You May Be Right, But You’re Still An Asshole
The title of this post is one of my favorite lines for The Big Lebowksi, a film full of brilliant one-liners. You may have noticed the line in the comment section of this site, as it seems to be an appropriate response to 95& of most online discourse — well, at least the second part of it — but more increasingly, it seems like an appropriate response to the resurgent atheist movement.
I say this, mind you, as a second-generation atheist myself. My father was a staunch believer in science and reason and passed those values down to me, and in these frightening times of religious extremism around the globe, I share the desire to push back against reactionary religious forces, ignorance and hate, homophobia and fear, holy war and Jihad.
But responses such as this suggest that the resurgent atheist movement has gone off the rails:
The sturdy white sign in Rockville’s Central Park asking passers-by to “Imagine No Religion” has generated some calls, a few of them angry, to town hall. There have also been calls to local clergymen and discussion in businesses along Rockville’s West Main Street.
The sign — some call it a billboard — was erected on Dec. 1 by the Connecticut Valley Atheists, and as of Thursday was the only display erected in the town’s center to mark the holiday season, aside from a Christmas tree just across from the town hall and some garland and white lights wrapped around light poles.
The structure the atheists placed in the park features on two sides a dramatic image of the sun shining between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, framed by the words “Imagine No Religion.” The image of the towers is meant to convey that without religion the towers would still be standing, said Dennis P. Himes, a Vernon resident and coordinator for Connecticut Valley Atheists. On the third side, facing the town hall, is information about the winter solstice.
(via Pharyngula)
What precisely is the intention here? Does anyone in their right mind — with any understanding of basic rhetorical methods — think that making an ugly 9-11 reference during the holiday season for a number of religious traditions, along with a half-assed reference to an oft-misunderstood and incredibly loaded 30-year-old song, will accomplish anything other than polarizing people? Will this encourage discussion about the hegemony of religion in our culture? For a group of people who who profess to exalt reason, atheists need a better grasp of public relations (maybe they can take some notes from Al Qaeda.)
But more fundamentally, when did it become such an imperative to engage in the discourse as a complete and utter asshole? Has Fox News and Bill O’Reilly lowered the national discussion to such a level that everyone feels the need to shout louder in the din? Why are the dunderheaded and unethical, loud and obnoxious Michael Moore and MoveOn.org the most recognized voices of the progressive left? Why should atheists have to rally around obnoxious, ineffective egotists like Richard Dawkins and (ugh) Christopher Hitchens?
The desire to be the loud and ugly voice to shout over all the other ones is tempting, but it’s a zero sum game. You may get your voice heard, but in the end, you’re just another Walter Sobjchek in The Big Lebowksi, the ugly, alienating ignoramus with guns in hands and not a thought between the ears. We can do better.
9 Comments »
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Er, that’s supposed to be “Christ can suck my hog …” I’m sure Chris could too, whoever he is, but he probably exists.
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Being provocative is an important way of getting attention and inspiring discussion, but I think that the 9-11 reference is way too “on the nose” to be effective — it’s a bludgeoning rhetorical device, and that approach really only works as a way of reselling unrest and dissent to the already-converted.
For a group that desperately needs to overhaul its public standing (most polls show atheism as being on par with nihilism in most Americans’ minds), Hitchens, Dawkins, and this sort of thing just seems to be doing more harm than good, and this sort of sensationalism undermines the ideals of rationality that atheism prides itself upon.
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Paul M Davis (author) -
Well, it can be difficult to put your point of view forward in a way that doesn’t offend most people when the most basic element of your point of view is that most people are at best misguided and at worst delusional (as a vegan atheist, I have this in spades).
I guess I see your point on the 9-11 thing, but a lot of us are just sick of apologizing and pussyfooting around. And you’re right, it’s not going to convince any die-hard religious people of anything (could anything?), but there’s also the - I suspect rather large - middle ground of people who really don’t believe in anything religious, but continue to pay lip service to it because that’s what people do. I think it’s good for those folks to see that they’re not alone. And hey, maybe some of them are better graphic designers?
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True — fair enough re: the vegan and the atheism thing. My vegan wife deals with this sort of thing all the time — unchecked and unsolicited aggression from coworkers just for eating lunch. I get some of that as a vegetarian, but the vegan thing seems to just work people into paroxysms even when the person isn’t making a point of it. Just the existence of veganism or atheism being an alternative puts people immediately on the defensive.
Atheism is a bold statement to make, that many of the people who occupy the middle ground are uncomfortable making — people are far more comfortable identifying as “agnostic”, which I consider to be a copout, though I know plenty of people who would probably identify as such if they had to. I agree that we need to make our point of view heard and noticed increasingly, and stand in opposition to the religion-driven insanity that considers hastening armageddon to be its primary goal. Our side needs a much better design and PR team, however.
