Chuck Norris Sheds More Light on the Evil Atheist Conspiracy

That’s funny! It occurs to me however, that for quite a lot of the religious, thought is a large part of the faith lifestyle. Their blogs have daily meditations, they have bible study groups, they have intense theological discussions, they discuss particular applications of their holy texts to life if not daily, at least regularly. I mention this not to be redundantly repeating myself by telling you what you already know (again), but to raise the possibility that one of the points of miscommunication is that the religious, talking to each other, are accustomed to using a linguistic shorthand that we atheists simply aren’t privy to. We don’t know, quite literally, what their actual words mean. We, on the other hand, are also accustomed to dealing with each other in a non-faith context and we can get fairly boisterous with it. Huge possibilities for misunderstanding.

Is Chuck Norris serious about the Mint? No, serious, serious?

“There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.”

Well, I agree Chuck Norris is being quite overzealous, but let’s look at it from his perspective. He probably sees people Sam Harris who go around saying how atheists need their rights (which I agree with) but then turn around and say ALL religious people are bad no matter what and we should “ban” religion, basically creating a double standard, and isolating liberal religious who would actually agree on with him on some things. I In the Soviet Union they “banned” it too to “educate” people-look what happened. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you want freedom from religion, you need to tolerate freedom of religion. You can fight for your rights without attacking other peoples’ rights (this applies to religions as well) most of the time. Most atheists do from what I’ve seen, it’s just some of the public figures seem to be getting a little overzealous with the “let’s ban what I don’t think should be around” scenario. So I think that’s where he’s going with that, even though he didn’t say it right. What many people don’t seem to realize is that people like Sam Harris only add to the negative image of atheists. I haven’t heard Dawkins say anything about banning religion, so I guess he is ok. What I don’t like about him is him acting like this is a “science vs. evolution” scenario all the time. Only creationists reject evolution. There are plenty of religions that do accept it. Also, it’s perfectly fine to have your groups on the Internet, but you don’t like it if some religious person comes into one of your chat rooms and starts “preaching” do you? Well, lately I’ve been seeing quite a few “angry atheists” coming into religious chat rooms and saying lots of hateful things, I mean really hateful things, without provocation. It was interesting, a friend of a friend, who is a Deist, heard about one on myspace who was doing just that and wrote to him to tell him to please stop b/c he was being just as bad as fundies and making atheists look bad. He wrote back with such anger and venom, and totally attacked her for having an alternative lifestyle (info he got off her profile)-which was totally irrelevant to the conversation and one of the very things he gets on religions for. It was disgusting. Too often those are the types of people that are seen and heard by people like Chuch Norris. I’ve seen the “Rational Response Squad” come in and do this too. It would be nice if more people were like Hermant. You say no one “forces” you to be an atheist, but what about that, and what about people like Sam Harris who seems to want to force everyone to be an atheist? Some atheists seem to think that b/c they are atheists they are “allowed” to do this. I disagree and think this approach will eventually backfire, for both sides. How is Sam Harris any better than fundie preachers? Please, no double standards. This also goes for people who bud into private conversations in public, both religious and non-religious. Things like Jesus camp are awful. And there is stuff being done to try and stop places like that. But they certainly don’t comprise all of religion by any means. And you also need to realize that the more Sam Harrises come out, the more militant some of these fundie groups are going to get-and it’s going to go back and forth like a bad game of tennis. I’m not saying you should “roll over and play dead”, but you can accomplish a lot of your goals without being as hostile. If you actually think that if you ban religion the world will be a better place, you don’t understand human nature very well. People will just find another kind of dogma, probably an even worse one, to kill each other over. It’s a human problem, and it isn’t going to go away by eliminating one symptom of it. In the Soviet Union, they were going to be an atheist society-and they ended up adopting the dogma of communism, which they used to kill lots of people, most notably Jews and Christians, and people of any other religion. The coin thing was ridiculous for him to get all upset over, I agree. As for the internet, freedom of speech, but I don’t think either side trolling into opposite groups is going to accomplish much. Advertise, and people will know you are there, but do it in neutral places on the web. There are plenty. This website for one is a great idea. As for the children thing, many people accept religion as adults too. But I agree that children should be exposed to all view points.

