Hi all,

I am a secular humanist… there I’ve said it. I believe in science, reason and critical thinking. I also believe in ethics, compassion and morality. There are individuals on both the religious and secular/atheist fringe who spout ethics, compassion and morality, when in fact they only apply these values to the individuals who agree with their beliefs. All others receive vile judgment, ridicule and hate. To think that religion will ever be eradicated is folly. To think that ridicule, vile judgment and hate will ever accomplish this result is utter folly.  I see secular organizations that I used to respect turning into these fringe groups. Gone is communication, dialogue and teaching. Communication morphs to yelling, dialogue morphs to vitriolic accusations and teaching morphs to dogmatic rants. I was recently talking to a friend about the change in direction of a secular humanist organization that I once had respect for and he said “wow, they are changing from a think tank to just a tank”. I thought that analogy was dead on, because now they are blasting away at anything in their path. This will eventually fail and leave behind nothing but chaos for secular humanism and bigger roadblocks to the task of communication and education. You can’t make sophomoric fun of someone and then expect them to listen. Please to all who are listening, become teachers…not assassins.

I agree. In order to encourage people to deny their religion, I think we have to be more welcoming and less ridiculing. Ridicule just makes you feel better about yourself but doesn’t really seem to help anything besides that. I suppose sometimes ridicule is warranted (and possibly helpful), but we definitely shouldn’t make it our MO - because then that’s what we become identified as - haters.

Unfortunately human nature spans all groups and ‘belief’ systems. Just as there are intolerant theists, there are also intolerant non-theists. No amount of education and rational thinking will eradicate this in our psyche I believe. Unfortunately when trying to spread an idea such as non-theism / Atheism etc. we are hindered by having people on our side who are unable to show tolerance and understanding toward those who do not share their views. This often hands others an excuse and a stick to beat us.

Strat - 12 March 2010 10:29 AM

Please to all who are listening, become teachers…not assassins.

Excellent point!

(reminds me of an A1 gripe I have with the AGW contrarian crowd)

I agree, Strat, and scepticeye responded quite well.  To use a political analogy, I have a Wednesday lunch with a group of seven other men.  Two are quite conservative, four, including me, are quite liberal. and two are apolitical.  I enjoy discussing issues with one of the conservatives.  I consider him a good friend, and we have mutual respect because we don’t denegrate the other’s beliefs even if we argue strongly against them.  At the same time the other conservative and one of the liberals are both irrational extremists who replace their lack of knowledge with insults and attacks.  Both my friend and I are embarrassed by those two.

Unfortunately, neither the secular nor the religious are immune from demagogues.  All we can do is point out that they don’t represent the majority of the members of their resspective belief systems.

Occam