//Paul M Davis (author) -
An interesting point on the vegan=atheism parallel:
I am a relatively conscientious meat eater (when I go shopping I always buy free-range organic, and I’m really trying hard not to eat beef anymore, and I’m generally aware of how destructive to the earth and my health eating meat is) and a self described agnostic (personally I feel that stating empirically that I KNOW that there is No god is as silly and borderline dogmatic as most organized religions - but I’ll admit that could stem from ignorance of atheism as an actual philosophy vs. a ideology espoused by pissed-off pseudo anarchist 20 yr olds who are simply reacting to their stale middle class presbylutheropalian upbringing) (wow that was a long sentence)
Having grown up in Santa Cruz, I have been surrounded by vegetarians/vegans for ages, and have been involved in a lot of lively discussion trying to suss out (i think) the way I really feel on the topic, and I’ve noticed something that must be very irritating for veggies -
Whenever someone in a culture like ours here in S.C. finds out that you’re vegetarian, they always feel an immediate need to rationalize and qualify their non-vegetarian status the exact same way that I did mine in my opening sentence. It doesn’t matter if you as a non-carnivore give any percentage of a shit about my eating habits - I’m not discussing the topic or arguing in favor of meat eating to you, I’m rehashing my argument to myself because on some level, every time I eat meat in the presence of a vegetarian I feel a twinge of S.C. hippy guilt. When I was a younger man this manifested in a lot of bullshit Dennis Leary influenced macho chest beating - but to be fair the vegetarians in my high-school were very over the top Lisa-Simpson- stealing-Homer’s-roast-pig aggro about the fact that they were vegetarian - when you’re that age, you think everything you do DEFINES you ‘cause you don’t have a clue who you are or what you’re doing.
In much the same way, this could at least account for the hostility “middle ground agnostic” folks (and I do include myself in this) feel towards both religious zealots and die-hard rational humanist athiests alike. To an agnostic they’re both equally alien viewpoints, and - more importantly - they are both more admirable. Atheists and born again Christians both know where they stand, as do vegans and Nascar watching Dennis Leary loving McDonald’s enthusiasts. The only thing us guilt-ridden try-not-to-eat-too-much-meat-aterians/agnostics know for certain is that we don’t really know where we stand. And like any human seeing another human possess something they can’t have, we resent you fuckers for it.
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JJ -
Well put, JJ. Usually what I encounter among omnivores when the word ‘vegan’ or ‘vegetarian’ comes up is just total assholery and aggression (although this is on the Internet; in person it would probably be very different) and people saying vegans are terrible people, and going on and on and on about how delicious meat is, and yadda yadda. But this probably comes from the same place as the rationalizing you’re talking about. But we digress …
I recommend you read up a bit on atheism, and you might find you’re more of one than you think. Most atheists, being very rational people, grant that they don’t know that there’s no god; we just live by the assumption that there isn’t one, because the odds of there being a god (and of that god being the Judeo-christian “you’re going to hell if you don’t worship me/my son” variety) are vanishingly tiny, and the issue wouldn’t have even come up if there weren’t people telling their children and those people telling their children, etc., etc. that this one book was The Word (how’s that for a long sentence?). So the agnostic argument that we can never really know, and thus that there’s an equal chance that I’m right and that Mike Huckabee is right is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a load of crap.
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I think one thing that all of us can hold hands and smile and completely agree on is that Mormons are completely fucking insane. If being Agnostic means accepting that Mormonism has even the tiniest sliver of a possibility of being the one true religion, and that we’re all born dead and we’re going to outerspace with NASCAR American jesus and alcohol is evil, then Agnosticism is as retarded as those crazy-ass Scope drinking polygamist freaks.
Seriously, if you’re reading this and you’re mormon, I’m talking about YOU. GET HELP.//JJ -
JJ — in response to your comment about the Santa Cruz vegan/vegetarian community, I’m completely there with you. Even though I now consider myself a vegetarian now, I think the SC community is grandfathered into a sense of liberal entitlement that is just as fundamentalist in its own way as any stereotypical conservative/X-ian community.
The thing is, SC (and the Bay Area) community presents an incredibly skewed view of these issues, and their place/relevance in the national discourse. I am the absolutely last person to push my current eating choices on others, yet here in Chicago, the very omission of meat from my lunch plate at work garners aggressive responses from my coworker.
Oh, and yes, though I hesitate to single out one religious group from any other, Mormonism really brings the crazy, but not quite to the defree of Scientology. I think Scientology is a interesting case study in how made-up stories can, in the course of only a few decades, become considered by a community to be the “Word of G’d” — or space aliens, or whatever you choose to believe.
//Paul M Davis (author)
I don’t know. I see your point, and I’d rather the atheists always be reasoned and well-mannered, but I think there’s a difference between taking a strong tone and putting your point forward somewhat forcefully on the one hand, and waving a gun around in a bowling alley on the other. I actually really liked the Dawkins and Hitchens books (and I never thought I’d be back on Hitchens’s side after his Iraq war drum-beating), and I don’t have a problem with this sign - apart from the crappy design of it. It’s not saying “religion is totally stupid,” or “you religious folks are morons,” or “Chris can suck my hog - oh wait, no he can’t, he’s dead” or anything along those lines. It’s a simple message, and if it gets a couple people thinking, I think that’s worth it. Granted, the odds of it getting anyone thinking are slim, but I suppose it’s worth a shot.
I think you’re equating atheists’ saying “hi, here we are, we don’t believe your fairytales” with being a loud, ugly voice a la O’Reilly, and I don’t agree.
And yes, I’m still an asshole.
13 December 2007 at 1:48 pm