To clarify, at the end of my statement, when I said “every one believed in God.” I meant a god, I didnt mean to imply every one was Christian.

Chuck Norris doesn’t believe in God. God believes in Chuck Norris.

Someone should outlaw reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger.

Bright…

I think you’ve wandered far afield….

Where has Sam Harris advocated the banning of religion?

I think Harris argues against religion, but that’s not arguing for a BAN on religion.

If you’ve got a quote, please bring it to my attention. I’ve never read anywhere that Sam Harris advocated the government stepping in to criminalize religion.

You say Harris “seems to want to force everyone to be an atheist”.

I think that’s utterly false. Please provide documentation for that outrageous claim.

Things are bad enough for atheists right now. We don’t need people putting words in other people’s mouths.

Things are bad enough for atheists right now. We don’t need people putting words in other people’s mouths.

I”m all in favor of that. And I’d go a lot farther, not assigning guilt to something because someone else did it. Sam Harris would have to go back to writing his Dissertation if he gave that one up. I’m really interested in how the idea of vicarious guilt, really big in the caste religious-political systems, is gaining vogue among some atheists again.

Chuch Norris, good grief. Isn’t it bad enough that he pretends to be an actor, now he’s making believe he can think?

While I don’t fully agree with Sam Harris, I’ve never heard him advocate a ban on religion. I did hear him say on a podcast that he doesn’t want religion to have the reverrence that it currently enjoys.

I’m not pretending anything.

Bright says Harris advocates BANNING religion and seems to advocate FORCING people to become atheists.

Honesty can begin right here, right now. No evasions, no “tu quoque”. No lists of other things he’s done that you don’t like.

Did he or did he not say those things?

To some people saying “Religion X teaches evil things” is the same as saying “all people who are born into religion X are evil”. I can’t figure out how they come to such conclusions but they do. Perhaps it’s in their upbringing.

Good God, Bright. They are called paragraphs . . .look into it. You make a bunch of claims without any hint of proof. Some atheists are mean and wrote mean e-mails to your friend. I don’t see where anybody wants a govermental ban of religion, but nice tie ins to the soviet union. Are people still scared of “the commies”?

No one forces you to be an atheist. That’s something you see only in religion.

It is true that there are lots of times in history and the present when dictatorial systems that mix politics and religion do and some times when individual religions do but to make a blanket assertion is inaccurate. Liberal religion, like what I’m going to start calling liberal atheism, doesn’t insist on homogenous conformity but allows for individuals to have their own ideas on these things. And liberal religion is a lot less rigid than the kind of atheist orthodoxy that is found on most atheist blogs. This one and a few other’s I’ve seen are a marked exception. And there is quite a bit of pressure for people in the sciences to conform to the atheist-fundamentalist code of speech too.

I’m undecided on the Forrest Mims case, in which Martin Gardener crowed about his being denied a job on the basis of his fundamentalism. He was going to be writing in an area that had nothing to do with any of the pseudo-science aspects of fundamentalism since his expertise is electronics. Mims is certainly qualified to write on that. I don’t like his fundamentalism but I don’t like McCarthyism either. I am also rather attached to the Civil Rights laws protecting equal rights in employment, wishing it covered my minority group as well as race and religion.

Well, he says “religion must be destroyed”. I can see how it would be easy to interpret that as “religion must be banned” though he doesn’t exactly say that. In fact, he’s pretty vague about the practical political applications of his positions.

He says “Religion must be destroyed by science“.

How does he think this “destruction” would come about? Forcing people into reeducation camps? Using the might of the state to ban religious writings and observances and institutions?

No.

Not by force, by finding new ways of talking.

To win this war of ideas, scientists and other rational people will need to find new ways of talking about ethics and spiritual experience. The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis. We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous. We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity — birth, marriage, death, etc. — without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality.

I am hopeful that the necessary transformation in our thinking will come about as our scientific understanding of ourselves matures. When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths.

Monkeymind said

I can see how it would be easy to interpret that as “religion must be banned” though he doesn’t exactly say that.

I think it’s easy to interpret anything badly if you make up your mind by reading the title of an article and disregard the lengthy footnote of the article itself. (Thanks to Richard Dawkins for that rather brilliant turn of phrase).