Atheism evangelism followup

[dougo]

I posted a comment on hahathor's post about evangelical atheists, and since I never followed up on my post about it here, I figured I'd repost part of the comment here.

The thing that spurred me into asking [whether atheist evangelism was any better than religious evangelism] was this: I saw a documentary about evangelists where someone explained that, if you truly believe that someone you love will go to Hell because they are not a Christian, then shouldn't you do everything you can to prevent that loved one from going to Hell? It does make logical sense, if you accept the assumptions of Sin and Hell. And it made me think, hypothetically speaking, if I truly believe that someone I love is doing damage to themselves because of their religion, then shouldn't I do everything I can to convince them otherwise? For instance, suppose I knew a Christian Scientist who was suffering from a treatable illness, but who refused medical treatment in favor of prayer. If I cared about this person, shouldn't I try to convince them that medical treatment is far more likely to be effective than just prayer? Maybe this doesn't count as evangelism, since I'm not trying to convert them completely to atheism, just away from a particularly egregious corollary of their religion. But it falls into the category of "disabusing others of their beliefs". This is an extreme example, but I think this is the kind of motivation that spurs people to talk someone out of a religious belief: the stereotype is that religious people do some irrational things based on their religious belief that can sometimes be harmful to themselves or others, and if you think that this might happen, then in theory it's socially responsible to try to change their mind. But, yeah, in practice it's usually just rude.

To be clear, I personally think evangelism of any sort is usually a bad idea, not just because it's rude, but also because in general it's dangerous to assume that you know better than someone else what's good for them. But I think the motivations of atheist evangelists can be as virtuously-intended as religious evangelists who want to save your soul from eternal damnation.

Comments

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

If you believe there is no God, just as strongly as you don't believe in the orbiting teakettle, I think you're more accurately characterized as an atheist than as an agnostic.

I think an atheist is someone who believes there is no God, and by that standard it sounds to me like you're an atheist. If you instead use the definition "An atheist is someone who KNOWs with an absolute perfect unshakeable unfalsifiable certainty (of a sort that I do not have about any statement about the existence of entities in the world (except possibly myself) or about any other statement about my environment or the universe at large) that there is no God", then you're an agnostic, and so am I, and so are all of the atheists I've discussed this with. I don't think this is a particularly useful way to use the words. I think it makes sense to use the word "belief" in "an atheist is someone who believes there is no God" in the same way people use the word "belief" in other contexts, rather than in some different sense.

To relate this to the thread subject of evangelism, I find I don't do much evangelism of the sort "Persuade people that they are wrong in their beliefs about the existence of God". And almost all the evangelism I do is a fairly subtle and IMNSFHO unobjectionable form, of asking them questions about their own religious beliefs, choosing the questions so as to focus on aspects of their beliefs that I think they themselves will find inconsistent or irrational. But I do find that I do the sort of label-evangelism I'm doing in this post, encouraging people to label themselves as atheist when I think it's an accurate description. I went through a brief period where I considered myself a pantheist, because the properties of God (omnipresence, omnipotence, existing for all time) were held by the totality of things in the universe as a whole. But then I decided this was a cop-out; If I didn't believe in any other entities other than the ones an atheist believed in, I was better described as atheist.

[cnoocy]

But many, if not most, religious people use "belief" in a different sense in religious contexts than they do in non-religious contexts. When I say "I believe that there is an underlying pattern to the workings of the universe" I don't mean "the preponderance of evidence supports the existence of an underlying pattern", I mean "the concept of an underlying pattern provides meaning to my understanding of existence". So I think it's reasonable for someone like gemini6ice not to agree with "I believe there is no God" in the second sense of believe and therefore not to call themselves an atheist. Ultimately, I think it's up to the individual.

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

I've come across many "athiests" who believe that there is no god and view anyone who does believe in any god(s) as completely intellectually inferior.

I think the key difference is: "Do you believe that lack of evidence of a claim is evidence against the claim?"

The problem is that faith/religion, for the most part, is not a testable hypothesis, unlike scientific theories.