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

[flourish.livejournal.com]

Right.

I guess what's tough is that it's hard to trace back the cause from some of the effects. You go back far enough and religion really means "cultural group" - so often the bad things are happening because they are expedient and humans envision an ingroup/outgroup relationship - for example, the various ways that Jews have been persecuted I think has less to do with actual Christian beliefs (though those were obviously the pretext) and more to do with the fact that people wanted to seize the Jews' property.

Of course, that's not true in every case. Sometimes there are genuine harms that result directly from belief systems - peep the Quiverfull movement or the FLDS today and some of the abuses that occur within those contexts.

But even then it is more complex. Yes, beliefs have something to do with people becoming Quiverfull, but so do wider societal ills like sexism and racism etc. And I don't think those are purely the fault of religion - or, at least, removing religion isn't a silver bullet that removes them, and getting religion isn't an infecting thing that infects you with them, at this point!

So to me, it would make more sense to talk about the ills of in-group/out-group thinking than to single out religion. But of course, that's from the perspective of a religious person - so I am not surprised that we would differ on this! ;)

[flourish.livejournal.com]

Er, and again as an edit - with persecution of Jews I was thinking less about the Holocaust (AUGH GODWIN'S LAW AUGH) and more about their expulsion from Spain. Let's not even touch the Holocaust thing! I do not want this to turn into that discussion! I need to read my comments over before I hit 'send'!