I notice something today upon which I feel moved to remark. As a card-carrying weirdo, I have, many times down through the years, sought groups of other weirdos with whom to commune, but have never maintained a membership in said groups, because said groups (with one rare exception) all seem to spend the entirety of their collective energy on how stupid / misguided / evil non-members are. What, I ask you, is up with this?
For example. I made the decision at an early age not to reproduce. Some years ago, I looked into the "child-free by choice" groups, curious about other peoples' motivations and experience with that decision. What I found instead was a bunch of supercilious child-haters who spent all their time talking about how great it was not to have children, how stupid people who had children were, and what a raw deal they got from the world because they were so special. What the hell?
Same thing with the atheists. No real discussion of non-religious concepts and how to get along respectfully in a majority-religious world, just an endless savaging of religious ideology and its adherents.
For the record, I actually sort of like religious people and children. I'd go so far as to say that there are some of them in the world that I even love and respect. Yes, I do my share of pissing on people who don't share my world view, it's just that -- I dunno, when I go looking for community, I hope to find something more than my own limited frustration reflected, and I've been uniformly disappointed.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of bitching about how wrong these people are. I throw myself upon the pyre in order to point out the greater irony: groups formulated to support a separation from something shouldn't spend the entirety of their existence focused upon that something.
For example. I made the decision at an early age not to reproduce. Some years ago, I looked into the "child-free by choice" groups, curious about other peoples' motivations and experience with that decision. What I found instead was a bunch of supercilious child-haters who spent all their time talking about how great it was not to have children, how stupid people who had children were, and what a raw deal they got from the world because they were so special. What the hell?
Same thing with the atheists. No real discussion of non-religious concepts and how to get along respectfully in a majority-religious world, just an endless savaging of religious ideology and its adherents.
For the record, I actually sort of like religious people and children. I'd go so far as to say that there are some of them in the world that I even love and respect. Yes, I do my share of pissing on people who don't share my world view, it's just that -- I dunno, when I go looking for community, I hope to find something more than my own limited frustration reflected, and I've been uniformly disappointed.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of bitching about how wrong these people are. I throw myself upon the pyre in order to point out the greater irony: groups formulated to support a separation from something shouldn't spend the entirety of their existence focused upon that something.
Regarding Atheism, Sam Harris talks about this a fair bit in some of the interviews of him that I've watched. He rightly refers to it as a "PR problem" - namely, how does one build a movement around something that's not a belief system and has no dogma?
ReplyDeleteAtheism is nothing more than the default position towards any claim to knowledge that's not supported by anything. Putting it another way, the spine of theism is "god X exists" and the spine of atheism is "prove it".
So it's a bit of an uphill battle to rally around "prove it".
I think what we're seeing right now is a kind of Affirmative Action movement for atheism - the atheist community is reacting a lot like other minority groups in the past at the beginning of their civil rights movements. You tend to react a bit oblong in the direction of demanding equal rights/representation/protection under the law at first. Then you work out the rational arguments, etc. later after you've first forced the powers that be to listen to you.
Even I have slowed down my activism as an atheist. After a while, you've heard the argument from ignorance countered enough times that you start to lose interest in further examples.
Also, I see the end goal of atheism as eradicating the need for it. Once it becomes generally acceptable to not believe, hook/line/sinker everything every Tom/Dick/Harry tells you is true, there won't need to be movements like atheism.
Meanwhile, what I'm hoping is that the political situation of atheists eventually improves enough that we don't have to fight so hard anymore. At that point, hopefully we'll be regarded as plain old joes, just like other minority groups who've had similar successes are these days.
By the way, I didn't really address the core of your remark previously. I intended to express complete alignment with your disappointment here.
ReplyDeleteI think the phenomenon you're talking about is primarily social - things like philosophical orientations can serve as markers of membership in a particular social group.
In that role, however, they can become kind of self-perpetuating - the need to maintain social cohesion can outlast the original novelty.
Putting it another way, it can be drained of its original content and end up merely being repeated or submitted to for the mere purpose of maintaining group membership.
I think that's what happens in a lot of cases where the rallying point is something like your example - persons who've decided not to replicate themselves.
It's like, you can only get so much mileage out of that. I don't want kids, here's why and well.... you just can't rehash that an infinite number of times before it long since gets old...