Yes, I know I should be frantically working on my thesis, but I’m taking a break to post some news I promised I’d share. On Wednesday I wrote an article on my experiences as an atheist at Purdue and the Society of Non-Theists. The overwhelming response was people emailing me, thanking me for writing it, which is absolutely awesome. I also found wonderful write up by a fellow Purdue student about how my experiences mirror his of coming to the Midwest as a Mormon:
When I lived in Utah most of the kids in school where Mormon. In Tennessee I could count the number of LDS students on one hand, two of them being myself and my sister, out of a student population of about 2000. And with Utah’s reputation of being “Mormon country” whenever someone learned where I was from the conversation would usually go something like this:
Person: “Where are you from?”
Me: “Utah”
Person: “Are you Mormon?”
Me: “Yes”
Person: (In disbelief and with a serious tone) “Are you going to have 10 wives when you get older?”And the multiple wives question was usually just the tip of the ice berg. I could not believe how many strange outlandish questions I got asked about being LDS. It got to the point where I almost dreaded telling someone else I was LDS because of the various stereotypes and nonsense people would then assume about me. This was also when I began to meet LDS members who have had their families and friends shut them out of their lives because they became Mormon. I also met a girl here at Purdue who told us of her conversion and how her parents had cut off all contact with her because of her decision to become LDS.
So after reading Jennifer’s article I began to relate to what she was talking about. I could even relate to the preachers who stand out on the mall preaching hellfire and damnation on all those they disagree with because, surprise, they think Mormons are going to hell as well. Whenever you see one of the street preachers holding a sign with a list of “damned” groups of people, look at the names and you will see Mormons listed along with atheists, pedophiles, democrats, and homosexuals.
While we’ll probably never agree on theology, it’s wonderful that others understand what being an atheist is like, and realize we can be more similar than they might have thought. Responses like this make me think my article was a great success!
I wonder where in Tenn he was? I know that up on Signal Moutain there was a LDS temple.
I’m glad a letter came back that is from an unexpected viewpoint (at least to me)! Congratulations on raising awareness and adding something worthwhile to the thought pool at Purdue.
Shawn,I was in Murfreesboro.
Wow, Jake, I didn’t think you were that old.
Ah, you were a bit north of me than.
I think feeling alienated from the group, and misunderstood for one reason or another, is a pretty universal human experience. I bet even Tom Cruise and Pope Benedict feel that way from time to time.
ok, i can’t stop laughing. maybe cause i’m high, but still. it should be a band name, or album title at the very least. “Atheists, pedophiles, democrats, and homosexuals.” lol! with lead singer “Mormon polygamist.” snort.
To be honest, while I appreciate the sentiment to a certain degree, to a much greater degree I find I’d rather not have any commonalities with Mormons and the such-like…Perhaps that’s not a very nice thing to say.
Letters like yours can help some people realize that there are others like them, but they can also open the eyes of at least some religious believers to the possibility that atheists are human. It is strange that we’d even have to consider such things in this day and age, but we do. One of the things I liked about your original letter was that it helped to humanize atheists. At least here in the bible belt, this remains an important task.
mcbender,Could you explain your position a little more?
To be frank… I’m being an insensitive prick and expressing something along the lines of a superiority complex. Here’s what I was saying in a nutshell, and it isn’t very nice:People who feel beleaguered because they’re in an *irrational* minority deserve it because they’re irrational. The more external pressure is directed at those views, the more likely the holder is to reconsider them… or, failing that, at least the less likely the person is to *really* subscribe to the views in any sense more significant than, say, the Anglicans do.I’m not for tolerance. I’d like to see all religions relegated to that place in society (as Dan Dennett has put it, religion could become something people felt obligated to apologise for, like smoking; I’d like to see that happen). As such, I don’t really care if we have religious minorities empathising with our position – it’s counterproductive to what *I* see as our overall goal (but many if not most will disagree with me).I’m curious what the reaction would be if we were to take the letter Jen presented and use grep to replace “Mormon” with something like “Scientologist”. Would we still be saying how wonderful it is that these people are coming to understand our point of view? Probably not; we’d be lambasting their ignorance for believing in Xenu and making jokes about “hydrogen bombs in volcanoes”. Yet the situations are identical: it’s intellectually dishonest for us to talk about how wonderful this is in the case of Mormonism when we wouldn’t in the case of some other demonstrably false belief system.Prating about “isn’t it nice how we can each learn to understand where the other is coming from” is counterproductive and harmful, as I see it. It’s also intellectually dishonest.I am very outspoken about my atheism (or, more generally, scepticism) and I make no bones about the fact that I look down on people who are not atheists and/or not sceptics. It’s gotten me into a lot of very nasty arguments, and lost me a lot of friends, but I have no problem with that: it comes with the territory.I disagree quite strongly with Jen that this person “understands what being an atheist is like” or that “we’re more similar than we thought”. No. The differences are very profound and to make light of them is intellectual dishonesty.It’s rather late at night and I don’t know if this is coming across at all in the way I intended it (it doesn’t help that I’m procrastinating from writing a paper either); this is very hastily written and I think it likely it’s rather poorly written. I think there’s a very real chance I’ll end up wishing I’d eaten my foot rather than phrasing things this way.
