S.E. Cupp Calls Out a Group of ‘Crazy, Militant Atheists’ for… Wait, What?!

Seriously, no comments?

I think it would find it easier to believe that Benny Hinn can cure cancer with his magical god powers…than believe that S. E. Cupp is actually an atheist…it reminds me of those old aspirin commercials “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on t.v.”

Who the fuck is that idiot?

wait wait wait… she said “I envy religious people… I envy the faithful. I would like to be a person of faith, but I’m not there yet…”

Who wants to take bets on how long it is before she undergoes a miraculous conversion… becomes the poster-child for “prominent atheist _________ finds god….”

I’ll bet she was pissed as hell at whatever her name was from the atheist turing test for stealing her (future) thunder….

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is abominable, intolerant, or arrogant to point out a leader’s prayer habits as a point of criticism, it does seem a bit petty to me. Atheists believe, by and large, that when a person is praying to an entity they’re really just talking to themselves. 

But there is an additional psychological layer to it, an externalization of the internal conversation being projected onto whatever entity is being putatively prayed to, a level of self-critical contemplation (in the best of circumstances) similar to meditation. Just because a person, due to their upbringing or tradition choose to conceive of it as reaching for advice from an external deity is relatively unimportant from a results perspective, because it’s the same result that would be achieved (if we atheists are right) as if the person just thought hard about it to themselves.

As an example, a Christian friend of mine was contemplating a job change, what would amount to a major promotion and an exciting opportunity in his line of work, but also one that would be disruptive to his life at a time when he had a newborn and one other small child; would involve moving, impact his wife’s occupation, and so forth. When he talked about his process of coming to a decision he would say that he was “praying on it”, and he certainly believed that he was communicating in some sense with his God for advice on what to do, but in stripping away all the religious detritus from it it was clear he was simply using prayer as a distancing mechanism, a way to step back and get a different perspective that tries to bracket out his excitement and trepidation about the choice and look at it from an artificially objective lens. Seemed to work for him, and it would have been churlish for me to criticize that process on the basis that I don’t think he’s actually communicating with anything but himself.

When all the churches and religious organizations start distributing their voter guides will Cupp call them “Crazy, Militant Christians/Muslims/Jews/etc”?

Funnily enough I was watching that segment and had to switch it off, I just couldn’t take any more of her nonsense.  An atheist who want to be a person of faith.  Not a believer, mind you, just a person of faith.  sheesh.

Accusing atheists of being crazy or intolerant, just un-friggin-real.

Did they put her on MSNBC as a token conservative?  Either way, it’s a show I won’t be watching again.   

I loved how Steve Kornacki said something about her being a “self-loathing atheist”. I can’t figure that chick out, but I think Rich is on to something when he says it’s her shtick. I just don’t get her vehement “belief in belief”, as Dennett calls it. I can see being fascinated by religion on an intellectual level, and even being totally cool with individual religious people, but to denigrate your own non-belief? Huh? 

And this too – she doesn’t think someone who represents 5-10% of the population (as she points to herself) should govern everyone else. Cuz, you know, atheists aren’t human beings?! 

Really, I thought most of her comments were just stupid.  What was insane was her comment that she wouldn’t vote for an athiest and what followed including her logic of how a president that doesn’t believe like the majority………. Sorry just had an aneurysm.

In my experience, people either take responsibility or they don’t for their actions, and their religiosity is completely unpredictive of which they will be. And generally speaking, once a person has arrived at a place where they are willing to commit to a choice, they become much less amenable to counterargument or criticism of that decision, again regardless of whether they think the ultimate decision was God-assisted or not.

I suppose at the margins there may be cases of people who would be persuadable in such circumstances but for their religious commitment, but I am willing to wager that is not true for the vast bulk of such people and decisions.

Combine that with belief that faith is a virtue and that doubts are the voice of Satan, and you have the perfect formula for making unassailable and unreasonable decisions.

Yeah, except there is little reason to believe that Obama, say, actually believes that doubts are the voice of Satan. Nor, it should be said, is that probably true of most Christians. 

She has a Master’s in Religion Studies from NYU, so I don’t think we easily can dismiss her as stupid. Deeply cynical, though…definitely.

