It got worse.

Or, hey, tell us what sort of respect is due to the belief in the flying Tom.

Personally, I think respect for others should be the default mode.

That’s nice, but I asked about respect for beliefs, not respect for people. And I even made that distinction explicit. Since you insist upon ignoring it, I’d like to ignore everything you said after this point. But you keep claiming egregious falsehoods, and I have SIWOTI Syndrome.

Everyone harbors some thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that are going to seem ridiculous to others, and not all of them, not even the ones an athiest holds, are ones they’ll be able to defend in scientific terms.

Strawman; no such claim was made. Science is not the only tool of the materialist; there is also philosophy. And while I may not be able to defend my so! not! ridiculous! love for Rock Me Amadeus in rigorous terms, such matters of taste are categorically different from political opinions, which can be defended philosophically.

(And there are certainly plenty of athiests who defend ideas simply because they’ve been *told* they’re science, not because they’re ever actually going to understand the science themselves.)

Unless you’re asserting that the scientific community in general cannot be trusted to share actual findings with the public, I don’t see what your point is.

Are you ever going to understand gravity? Probably not; no one today does. Your friend contemplates jumping off a building and flying like a bird; should you not try to defend gravity?

And I do find it xenophobic how people so often reach for the most outlandish example they can find of supernatural belief to promote the virtues of athiesm–it too often feels like the tactics used to “other” people.

And I find it hypocritical that you call Scientology outlandish.

I picked the flying Tom because it was a likely baseline; I could expect you would share my incredulity and we wouldn’t get caught on an example like Yahweh where you might respond “I don’t find that silly,” which would sidetrack the conversation.

Choosing an easy, noncontroversial example has nothing to do with xenophobia.

Even though science provides very good tools for making sense of the world, it’s incapable of making sense or reflecting the emotional truth of all the things many people experience and wonder about.

Again with the strawmen.

If a supernatural belief lets a person feel more secure in themselves and the world, I really don’t see why it should be anyone’s business until that belief negatively affects others.

Okay, here’s why.

And there really is no reason to believe that widespread athiesm necessarily leads to a culture that treasures skepticism and doubt

Irrelevant. Skepticism and doubt are the relevant benefits here, the values to be promoted. Atheism is just a side-effect.

However, try arguing a teen or adult toward atheism sometime, and you’ll find it’s nearly impossible to do by any route except by cultivating skepticism. If atheist evangelists lose sight of the prize, and push atheism explicitly instead of skepticism, they won’t succeed except by promoting skepticism anyway.

people are people, and dogma builds up when they get organized, whether the organization is religious or athiest.

This is another one of those “common sense” claims that is just supposed to seem evidently true. Yet again, it isn’t. So far as the scientific community can be called “organized” (since there are many interconnected institutions, publications, and agreed-upon standards of evidence), that community does a fantastic job of systematically dismantling dogmas. Indeed, it could not function if it did not. Neither wholly atheist nor wholly religious, that community is nevertheless made up of people, and as such is a counterexample to your claim.

Moreover, as dangerous as dogma can be, there is a lot of value in organizing around something irrational, even if it’s just an irrational optimism that things can be changed for the better in the face of long odds.

Nope, sorry, that statement is self-contradictory. It is rational to pursue things of value, so if there is value in optimism (say, it helps people find the energy to struggle), then it is not irrational.

A willingness to push through on faith is why some kinds of religious organizations have been the movers in a lot of social justice movements.

Maybe. Take the example of black churches pushing for civil rights. Did they do it because they were religious, because they were churches? Or did they do it because black people were going to push for their civil rights by whatever means necessary, and black churches, weekly meetings of large segments of the black population, happened to have pre-existing organizational infrastructure that could be utilized for the struggle?

I wouldn’t be confident in asserting one or the other, as you have done.

But it’s pretty rare that effective vanguard activists can be defined by skepticism and rationality.

Whatever that means?

Some people say that they really believe things will be better when people aren’t harboring religious/supernatural belief. That’s what I’m arguing against.

Things really are better in those western European countries where atheism is orders of magnitude more common than here in North America. There’s a correlation/causation question there that is way too big for me to tackle, but I will offer this possibility: realizing we cannot hope for a god to fix things leads to acknowledging that we ourselves must be the agents of change. There is a call to social justice in that realization, as many existentialists can tell you.

