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I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
This post is an interesting little mirror to this sub's CW leanings. Imagine if the positions were reversed with a left-leaning interlocutor instead of a right-leaning one. Say you told a story where they were making snide passive-aggressive remarks implying you were racist. The response you would have gotten would almost certainly be cheering alongside you. I highly doubt they would be as unanimous in their scorn, claiming this post breaks rules, that your previous compromises means you somehow deserve this, or that snide remark essentially saying "we're not your therapist, bro".
The fact that Christianity's cultural side is inextricably linked to the superstitious side is clearly causing some amount of cognitive dissonance. But instead of resolving it (either by severing the two sides, or by rejecting Christianity entirely if doing so is infeasible), this sub... tries to ignore it as much as possible. This sub pretends it doesn't exist, and then gets really conspicuously oversensitive whenever someone reminds them of it.
Well, now and then it comes up, but we have actually managed a detente here that the outside world has not: the atheists won't sneer at the Christians, and the Christians won't wag their fingers about Jesus and hell. (When that detente gets broken, as happened recently, you are likely to get modded.) Nobody wants this place to become either a platform for evangelizing or /r/atheism.
That Christianity gets treated with the kid gloves here is a blatant double-standard. The modding happens because the Christians don't even bother trying to defend their superstitions since they know they'll get trounced, so instead they fight with oversensitive interpretations of the rules (declaring anodyne statements to be "unnecessarily antagonistic", "bad faith", stuff like that).
This forum should be open grounds to challenge any view.
At the risk of getting modded for "waging the culture war", go ahead, challenge away. Show us what you've got.
That's not how it really works. The atheist view is typically a response to Christian arguments, not a pre-emptive strike declaring 100% certainty that no gods exist.
You seem to be confusing atheist with agnostic.
There's no such thing as a dictionary-definition Atheist. Nobody can prove god doesn't exist, when those who say He does can shift His definition to fit reality.
An Atheist is an agnostic who's 99% certain that the common conceptions of any God made by humans is not real.
By that definition, atheists are perfectly orthodox religious believers, or have you really never heard of the way of negation/apophatic theology? Usually summed up as "We cannot say what God is, only what God is not".
Ironically, in view of the comment about angeology, our friend Pseudo-Dionysius was one of those:
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According to most progressives there's no such thing as "wokism" or "the deep state" either but that doesn't mean you don't know exactly what im talking about.
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The two words can be used interchangeably in some cases. Most atheists are agnostic by design, while most Christians are gnostic. It's usually Christians making the first claims.
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