What I’m suggesting is that that phenomenon is not significantly different from all the other ways people become locked into ideas and ideologies and willfully ignore contrary evidence, discount advice and arguments, and so forth. Talking to the useful idiot of any political ideology will cause you to run into exactly that same evidence-proof and sense-proof certainty as that generated by the most demented of prayer-bots. 

In my experience, most people who use prayer to clarify their decisions are no different than people that use other decision mechanisms. Of course there are people who use prayer and it becomes exactly as you describe. But they are the exception, not the rule. Most people are simply incapable of building those fortresses in their heads that lock out their friends’ pleadings and their colleagues’ criticisms, at least not to the extent that is being criticized here. 

 No atheist speaks for other atheists…period.  Cupp’s not an atheist, she plays one on TV.  This militant atheist group only speak for themselves…Obama gets a C…shut up!  You don’t know what you are talking about. 

At the risk of repeating myself; Fuck her.

Isn’t it clear by now to everyone that Cupp is no “atheist”? She’s a theist, trying (and failing) at playing an atheist on TV.

Well, I’ll reserve judgment on S.E.Cupp for a while, sure she has given herself a ‘look’ that is memorable and see everyone is talking about her so she’s doing something right for herself right there. By being on MSNBC with a group of similarly aged folks where there is a dialog and discussion she’s getting away from the Amen Chorus at FOX. I don’t expect everyone to have my same opinion but I do hope they discuss and argue their positions with courtesy and intellect and there is not enough of that around. I saw her on a show at MSNBC as part of the table of commentators (not her show) react to a documentary about the people who have been losing their jobs and careers in this economy, it wasn’t the face of a smirking FOX talking head I saw, it was someone who was reacting with humanity rather than ideology. SO rather than participate in the latest lynch mob against someone who says something I don’t agree with you all can rage and name call without me. 

You and SE Cupp should both come out of the closet and be done with it.

I’m one of the moderators at Unreasonable Faith, another atheist forum on Patheos, you airy goofball. I’m terribly sorry that you think my difference of opinion on what prayer signifies about the integrity of a decision process makes you want to cast me out or whatever.

How about Poseur Atheist-Theist?

Argument from authority: logical fallacy.
So much for the integrity of your decision process.

I don’t think S. E. Cupp is atheist. At all. You can’t be “Hi, I’m atheist. Now let’s pray!”

She has absolutely no idea what atheism is. She must be a protestant mocking us or something. I haven’t saw no evidence whatsoever that she’s actually an atheist.

I bet my underwears that sometime in the future this full-of-shit “atheist” will find Christ and appear on TV as a proeminent ex-atheist. I’m sure of it.

I can even see, even though clairvoyance isn’t real: she’ll be an atheist for 3 to 5 years, convert to christianism and then tell people she was atheist for… I don’t know… 15 to 20 years and came to light because Jesus Christ is the word or something. She’ll tell people that she was famous for her atheism activism but that in the end atheism is a lie.

Ex-atheists are super rare and not famous enough. They must be trying to fake one to parade as a trophy, since it’s taking too much time to appear a real one.

Am I wrong? Is that a stretch? In a world where Fox News exists, is that so unlikely? Hell no.

If you have in fact been around the Internet for a while, you should know that attempting to prove something about yourself by anything other than self-evident behavior is a virtually futile pursuit – especially in an environment in which most of us use pseudonyms.

You want to give prayer-based decision-making a pass, as functionally equivalent to strictly rational methods; the problem is that believing you’re conversing with invisible all-wise sky-people is introducing an inherently irrational, and thus unreliable, mechanism – no matter how often you (dubiously) claim that the results are about as good.

And yeah, in the absence of verification, your claim does boil down to an argument from authority: I’m an atheist mod, therefore I can’t be a closet theist. And really, that’s the same argument Cupp makes: My statement of atheism must be believable, because I made it on TV – despite all the circumstantial evidence to the contrary I provide every time I open my mouth.

In both cases I think an old aphorism is more relevant than any unsupported protestations: If it quacks like a duck …

 I don’t know much about Ms Cupps and from what I saw on that clip it made me think that she is a lying moron. (What kind of atheist says that they really wish they were a person of faith??)  Plus I had read that she had written a book defending Christianity against “persecution” from atheists.
  And now you say she once said she would never vote for an atheist President. WTF?? That’s like a gay person saying they would never vote for a gay President. It makes NO sense. And frankly I don’t believe for one minute that she really is an atheist.  In many ways she reminds me of Tammy Bruce–the right-wing “lesbian” who goes on all the conservative talk shows to denounce gay rights. Both women are just lying shills for the right-wing.

