Posted: Aug 19, 2014 8:29 am
tuco wrote:The point I am making is that in my opinion what is sometimes being called militant attitude towards religion, on this board and elsewhere, is counter-productive. To me, its not about privilege, its about most efficient way to deal with stuff we do not approve of and would like to see changed.
I've heard this a lot. I've also asked people why they believe this. I haven't gotten a good answer that doesn't boil down to politics in the general sense, matters of policy. It simply turns out to be just a feeling, a general idea that if we were all just nice, things would be peachy. Perhaps you can give a better reason; I have yet to hear one.
It seems, emotionally, very pleasant. Just be nice. Very enlightenment and civilized and democratic. I have, however, come to distrust such emotions, because they fail a lot. I could go into the Cognitive Science aspect, but I won't yet. For now, I'll stick to simple empiricism.
Set the wabak machine to the late 1970s. It had its own problems, such as disco and bad hair, but the US was a pretty secular place. Birth control seemed safe; the Christians had not set their sights even on abortion as a politically divisive issue. Evolution was taught everywhere without any fuss. The Moral Majority had yet to be formed explicitly. If people thought about Islam, they generally thought about it in positive terms. There was some concern with Iran, and the hostage crisis worsened it, and there were some murmurings about the oil embargo, but it was very low key compared to now.
Most atheists were nice. Madalyn Murray O'Hair was the primary exception, and most atheists thought she was an embarrassment. Prominent atheists like Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan were gentlemanly. Richard Dawkins ignored religion, as largely did Christopher Hitchens. James Randi hadn't even come out as an atheist (which he did before coming out as gay).
The next two decades saw an unbelievable amount of religious encroachment into the public sphere and an amount of threat by religion that people thought had gone away decades prior. It's important to note that no President before Jimmy Carter made a big deal about their religion, and all Presidents after have. The last event was some trouble about Kennedy's catholicism. Eisenhower's religiosity, as exemplified by the change to the national motto and the Pledge of Allegiance, was pretty low key.
Then, of course, 9/11 happened. The so-called New Atheists got angry and came out.
My conclusion, though I vacillate, is that being nice and respectful, however many warm fuzzes it may give, simply did not work.
Since then, in polls, the number of admitted atheists has been growing. The number of the very religious also has, but this is a continuation of a trend that had been going on since the 1970s, as the Baby Boomers tired of vague spiritualism and wanted something with more teeth in it.
The more aggressive atheism is doing something. I'm not sure it will work, but I am sure that the niceness did not.