new blog post on atheism and history of philosophy; with bonus Oklahomo

[martasfic]

Tonight on the bus ride home I wasso tired I started feeling nauseated, or at least extremely prone to motion sickness. It was a combination of not eating all day, maybe five hours' sleep, and a truly stressful and long on-site day at work. But once home I didn't turn on Doctor Who or crawl into bed. Rather, I wrote about 2,000 words on the history of atheism and how it is fed by some philosophical concepts, so the word means a bit more than just "'God exists' is false."

The start:

Over at Love Joy Feminism, Libby Anne has an interesting conversation going in the comments of this post. The context: The person accused of shooting Deah Bakarat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha down in Chapel Hill, the man accused of shooting them* is an atheist, so some pundits and bloggers have asked whether he might have been driven by the anti-theism, the idea that religion should ideally be done away with.

(* Yes, I know his name. I make it a point not to give people like this man publicity by naming them when I can. Consider it my own curse against the dying of the light.)

The thought is that several big-name atheist writers (Christopher Hitchens, for one) have been quite vocal about how Islam is evil and a major source of global suffering and we’d all be better off if less people were Muslims, or for that matter Christians or any other religion. Which in turn inspires a more general question, the one brought up in the comments that piqued my interest. Isn’t atheism just the belief that “God exists” is false? Then where do we get off blaming these murders on it? There doesn’t seem to be a connection.

Read the full thing here, and please feel free to comment at either site.

It's probably safe to doubt my wisdom when it comes to life-choices, but as far as blogging goes I'm reasonably happy with it. If nothing else, my expensive grad school education came in handy for once....

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On a completely unrelated note, I know a lot of you are Sherlockians, and if you haven't seen it yet, the latest Oklahomo parody is genius. I suppose it should be tagged #SetLock, but if you've managed to avoid this particular spoiler, you really should rent outthe rock you hide under to the rest of us sometimes. Warnings for language, abuse of facial hair, and testing the limits of "There is no such thing as too much Ritchie!Holmes goodness."

(Seriously, as far as these things go it's pretty thoroughly PG13 and worth every second.)

Comments

[dreamflower]

That's a very interesting post, Marta, and I like the way you differentiate between the various sorts of atheists. I have several atheists on my flist, and I acn say that when they write on the subject, their reasons and their expressed beliefs cover a very wide range.

There are many types of believers; why should we expect non-believers to all be the same?

As to the question of "evidence", I think part of the problem is that many atheists reject out of hand any evidence that does not meet their criteria of objectivity. For most believers in my experience do have evidence: but it is subjective evidence, some action or event that to them points to the existence of God, though others might not draw the same conclusions from it.