Should Atheists be angry?

This is a long read, but with enough time to get through it and in the absence of distractions, I believe it's worth it.

From Greta Christina's Blog, Atheists and Anger

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... (Read the rest of it. Seriously.)​

I don't call myself an atheist, but I find myself feeling the same kind of anger she describes, and I feel it's well justified from atheists and non-atheists alike. In fact, reasonable people in general should be angry about this stuff as far as I'm concerned.

I predict you'll either be anger with Greta or you'll be angry at her, with little to no middle ground in between. I await your responses.

 

Read roughly half of it.

She makes some good points, but also some very weak ones.

As a whole though (and this has nothing to do with me being a Muslim), I feel no anger.

Having lived in Afghanistan for the past 11 months and encountered some unbelievable ignorance from (rich) businessmen and high-level officials, there is little the ignorant folks of the US could possibly bother me with.

It all looks like childish games to me.

 

Definitely seems like a lot of wasted energy, but there are some good points.
Plus, I feel for her that she's frustrated with the way her, and her partner, and others in their situation, don't get equal recognition in the eyes of the law.

I'm not sure I'm an atheist, but I know I'm not a true Christian any more. There's just too much that doesn't add up.
Plus, statements like what I saw on the news yesterday irks the hell out of me.
A woman was being interviewed about the wildfires around here and she said she prayed to God to see her through, and that he answered her prayers by sparing her house.
I thought to myself, "So these other people that lost their houses didn't pray hard enough, or He just didn't like them for some reason?"
Yeah, right! Get off the t.v., you dingbat!

 

I'd essentially say that I'm angry with her, but I'd tend to agree that anger is, at best, a dangerous emotion. It's trite as hell, but it's very difficult to be angry without there being hate buried somewhere in that anger. And, to be perfectly frank, if I'm trying to psychoanalyze myself, I think I do have quite a bit of hate for religion, or at least the modern religious establishment.

Part of the problem with atheism as a movement is how far-reaching it is. Compare that, for example, to women's lib or the civil rights movement. Not that those weren't large in scope, but you had a clearly identifiable group attacking policies that are specifically prejudiced against them. As I think it's fairly easy to tell from her rant, as an atheist, it's easy to find a lot of social policy that is directed or affected by religion which negatively impacts those of different religious persuasions or people who are atheists, agnostics or deists. When I think about all the ways that religion (or if we want to be more specific, Christianity in the United States) impacts life, I'm kind of overwhelmed. It was interesting to see it laid out quite as explicitly as she does, though, as she also observes, she's just scratching the surface. My point, though, is it's very difficult to organize that anger or that frustration or that hate, whatever you want to call the emotion, into an organized front, because people care about different things more. When you're fighting to get rid of segregation or for the right to vote, you have a clear cut idea. A single goal. How do you get people organized to tackle the breadth of injustices she brings up?

My other comment is that I think she heavily conflates (perhaps intentionally) institutional intolerance of atheists with personal intolerance. There's really nothing to be said about Jackass McPrejudice who asked if her dad was Baptist or Catholic at the nursing home. I mean, sure, you can let it piss you off, but that's pretty useless. It's another thing when we're talking about abortion or gay rights or the battle between science and faith, and those are the areas in which I think energy should be focused, if we're going to focus on anything.

Finally, I think it's important to remember that atheism as an idea and a movement in the United States is fairly recent and lacks a coherent identity. Minority groups that have had to fight for equal treatment tend to have a long, hard road ahead of them, and I think it'd be hard to say that atheism as an acknowledged, open concept, is something that this country has had to deal with for very long as part of its national identity. Fifty years ago, more than 55% of people would have said they wouldn't vote for a black president and now we have one in office (whatever you may think of his politics, the dude is there).

The civil rights movement isn't over, nor is women's lib (is it ok to call it that anymore?), and they've both been fighting tooth and nail for every inch of what they've acquired. I think it's going to take the same amount of time and energy for atheists to do the same.

 

Jehosaphat, DamnitAll! I visibly aged: the issues dealt with are important to me, and to use a sports metaphor, I would not have this kind of player on 'my team' in any game I cared about.

The writer called it a rant. I call it a Trojan Rant.
By the fifth 'I Feel Angry When' - statement, I got Deja Vu. It's a formula which reminds me of some prayer-like invocations: if you can get people on side in the first five rounds, as long as you've anchored feelings of positivity and solidarity amongst the listeners, they'll be misting up and shaking their firsts in support of stuff they'd have discounted or even, sometimes, actively opposed if presented cold, with time to think. It's an affirmation technique; one which becomes uninterruptible when the speaker makes it clear that its just 'I' who feel angry and this is just a rant. At that point of the proceedings, the speaker's got a kind of diplomatic immunity by virtue of thumping the 'this is subjective' card on the table at every move. Licence to speil.

