortly after the September 11th attacks about how suicide terrorists are what you'll get when people believe in the afterlife. Agree with it or no, I don't think it was something Sagan would have written.

[mmcirvin]

...Though, admittedly, I haven't read "The Demon-Haunted World"; it's possible something along those lines might have been in there.

(Personally, I think suicide terrorists are a specific example of the general kind of thing you get when political grievances and social alienation collide with the desire of young men to make sweeping romantic gestures. I'm not sure the promise of afterlife reward is really that big a part of it; there's a tendency on the part of skeptics to think other people are reasoning more logically than they actually are.)

[spiritualmonkey]

(Thought this might be a bit of a derail, but the subject of "Does religion instigate suicide terrorism" has come, so I thought it relevant.)

Dr. Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has been keeping a comprehensive database on suicide bombings, and in his analysis the major motivating factor in suicide bombing is foreign occupation, not religion.

Religion is a complicating factor in that foreign occupations that have given rise to suicide bombing campaigns almost always have a religious difference between the occupied and occupier, which allows for the occupier to be demonized in particularly effective ways.

But according to Pape, Suicide terrorism has a very distinct logic and strategic objective:[T]o compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered the suicide vest, and they are/were a largely Marxist group. But they were also drawn from the Hindu community that was in conflict with/being oppressed by the Sinhalese

[mmcirvin]

Yeah, I was actually thinking about Pape's work when I wrote that comment.

[tongodeon]

like the famous one he wrote shortly after the September 11th attacks about how suicide terrorists are what you'll get when people believe in the afterlife. Agree with it or no, I don't think it was something Sagan would have written.

Dawkins maybe a shrill dick and said something that Sagan, a non-shrill non-dick, would have never said, but that doesn't answer my question. Is there an example of someone communicating this message in a non-shrill, non-dickish way? Is there a way to respectfully, non-dickishly point out that the promise of an afterlife is often an incentive to squander this life?

I accept that Sagan wouldn't have said it. I don't accept that anything Sagan wouldn't say shouldn't be said.