Somebody shut her up. She does NOT speak for me.

Can we give her credit for being hot?

But hard on the brain and stomach.

 Apparently, she’s the world’s first self-hating atheist, if you take her words here at face value.

Yea, but she’s pretty hot.

So I guess you’re saying that 3lemenope is not an untrue Soctsman.

I found the presentation of the report’s conclusions (in the main scorecard table on page 2) to be sometimes a little confusing. For example, Michele Bachmann gets an F (Consistently hostile or negative) for Taxpayer Funding of Religion, which sounds like she’s against it (ie, she’s hostile or negative towards taxpayers funding religion). It’s only when you read the detailed section that you see that’s not what they actually meant. Same for God, Faith & Governance.

The scorecard would benefit from being more neutral and letting the results actually speak for themselves, rather than seemingly applying the atheist viewpoint from the get go.

Worse. She may be using her bullshit to make us comment about her. When she comes out as a christian, she’ll say she was featured in several blogs over the Internet, therefore she’s a popular atheist among atheists.

A degree does not necessarily indicate intellect, but it does indicate money and time.

(Reply to later post here, since the line splits are getting ridiculous. 🙂

If you have in fact been around the Internet for a while, you should know that attempting to prove something about yourself by anything other than self-evident behavior is a virtually futile pursuit – especially in an environment in which most of us use pseudonyms.

That’s really not true. There are plenty of secondary sources of evidence that become available when someone identifies a body of writing over a period of time that belongs to them. My gravatar and my nick are the same here as there (well, to be painfully accurate I had to change an “E” to a “3” because Disqus), so the most parsimonious explanation is that we are the same person (e.g. a person would have to go through an awful lot of trouble to make it seem as though it were so when it wasn’t). Given that, you can read anything I’ve written there over the past three and a half years. In light of the contents of that data set, anyone coming to the conclusion that I’m a closet theist must either be an illiterate moron or extremely lazy at reading.

You want to give prayer-based decision-making a pass, as functionally equivalent to strictly rational methods; the problem is that believing you’re conversing with invisible all-wise sky-people is introducing an inherently irrational, and thus unreliable, mechanism – no matter how often you (dubiously) claim that the results are about as good.

That is not what I claimed. Now it’s my turn to accuse you of being a very poor reader. What I actually said was that when religious people are struggling with a moment of decision, they often use prayer, and while they believe that they are communicating with an outside entity, atheists essentially must conclude they are really just talking to themselves, which is functionally isomorphic with meditation. I went on to say that the personality qualities that are associated popularly by atheists with prayer are not particularly unique; that every sort of decision procedure can psychologically lead someone to become insensitive to evidence and argument.

And yeah, in the absence of verification, your claim does boil down to an argument from authority: I’m an atheist mod, therefore I can’t be a closet theist. 

Then–and I hate to be rude about this–you don’t understand what an argument from authority is. As I already explained above, my indicating my status as a blogger is a piece of evidence, and one that allows access to other pieces of evidence, the sheer amount of which (if anyone bothered to analyze it) would be dispositive of my claim. S. E. Cupp’s claims to atheism don’t rest on an argument from authority either, but simply a bare report about an internal belief state. Now in her case, the claim is problematic because all other available evidence actually points away from her claim. But just because it is a bad claim and she makes it on TV, that doesn’t make it in any way an ethotic argument.

In both cases I think an old aphorism is more relevant than any unsupported protestations: If it quacks like a duck …

It’s really not my fault if folks are too lazy to actually use what they have available to find out whether my claim of atheism is well-supported. If you never bother to check if the quacking is coming from a hunting whistle instead of a duck, you may indeed foolishly assume you have yourself a duck. Doesn’t make the hunter a duck, now, does it?

Why, this is worse than the Crusades! Those damned militant atheists, grading the presidential candidates like it’s their freedom to do so. What a bad name they give the rest of us.

Does anyone else find her sort of scratchy, whiny voice as annoying as I do? That’s half the reason I dislike her so much. 

