street epistemology

[TheRocketSurgeon]

1. I'm skeptical of the claim that I'm repeating a lie. Evidence plz.

You keep repeating the lie that we don't understand religion (specifically yours, of course), and refusing to listen to us when we tell you what we think/feel as atheists. Instead of saying, "Oh, my mistake!" and then correcting your opinion based on the new information, you simply repeat what you said before, without regard for the people to whom you are speaking. It is a lie, we tell you it is a lie, and you don't seem to care. If I said that Christians are secretly atheists and only pretend to worship a God, and you told me that you sincerely believed, and I kept repeating it anyway, it would make me a liar... and intensely disrespectful, to boot. Yet you call us "angry atheists" when we react with anger to something that would infuriate anyone.

2. I'm skeptical of the claim that because some board members are former Christians, they understand the religion quite well. I find that to be false in my experience. How would you show you understand religion, when you constantly disagree with Christians on what Christianity teaches?

We don't just make the claim that we understand religion because we're former Christians; as you would likely admit, yourself, many Christians have barely cracked open a Bible in their lives. What we actually say is that we (the ones to whom this applies) have studied the Bible and have found that its claims do not match what we learn from other sources, or that the version of Christianity we were taught is based on poor scholarship or ignorance of the history of the Bible and the church. Your assertion that disagreeing with Christianity means we do not understand it is bunkum. We disagree with Christianity because we understand it. I would challenge you to present an element of Christianity you think I have failed to understand, and I will happily explain it to you both from my previous point-of-view (as a former Christian) and how I have come to understand it once I applied information not taught within the church culture.

3. I'm skeptical that I blind myself with the culture and thought-limitations imposed by a system of belief. Evidence plz.

Puh-leeze. Christianity teaches you that there's One Right Way to Live™, ranging from ideas about the nature and "place" of the sexes, to relationships, to which types of sex are acceptable and which are "abomination", and even extending to extra-Biblical principles like opposition to abortion, even though the Bible contains a forced abortion in Numbers chapter 5, performed by priests on a woman suspected by her husband of infidelity. It has clearly taught you that atheists cannot be moral (and a host of other foul traits with which you have tagged us), even though you have no reason to believe that other than your religious indoctrination and the bias with which you approach your examination of atheists. Again, we try to tell you how we really are, but you refuse to listen.

4. I'm skeptical that atheism has no system of belief. I don't mean the dictionary definition, I mean the sociological group. 

We may have some beliefs that are common among us, but if you pay attention on this board, we disagree on nearly every subject imaginable. With few exceptions, we accept the Scientific Method and the findings of scientists, but that's largely because we're not pre-indoctrinated to reject it. Even the group "leaders" you mention, like Dawkins, spend most of their time talking about applying what Sagan called the "Baloney Detector", so we learn to reject the distortions that are common to human pattern-seeking brains (such as observer bias, for instance) and ensure that our ideas are as grounded in reality as possible. That's part of why people talk about their lives changing once they embrace this methodology... you'd be surprised, if you ever honestly examined why you hold certain ideas, at what you accept simply by dent of cultural programming, much of it via religion and/or the "magical thinking" mindset that accompanies it. We reject magical thinking. That's not a system of belief, that's a method of knowing the world.

"Some beliefs that are common among us" would apply to Democrats, to NFL fans, to ex-military members, and pretty much any other group you can name. That doesn't mean there's a "system of belief" to any of those groups. Atheism itself is not a thing-- it is the absence of a thing, belief in gods. That's it. Why is that so hard for you to understand?

5. I'm skeptical of the view that atheism is the absence of belief. We're discussing this in another thread.

Atheism is the absence of belief in gods. Nothing else. I'm not sure why you're wrestling with that concept. Similarly, you and I are both adragonists. We might enjoy stories about them, talk about whether Smaug or Trogdor is the greatest dragon to ever burninate the peasants, but in the end, both you and I know that dragons are imaginary creatures from the minds of human beings. So when you're trying to tell atheists what they believe because of atheism, pause a moment to consider what beliefs you hold as a result of your adragonism, other than to reject the reality of stories about flying, fire-breathing wyrms.

If you will take a moment to consider, with an honest heart, you will realize that both atheism and adragonism only become "things" when surrounded by people who insist that gods or dragons are real. If you were surrounded by devotees of Smaug the Magnificent, you might have to spend a shocking amount of your time explaining that you're an adragonist, but it doesn't mean that any of your other beliefs have changed. In the case of atheism, we reject magical thinking, so some extra-Biblical beliefs will change based on the acceptance of the Scientific Method (etc), but they're all along the lines of the sorts of things that they bust on MythBusters. (Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are both atheists, and the show is largely about applying the Scientific Method to beliefs that people hold which are, as often as not, completely false.)

So please, I ask you as kindly as I can, Delicate. Stop simply launching hatred at us, and consider what you have been taught to think about us that may color how you filter the anecdotal evidence that is presented to you every time you tell us what we "really" think, and we tell you it's simply not true.