The Two Sides – Atheism vs. Religion . . . Oh, Really?

In my experience, most folks, when they talk about atheism do so from a position that I am considering increasingly, well, bizarre. It's the position of religion on one side and atheism on the other. What strikes me as bizarre is that ignores the actual way that actual religions behave. Because it isn't really that it's atheism vs. religion, or not just that, it's that it's Jews vs Muslims vs Christians vs Hindus vs all the other mutually incompatible systems that exist out there. Atheism is really just one more into the mix – we reject religions pretty much to the same extent that they reject each other. (This is even ignoring how members of the same broad religion often reject their co-religionists. It happens all the time on this blog - “Oh, but they're not real Christians”. Or Scotsmen. Or whatever.)

Oddly, however, save when they're in the presence of an atheist. Then, it's like they're somehow presenting this unified front to atheism. So, religious people talk about religion like it's this one, singular unified thing with this single, unified worldview against which atheism is its chief opponent. Which is foolish. A Muslim rejects a Christian's worldview as much as an atheist. If that Muslim is correct, the Christian is going to fry in the same grease I do. I don't even know what's going to happen if the truth is that Zeus is up in Olympus shaking his head at how stupid we all are for ignoring his divine power. I guess it'd be Tartarus for the lot of us. My point being that most of the world's religions are pretty mutually incompatible, so it's pretty hypocritical to act like it's really atheism vs. religion. It's more like atheism vs. [a bunch of people who also hate each other's guts, as evidenced by all the religious conflicts going on in the world].

Interestingly, most atheists are also caught up in this – we often forget that people who defend religion aren't really defending religion in a generic sense, but are really defending their particular religion under the umbrella of some generalized, and almost wholly non-existent generalized religion.

What this allows them to do is argue from a position of false generalization. All religious people believe in their god or gods from a very particular viewpoint that is not generally served by the very idea of a defense of religion. The fact that there might be someone, somewhere who has a brand of religion that isn't logically incompatible with rationalism doesn't mean that almost all actually religious people belong to a heavily supernaturalist religion, generally believing in one or more anthropomorphic divine beings to which superhuman magical powers are routinely attributed. But not the same ones, not the same beings, not even the same superhuman magical powers.

Indeed, someone who believes in “god” in the sense that it is the universe, whatever that universe might be, is far closer to the position of atheism than to fundamentalist Christian religion. But it also ignores the fact that public face of religion isn't a materialist pantheist who doesn't believe in supernaturalism and calls the universe and laws of nature god, but largely Christians, Hindus and Muslims who believe in all manner of supernaturalist claims. It's curious that even atheists often let this slide and argue a position that almost no one who engages an atheist in discussion actually holds. They do not defend “religion” in some generalized, holistic sense, but their own religion - after all, almost all of them condemn each other to some form of misery at least as much as they condemn atheists.

So, I think atheists should stop that. We should clearly ask what religion a person belongs to before engaging them in conversation about religion. I think that's fair. It'd be nice to know what you're really talking about, right?

Another little pet peeve in language!

One of the things that vexes me most when getting into discussions about religion is how many religious people will totally ignore that 3/4ths of the world's population belongs to three religions (Christianity, Islam and Hinduism), and talk about how small to fringe religions are as socially meaningful and important as the big three.

It drives me nuts! Yes, I know that Baha'i people aren't particularly crazy as religious people go. Too bad there are only about six million of them. I know that Unitarian Universalists aren't whack jobs. Too bad there are so few of them, then! To act as though these small, politically impotent and socially irrelevant faiths (sorry, all you Baha'i and UU people out there, it's . . . true) are the normal way religion gets done in the world, or America, is nuts. Absolutely nuts.

It is also this total conversation stopper! Because, well, if I was Baha'i or a UU member, I'd be clear in distinguishing how my religion is different from those other crazy people religions out there. I would say, "Well, while it is true that currently religions are parochial and close-minded in large, that does not have to be the case" or something like that. I wouldn't defend religion generally by pretending my tiny minority religion somehow represented religion overall.

But it one of my linguistic pet peeves. How religious people defend the whole of religion by acting like mainstream Christianity, Islam and Hinduism don't exist or aren't particularly meaningful to general discussions about religion. It is a dirty trick that decontextualizes discussions about religion in absurd ways.

Chav

My new favorite word is chav. Someone used it in a response to me and I didn't know what it was, so I had to look it up. A chav refers to people "who mainly derogatory slang terms in the United Kingdom for a stereotype fixated on low quality or counterfeit goods". What a great word. I can see the exact sort in my mind's eye - some kid with more money than sense mindlessly aping hip-hop culture at the food court of the local mall.

It apparent derives from the Romani word chavi, meaning child. Related is the the word charva which means prostitute. Anyone with real experience with urban culture then should know immediately the deep meaning of the word as a spurious rip-off. A fake. A poseur. Someone who superficially adopts the outwards signs of a misunderstood culture in order to be seen as hip by equally clueless people.

These are the kinds of words I love. Things with Latin and Greek roots and eat me - all those guys who pepper their speech and writing with Latin and Greek words are total chavs. :)