Comments on: “Maybe It Is Just the Time of Year”

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 05:00:58 +0000

Good article by Mehta, although by not putting the atheist flame wars in context with any other movement (or whatever you want to call this thing), it’s not clear whether we are any better/worse. We do pretend to hold ourselves higher (we’re the rational ones), but otherwise I’m not sure if this is just par for the course with blogs and social media (I imagine politics gets at least as heated).

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 21:45:13 +0000

This has been percolating for a while.

The ‘firebrand’ atheists have fed the beast for a while now.

If you don’t have a rational argument, then being offensive to religious people was deemed just as good. If you look back at the rhetoric used in the great wars of the last century, you can see how namecalling is used to objectivity and degrade human beings. The rhetoric back then, may seem transparent to us, but that is the filter of hindsight.

Once you remove someone’s humanity, with words like… crazy…. fanatic… fundie… religitard…. or even misogynist and patriarchy, then you open the way to treating people like things.

I’m an accommodationalist…. because I think first and foremost we have to try and give people, at least initially, and as much as possible, the benefit of the doubt, and try and understand their concerns. Even when we are not going to agree. I think we should make accommodations for the concerns of women, minorities, and yes, even religious people and those of different cultures. Treating people like people demands this, in my opinion.

That doesn’t mean the vocal minority, evangelical, atheist, or feminist….. gets to set the standard for everyone. Accommodation means compromising. It is the first step, in my view to avoiding the spiraling terror of war. We are not so far removed from it, it can happen again.

By: Corwin

Corwin — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:13:29 +0000

Sobering and thought provoking indeed. I agree with most of Mehta’s points, apart from his implication that it’s necessarily a bad thing to “air our dirty laundry for the world to see”. I think there’s often considerable value in discussing disagreements in an open and public fashion, as long as the discussion remains reasonably constructive. In my opinion insults and invective even have their place, although they certainly shouldn’t be a first resort. Perhaps too many of us (I’m not exempting myself here) have taken the brash, confrontationalist New Atheist sensibility a little too much to heart.