Not so very long ago, a hundred years or so, I led a fairly rich journaling life. Quantitative, that is. Possibly in direct proportion to having a lot of other things to do. Just as a general rule of thumb, if you want help look for a busy person. A person doing three things is more likely to take on a fourth than a person doing nothing is likely to start a first especially an altruistic first. I’m not sure this is one hundred percent true, but I’m sure a lot of people hold this belief. When I was in sales I used to carry a rag around on slow days and when people came in I’d pretend to be dusting something. They would pass salespeople who were standing around looking eager to say “Excuse me,” to me and ask for help, sometimes even passing salespeople who asked to help them and they’d respond with “Just looking.”
I think a lot of things work like that. I mean they are true because a significant number of people think they are. I was a good salesperson so their experience almost always reinforced the idea; if you want help ask a busy person.
I used to get into a lot of arguments on journaling sites, some I joined the site following an argument. Hmmm, that’s what I mean, I would get into arguments already in progress. I used to cite my reason as boredom, but that was three quarters of a lie and a bit of a seed, a psychological plant that the argument was boring.
The two easiest arguments to find anywhere and anytime are politics and religion. Since the emergence of the teaparty as a real thing in the States you’d have to be really bad at arguing not to get into an argument about both politics and religion at the same time. It’s not odd that I came down on the far left with politics, though I haven’t been so black and white in real life in a long time, on paper I’m a screaming liberal. Like anyone else defending a position on anything left or right of center, I prefer to think of myself as a realist or pragmatic or brimming over with common sense. The latter is easy to present when you are arguing with someone with a dog in the fight.
I hate that expression because it raises the ugly head of dog fighting for gambling, outlawed in this country in the mid 1800’s when a mans life expectancy was under forty as being to brutal and inhumane. I try to think of it as two dogs having a disagreement; mine and yours and our vested interest is in the well being of our respective dogs, not which is more vicious.
On Open Diary I fought with atheists most often. In real life I don’t think I have ever had an argument with an atheist, of course in real life I’ve never met an atheist who poked theists in the chest and called them stupid. I’ve met a lot of newly born theists who annoyed strangers with their armchair theology and a handful of memorized verses. In real life with both religion and politics my feeling is that as long as no one is getting hurt I don’t care what you believe or how you vote. Mostly that’s how people treat me too. Truth is as long as you can live with what you do, believe or think you’re fine, if you can’t best rethink things. This doesn’t work with sociopaths. I’ve met more than my fair share of sociopaths and they are still in the vast minority. True believers in, well, anything, are more common and just as dangerous.
So why argue with atheists? I didn’t, exactly, chose the argument, I just don’t like bullies, and journaling sites used to be infested with them. The word troll was used as a meme, but it doesn’t really cover a believer, um, I was the troll, disrupting arguments in progress with … with whatever was necessary.
The typical scenario was an educated atheist picking on some young Christian who for some reason felt obligated to defend Christianity (99 percent of the time) and didn’t really have the tools for the fight. If those sort of arguments had been respectful, I would have passed by, silently agreeing with the atheist. It wasn’t like that, it was bullying, filibustering, cage rattling, and often with an end game of trying to disabuse the Christian of his beliefs. If you read enough of these you noticed a pattern and the pattern demonstrated a sort of institutional bullying, one group with a shared set of tools attacking another. Historically if we agree with the dominate group they are the good guys, if we are unsure, historically, americans, like the underdog. The institutional bullies claimed, and rightfully so, that the minority is with the atheists (except when it suited their purpose they would bring up stats of countries where atheism and peacetime coincided. You know, like Stalin and the old USSR. Heh.).
The part that bugged me the most though was the idea of intellectual superiority, especially when called someone out on it and they got all humble and claimed they were just doing the poor misguided theist a service, a kindness. I had my own set of institutional arguments, except I was kind of an institution of one. I would point out that priests, for instance, has to go through post masters studies more rigorous than almost every other discipline. I am the last person on earth to defend a catholic priest, but, I’m also among the last to think of one as stupid.
I think some of the ones who argued had a dog in the fight and were very intelligent people. That was a problem in and of itself. A great deal more thought it was the argument that made them smart, that arguing on the same side (using the same logic verbatim) raised their intelligence, and the harder and more they argued the truer that became. No. In fact the silly shit I used to type in the middle of these arguments should have either gotten a laugh or got me dismissed as a clown. And, you know, with some they did, with others, posers, it just got them mad and they’d pull out all their tools and then go ad hominem. My friend, Amy G (a screen name), called that counting coup. There were more subtle ways of doing it and when she did it she was always kind and never engaged in religious battles so much as political ones, but when the other guy goes ad hominem you’ve definitely whacked em with your coup stick.
I know a lot about some religions and a whole lot about no religion, but I couldn’t pass at a meeting. Heh. In less vague terms, I’m not interested in sitting in a room with a bunch of people who agree on a position of theology.
When I was working in juvenile corrections we had this kid in who was some kind of mid management in a large skinhead group. His rhetoric was impressive, I mean he was well spoken. There wasn’t a single kid in my joint at the time that couldn’t have beat the shit out him. They didn’t, but, mostly because it was my job to make sure no one got the shit beat of them no matter how badly they deserved it. Not my job exclusively, but, you know, in the job description. Skin heads don’t fight like that anyhow. It’s always at least five skin heads on one of the other guy. It might work different in the UK, but a UK skin head isn’t necessarily a neo nazi. I don’t think there are many skinheads around anymore, Ideologically I’m sure there are, but wearing the whole braces over t-shirt, shaved head and nazi tat’s on the street, not so much.
That’s how I thought of the OD atheists, a lot of sharp rhetoric and five on one, except, I don’t disagree with the theory of atheism at least not to the degree I disagree with Nazis new or old. You’d sort of think that after your 1000 year Reich ended in six years you’d rethink your ideology. I don’t know. Ultimately you have to live with what you do, think and believe.
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