Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
If anyone is interested, mister Turok is over on the SSC open thread complaining about us: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-409/comment/180699602
I'm curious, why on earth do people think this is a "hugbox for fundamentalist Christians"? If anything I see progressive folks get more leniency. Anyway, sad to see.
TLDR: To an atheist, Christianity is quite literally 'unbelievable' and not being able to say so loudly and clearly (and repeatedly) is ridiculous.
As a former militant atheist, anything that prevents one from saying, "Fuck off with your stupid fairy-tales, and don't come back to debate unless you can find a basis for your way of life that isn't 'but sky-Daddy said so'" comes across as a Christian hugbox. It's somewhat equivalent to the reaction I have to being told by trans activists that a man can become a woman by wishing really hard and to be fair to Turok it is probably true that I would be reported for the Christian bit and not for the trans bit.
OTOH you are perfectly able to make the atheist argument here provided you aren't obnoxious about it, and indeed lots of people do if you actually try to assert the tenets of Christianity as literally true in a debate (we had one a while ago about 'what does it mean that God allows bad things to happen' where I earned a decent number of downvotes and pushback for giving what I see as the Christian answer. 'Christian culture has a pretty good track record even if we can't prove the religion is literally true' is a much easier sale and offends fewer people here.
I am so confused by this conversational mindset. What could someone perceive as the value to themselves of jumping into a discussion among Christians, with Christian premises, to declare that actually Christians are morons who believe in a "sky fairy" or whatever? If you truly believe that Christians are benighted superstitious freaks, then surely you're wasting your time yelling at them on the internet. Or if you think they're ordinary people with mistaken beliefs, then it seems like the attitude should be one of polite curiosity and question-asking?
Taking the time to explain one's reasoning for why one's audience is incapable of reason seems like a weird self-own more than anything.
I'm an atheist, and an antitheist, but I don't bother with being militant about it.
I feel like we reached the heat death of the theism debate sometime around 2011. Every argument has been deployed, countered, steelmanned, mothballed, and then resurrected as a zombie argument so many times that the marginal utility of another forum post is effectively zero. I am happy to report that life as a Western atheist is actually quite pleasant. I leave them alone; they generally leave me alone. It is a functional equilibrium.
But I want to push back on the quoted dichotomy. It suggests that if I believe religious people hold fundamentally absurd beliefs, I must either view them as raving lunatics worthy of scorn or simply be politely curious about their worldview.
This assumes a unitary model of the human mind which psychology tells us is almost certainly false. The correct model is that humans are world-class champions at compartmentalization.
The average religious believer is not a caricature. They are behaviourally indistinct from the general population. They take out thirty-year mortgages. They trust the FDIC to insure their deposits. They accept the efficacy of amoxicillin. They engage in normal signaling regarding movies and electoral politics. They are hosting a parasitic memeplex, yes, but it appears to be a commensal organism rather than a fatal one. It is not metabolizing their ability to function in a modern economy.
I have an uncle who is a highly credentialed microbiologist. He spends his days applying the scientific method to bacteria, running PCRs, and adhering to rigorous evidentiary standards. He also believes, with total sincerity, in homeopathy. If you tried to model this as a consistent worldview, you would fail. But he doesn't have a consistent worldview. He has a work-mode partition where dilution removes active ingredients, and a home-mode partition where dilution increases potency. I have tried to bridge this gap in debate. It does not work. It only generates heat, not light.
The peace treaty works both ways. The religious generally grant that despite my lack of a divine command theory of ethics, I am probably not going to eat their babies or harvest their organs for the black market. I am a Cooperator in the Prisoner's Dilemma of civilization.
In return, I acknowledge that their "God module" is just an unfortunate quirk of their hardware. It is a glitch, perhaps a spandrel of our evolutionary history that makes them susceptible to hyper-active agency detection. Maybe they genuinely do have a God-shaped Hole, which I fortunately lack. But outside of that specific theological blast radius, we share a surprising amount of epistemological territory. We can agree on the price of tea in China. We can agree on the laws of thermodynamics. We can agree that the new Star Wars movies were disappointing.
I feel a certain distant pity for the condition, the same way I might pity someone with a benign but annoying tinnitus. But since they are otherwise high-functioning members of the tribe, I see no utility in screaming at them until they admit the ringing sound isn't real. We can (usually) just ignore the noise and watch the movie.
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