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

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

This is a reasonable answer, though I might quibble about whether the harm done by UUs is based on UU beliefs or whether it's a general cultural failing. What do you have on the Discordians? (I know that some Discordians are assholes but I'm unaware of any harm done as a group, since they don't tend to form groups.)

I don't think any religion contains only good people or that good people can't do harm. I just doubt that there are _no_ religions that are harmless.

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure i am willing to call discordianism (or fsm) religions.

* * *

however, while i'm highly critical of religions, i do not think they are w/o merit. and as such, i do have some problem with the ridicule discordianism and fsm heap on people who are religious.

* * *

at a very meta and personal level, i see great harm in anything that causes people to deal with concepts instead of reality (what ever reality really is). religions as institutions tend to mistake how they view the world for the world itself. in young religious institutions these problems tend to undeveloped, in older institutions that problem tend to be very visible.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in your definition of religion, I think. If we're limiting the discussion to organized religions, that's a very different thing.

I'd agree that the FSM isn't a religion - it's pretty much just a way to mock religions. I could say something like "ridicule of other religions isn't universal in Discordianism" but I recognize that as the same kind of excuse that Christians use - "we wouldn't do anything like the Crusades today!"

I'm generally in agreement with your last paragraph, but I think there are religions (such as UUism) that don't encourage people to deal with concepts instead of reality.

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

my short definition of religion is dependence on some form of irrefutable certainty.

this gets a little hazy when dealing with religions that don't examine ontology or epistemology.

and the definition gets rather convoluted when dealing with thelema, discordianism, buddhism, and hinduism.

science and philosophy tend to avoid the irrefutable and/or the certain, but even they cross the line, but hopefully much less so than religions.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

This is unfair to you, since I appreciate your understanding that the definition is hazy, but saying "religions are harmful because they do this thing" and then saying "belief systems that don't do that thing aren't religions" is a little bit like saying "that's not science fiction because it's well-written". On the other hand I don't have a counter-definition.

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

thus why i talk about religious institutions.

theoretical concepts are difficult to pin down.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

I think your claim that atheism is not falsifiable is untrue. here is one atheist
's list of things that would persuade him of the existence of God. I agree with most, of these, all if I make a few qualifications, and could easily greatly extend my personal list of events which would convince me of the existence of God.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

So it is possible that, should a case of this particular bullet point come up, the particular atheist who wrote that web page could be intellectually dishonest. There's a big leap from there to your claim that is essentially that all atheists are in fact intellectually dishonest.

You believe that you live in Massachusetts, right? Is this falsifiable, or a dogmatic unfalsifiable belief? If not what would convince you otherwise? Make sure that what you specify is so clear and unambiguous that you couldn't possibly weasel out of it in any way.

I think that there is sufficient evidence that God does not exist to warrant belief in that statement. You don't. But I'm willing to accept that reasonable people can disagree. But you are certain that I'm wrong, wrong, wrong, and that you know for a fact that I can't possibly be reasoning from the evidence, and insulting me by accusing me of dogmatism and intellectual dishonesty. There is rudeness and lack of willing to accept the existence of legitimate differing points of view in this conversation, but it's coming from the agnostic, not the atheist.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

Just looking at the first bullet point, and seeing its disclaimers: "If the prophecy is vague, unclear or garbled" and "If the prophecy is trivial." There's no objective way to determine if a prophesy is vague or trivial. So to me, this is still unfalsifiable, because you could take any prophesy and say "Hey, it's trivial."
Some prophecies are vague or trivial enough that they would not convince me there is a God. Others would clearly persuade me of this. Others are a middle ground. If my goal was to determine the truth about the existence of God, I would do my best to evaluate a given fulfilled prophecy fairly, and decide in which category it fell in. If my goal was to hold to my belief that God did not exist regardless of the evidence, I could claim that prophecies were trivial when they were not. But that would be intellectually dishonest. It's hard for me to understand the content of the post I'm replying to unless you think that I, the writer of the web page, and anyone else who claims to hold a falsifiable belief that God does not exist, are all intellectually dishonest in this way.

Here's a specific example, to convince you my belief is falsifiable. If the holy book of a religion predicted the winner of the world series for ten consecutive future years, other than a prediction involving a lack of winner (because of a baseball strike, for example) for more than one of those years, and it makes no more than 100 incorrect predictions of world series winners, I would consider that prophecy non-trivial. (The last clause is needed to prevent someone from writing a "holy book" that contains a google or so predictions, one of which will turn out to be correct).

Do you think that if I hadn't written that paragraph, that I would have claimed, should a holy book make such a correct prediction, that this prediction was "trivial"? Do you think the author of the web page would have claimed it was trivial? I don't think so, and I don't think you do either. So I don't see what bearing the fact that we *could* claim it to be trivial has on the subject of falsifiability. There might be some predictions that you would find non-trivial that I find trivial, or vice versa. But unless you think I'm completely intellectually dishonest, and would claim any prediction that came true to be trivial, I don't understand your point.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to agree to disagree about questions like "Does God exist?" I'm not so happy to agree to disagree about questions like "Is there something that could happen which would change Andy's beliefs about God (that is, is *my* belief falsifiable)", or "If a prophecy did come true, would Andy automatically claim it was a trivial prophecy" (which it certainly seemed to me that you're claiming, since otherwise why is the fact that I *could* make such a ridiculous assertion relevant to the discussion?).

You have something backwards. The question "is the non-existence of God falsifiable" is the question "is there something that would falsify this belief, that is, establish that God exists", so I think I spoke to the quesstion of whether the non-existence of God is falsifiable.

Since we were talking about the beliefs of atheists, not of your beliefs, I thought you meant "atheists have an unfalsifiable belief in the non-existence of God", that is, "nothing could happen that could convince them that their belief is incorrect, and God actually exists". But you seem to be claiming instead that the proper standard is "nothing could happen that could convince *you* that the belief is incorrect". This seems an odd definition of religious belief. To say my belief is religious if there's no observation that could convince me it's wrong seems like a somewhat reasonable definition. But to say that *my* belief is religious if there's nothing that could occur that would convince *you* that it's false seems very odd to me.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

(I recently got in a similar discussion with a co-worker, but he refused to consider buddhism, etc. to be religions.)