This is my new favorite blog.
Tennessee is in the Midwest?
“I’m not for tolerance. I’d like to see all <blank> relegated to that place…””I look down on people who are not <blank> …”Just like every other fundamentalist.</blank></blank>
I am not a fundamentalist (if you’d called me an extremist or a radical I may have owned the label, but “fundamentalist” is a misuse of the word), because the proper evidence would change my mind. In principle, I’m open to that happening, and that makes all the difference.In practice, however, I shall fall back on that statement of Victor Stenger’s (paraphrased): “absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence, but absence of evidence THAT SHOULD BE THERE is indeed evidence of absence”. Stenger likes to say that, by this principle, religious claims can be positively disproved – and I think I agree with him. A universe with a god would be a very different place from one without, and it is currently indistinguishable from the latter…However, as I’ve said, producing convincing evidence (it would have to be extremely impressive) for god-belief would change my mind on that. In the pedantic sense, then, I am agnostic (in the same sense in which I am agnostic about gravity or evolution).It would not, however, change my stance at all. If a god existed, I would consider it my moral duty (in the Kantian sense) to oppose it in whatever way I could. If a god existed and were anything like the religious people like to claim it is, I would do everything in my power to undermine and defeat it even if it were ultimately futile, and even if (or especially if) I faced hell for doing so. To do anything else, to admire or even worship such an evil being (especially if motivated by fear of the consequences), would be to fundamentally undermine the principles of morality, and I cannot respect those who do so.It would take a lot more than the Christian god’s existence to make a Christian of me – ethically I can say nothing else, even under the threat of hell.I fail to see how this makes me a fundamentalist (and suspect you are writing under a common misconception of what that term means). As I said earlier, I am in principle open to changing my mind about the facts, which is exactly what fundamentalism is not.
I just wanted to add one additional point:In another sense also, I am not a fundamentalist. Fundamentalism implies sycophancy – belief on the basis of authority (e.g. in the inerrancy of a ‘holy’ text). It should be obvious that, however repellent or extreme you find my position, that it is if nothing else a position I’ve arrived at as the result of deliberation. I am not mindlessly believing what I am told by somebody else or some text, but rather I’ve thought out my position on my own. That is the antithesis of fundamentalism.If you disagree with my specific position, that’s fine – I’d welcome the disagreement and would be interested to have a discussion about it. If you resort to attacking my character by calling me a fundamentalist, we will get nowhere.
Wow . . . mcbender . . . all I can say is wow!
I knew someone who spoke the way you do — so passionately, arrogantly, and ignorantly — I’ve watched this person destroy his life and is now a lonely, sad man in and out of mental institutions. Let go of your bitterness and hatred. You are free to believe what you believe as others are. BTW — unless you truly study and learn about a religion, don’t fool yourself into thinking that you really understand it.
You’re assuming I haven’t made such a study, which would be false. I’ve done a significant amount of reading, which included religious texts, and interacted with more religious people than I’d honestly care to remember. Many of them were members of my own family.That said, I know that’s not what you mean. When I was younger I was a very religious Jew in some sense – I’m not honestly sure whether I believed it or not, but I definitely wanted to and I was very involved. I distinctly remember being told by many of the people at synagogue that there was a consensus of expectation that I would end up as a rabbi. I can’t say I know what it’s like for all religious people, but I have been there in some sense.What happened? Ironically, it’s best summarised by a Christian bible quotation: “when I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I gave up childish things.”I find it interesting how, inevitably, this criticism comes up whenever someone tries to criticise religion. “Oh, you haven’t studied it enough, you don’t really understand it.” Funny how they almost never say that to people when they join up with religions – then it’s “all you have to do is accept Christ in your heart and you’ll be saved” or some similar nonsense. There’s a huge double standard between the amount of study you’re expected to have when rejecting versus accepting a religion (which is ironic, because the burden of proof goes the other way).I do tend to go on, so I won’t respond to the rest of your concern trolling. I don’t honestly see the point.