Correlation or causation, either way, it is certainly true that atheism is no barrier to social and economic justice. The worst that atheist agitators here in the US will do is annoy you from time to time.

If advancing atheism and skepticism does nothing to advance progressivism, we’ll have wasted some time, but that’s hardly a scathing indictment. No need to clutch your pearls.

I really don’t see how that’s true when I know that religion has inspired many people to do good and be better to others, and when I know many people who have specifically used their athiesm to be assholes.

Stephen Weinberg: “With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.”

To put that in context, it refers to cases like otherwise progressive Catholics opposing funding for AIDS clinics that distribute condoms.

Religion can be a positive force and athiesm a negative one, as well as vice versa.

Very egalitarian of you, but is it true? Can you give an example of atheism making a good person bad, or a bad person worse?

But athiesm doesn’t have a lock on treasuring skepticism and doubt. There are religious traditions that foster it; there are spiritual/supernatural beliefs that discourage dogma and even belief-based organization.

Assuming for a moment that this is true, it’s irrelevant. Non-creedal churches like UU are very small; they and liberal creedal churches are not growing at any significant rate; many are shrinking. Where skepticism is entering the world today, it is coming through in the swiftly-growing ranks of atheists.

Enough assuming. It simply isn’t true that faith-heads can be consistently skeptical. Either you believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, or you believe that extraordinary claims can rest upon faith. When faith-heads are skeptical, they are compartmentalizing certain parts of their life, like their jobs. They do not apply skepticism to those things they hold on faith. So in the end, matters of faith are more important to them than skepticism, and it becomes problematic to say that they really value or “treasure” skepticism at all when that skepticism goes right out the window in the presence of faith.

I don’t think I have. I’m just uneasy about lumping the different types of claim in together.

Rep Davis issued a formal apology.

http://thecapitolfaxblog.com/2008/04/10/this-just-in-rep-davis-apologizes-to-atheist/

Some people say that they really believe things will be better when people aren’t harboring religious/supernatural belief. That’s what I’m arguing against. I really don’t see how that’s true when I know that religion has inspired many people to do good and be better to others, and when I know many people who have specifically used their athiesm to be assholes. Religion can be a positive force and athiesm a negative one, as well as vice versa. I think people are going to be people, no matter the prevailing cultural take on supernatural beliefs.

‘And it remains true that any danger that organized religion brings to society and individuals can also be brought by organized athiestic/materialist beliefs.’

By atheistic dogmas, sure. But by a culture that treasures skepticism and doubt?

But athiesm doesn’t have a lock on treasuring skepticism and doubt. There are religious traditions that foster it; there are spiritual/supernatural beliefs that discourage dogma and even belief-based organization. And there really is no reason to believe that widespread athiesm necessarily leads to a culture that treasures skepticism and doubt–people are people, and dogma builds up when they get organized, whether the organization is religious or athiest.

Moreover, as dangerous as dogma can be, there is a lot of value in organizing around something irrational, even if it’s just an irrational optimism that things can be changed for the better in the face of long odds. A willingness to push through on faith is why some kinds of religious organizations have been the movers in a lot of social justice movements. People who aren’t religious can also have that kind of faith in their ability to make things better, sure. But it’s pretty rare that effective vanguard activists can be defined by skepticism and rationality.

Or, hey, tell us what sort of respect is due to the belief in the flying Tom.

Personally, I think respect for others should be the default mode. Everyone harbors some thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that are going to seem ridiculous to others, and not all of them, not even the ones an athiest holds, are ones they’ll be able to defend in scientific terms. (And there are certainly plenty of athiests who defend ideas simply because they’ve been *told* they’re science, not because they’re ever actually going to understand the science themselves.) And I do find it xenophobic how people so often reach for the most outlandish example they can find of supernatural belief to promote the virtues of athiesm–it too often feels like the tactics used to “other” people.

People believe in things that are true for them, that make the world make sense to them, just as they eat food and wear clothes that make sense to them (even if, objectively, the food isn’t as healthy or the clothes aren’t as practical as others think they should be). Even though science provides very good tools for making sense of the world, it’s incapable of making sense or reflecting the emotional truth of all the things many people experience and wonder about. If a supernatural belief lets a person feel more secure in themselves and the world, I really don’t see why it should be anyone’s business until that belief negatively affects others.

:)