Which means everybody gets to shut up and recieve, to get 'worked on' by the 'epic poem', until it's time for the 'Greeks to get out of the horse' and gather up all those strands with a 'This is not just me .. it's everybody can and should ... kind of thing'. A generalisation ex machina, hard to challenge since the 'bits' were so numerous that it is likely there would be some which each listener will agree with.

Then I look at the block response to comments ... that introductory section where the agreers are thanked and .... 'critics' are lumped together somewhat negatively.
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/10/atheists-and--1.html

In this piece, unless I slow down to sort the wheat from the chaff and scry patterns in the brownian shifts of topic, I am taken on a very rough gut ride -physically irritated; In fact, I think need to do something soothing - play a bit of Deus Ex Revolution.

 

I think this one pissed me off the most:

Although, this one comes in as a close second:

It's amazing to me how mankind is always looking for some other group of people to point their hatred (and fear) on to. Nor do I understand why we must have a group of 'other' and 'less than.' But that's life.

But I agree with what most people have already said: These things should make every a little angry, no matter what god you believe in. But angry only does so much. At some point people (we) have to get up off ours asses and do something about it. (For lack of ideas, I can't say much more than we need to do something about it.)

But to be honest, I didn't make it through the whole thing. It just started to feel like a 'bit*h fest' and I stopped caring about her opinion.

Edit: I gotta figure out how to work the quotes I still have one there I can't get rid of.

 

I feel like I SHOULD be angry about these things, and I suppose on some level, I am. But mostly, they just make me sad.

 

Wow. She has a lot of anger issues

 

Did anyone make it to the end of the article? I didn't.

I don't call myself an atheist, if it comes up in conversation, I just say I believe in science.

 

Damn you. I played the first two more than 6 years ago and I crave to see what the third installment is like. My damn computer won't run high-end games, and I can hardly justify a gaming PC in my office. Argh!

Completely agreed. There is an urgent need for a greater knowledge, and subsequently understanding, of where each group comes from, the mentalities usually involved with being a believer over a rationalist (Christians especially, as well as some Jews and Muslims).

Can't say there aren't ignorant Atheists out there, either. I have met a multitude of people who simply believed in the non-existence of God, for no particular reason other than their emotional perception of things, notably irrational disappointment (due to whichever expectations they had from God when growing up).

To sum it all up, I couldn't care less what one's belief is, as long as sound reasoning is employed to believe in it.

 

@Remixer : I feel your pain - it is only recently I have upgraded from 2ghz dual-core, and that decision would never have been a 'games related' one.

Yes. I managed to get to the end.


It had triggered my memory of a Labi Siffre speech at a queer rally I attended at Turnham Green Town Hall, England, in the 90s. He did the "I feel angry when" shopping list. However, structurally, each item stood strongly in its own right, and rhetorically, he added two extra moves. 1: after setting up the 'I feel angry when x' pattern, he went on to, 'I feel angry when x ........ I feel angry. That was a pivot point. He'd turned it around, and from then on, he went. 'When x .... I feel angry'. He was closing the brackets on the thought-bytes or memes. 2: He topped it off toward the end by going, 'when x ........'. Wow ... by this time, his very silence was full of the 'I feel angry' message, and we, the participants, were compelled to have that churning up on our insides.

Then he did the judo move which was, very approximately, "Now you feel the way the people who hate you feel." And from then spoke on the subject of how feelings within important matters need to be dealt with in order to properly address the matters themselves.


I was concerned that the current author might missed those opportunities, which would have translated adequately into text, therefore I could not resist reading, with hope, to the bitter, very bitter, end just in case she hadn't. But she had.

 

Part of me thinks that if you're not angry, you just haven't been paying attention. The, hopefully larger, part of me thinks that anger is a terrible position to make a change from. I understand anger, I just don't understand staying there, setting up house, and buying curtains for it...

 

While I get pissed off as often as the next guy, it's rarely productive.

Writing an essay is a fair first step; but the bottom line is " What are you going to do about it?" Picking a single issue and working on it will be more productive that wailing at the world.

We're not there yet with gender or racial equality, no reason that atheists should expect more.

 

Interesting read. I can understand where she is coming from on a lot of those points. While I am one of those people "with imaginary friends" I feel some of the same frustrations as she does. At a few points I thought she was being a bit thin skinned though. I do agree with her that anger is needed. Face it, nothing gets done until someone get's pissed off enough to do something about it. I didn't read all the way to the end, but in my defense, I think I read almost every link she had up there on the way down.