And just how many pieces of contrary evidence does it take to disprove a claim? You’re claiming that your reams of other writing make the case for your atheism. But let’s say I claim “I am not a burglar,” and point to the 29 days out of a month on which I didn’t burglarize a house as evidence. If on day 30 I pull a second-story job, it doesn’t matter what I did on the previous 29.

For that matter, despite all your huffing, I have never said you are not, in fact, an atheist. I said claiming to be one doesn’t prove it, and being an atheist-forum mod doesn’t prove it. We’re back to reading comprehension here.

For the latter to be true – your credential as a forum moderator (or frequent poster, for that matter) “proving” your (un)belief – it would have to be impossible for a theist, closeted or otherwise, to serve in that capacity. It’s quite possible for someone to put up a good front, for reasons of their own; to change their mind; or to have simply not thought out all the implications of their position before taking on such a title and role.

I think it’s quite likely that you are indeed all that you claim, but just still have a squishy spot for irrational thinking so long as its practitioners are basically well-meaning and don’t do too much harm. 

You want to accuse me of misquoting or misinterpreting what you said about prayer, but then immediately try to alter your original statement. Tricksy, tricksy, but it’s not working.

Let’s compare. Originally you said prayer can be “a level of self-critical contemplation (in the best of circumstances) similar to meditation.”

Then that changes to “functionally isomorphic with meditation.”

The two are not the same. You tacitly acknowledge in the first case that this might happen “in the best of circumstances.” By the second, the statement is generalized. So, really: all prayer? And how often do those ideal circumstances occur among all those who make decisions by praying? Yet you treat all such cases as essentially the same, using as example your Christian friend who prayed about a job change. “Seemed to work for him,” therefore prayer’s generally just as good as conscious, logical decision-making: “it’s the same result that would be achieved (if we atheists are right) as if the person just thought hard about it.”

Do you really want to make that argument? Really? Because for your cheery anecdote I can give you a dozen of “prayerful” decisions that went disastrously wrong, when a decision based on evidence would probably have given a better result. Look at all the dead-kids-of-faith-healers stories on this very blog. These are people who hold jobs, often own houses, and generally function in the world; but when faced with a decision they think calls for prayer, abandon reasonable decision-making to the extreme of watching their children die as they fervently pray over them. Now that’s “unimportant from a results perspective?” 

Of course, you try to leave yourself an out by  saying “every sort of decision procedure can psychologically lead someone to become insensitive to evidence and argument.” True, but inadequate. The question is not whether any method is infallible, but which is most or least likely to lead to error. Even if you are just “talking to yourself” in prayer, if you believe what you’re “hearing” in response is of divine origin, that’s an imperative. It’s not an idea to be considered and measured against evidence – it’s an instruction to be obeyed without question, no matter how bizarre or half-baked that random thought might be. That fatally skews the decision-making process. Just because some people get a “good answer” now and then does not make it a reliable method for consistently generating good answers. The point of working out a rational, evidence-based method was to be able to consistently identify errors and subsequently minimize them.

And if you can’t tell the difference, whatever you think you believe, then you might as well go back to basing your life-choices on the patterns of bird flight or strange lumps in a sacrificial calf’s liver.

How long until SE Cupp will find Jesus? 
I wager that as soon as her dog and pony show exhausts its usefulness she will somehow find god in her heart and convert. At that point she will be able to go around saying: “I was an atheist too….”

 Oh, surely not even CLOSE to the first.

It isn’t a stretch at all. 

I don’t like saying “she/he isn’t a real atheist.” There is just so much evidence on the contrary that it impossible to say that she is actually an atheist. 

An atheist saying that she will never vote for a president who was an atheist? An atheist envious of the religious and hopes to become one some day? 

Mmmmm, I don’t think so. 

Since this is getting pretty tedious, I’ll make this (relatively) short. No, you didn’t accuse me of not being an atheist, usclat did. Look at the thread, the order of conversation, and reason through just what is a response to what. You, on the other hand, did make a claim that I was using an argument from authority in responding to usclat’s accusation. My response should be understood in the context of me explaining (painstakingly, although that seems about useless at this point) that my response to usclat’s claim was not an argument from authority.

Your analogy to the burglar is ridiculous almost beyond words. Descartes and Hume put empirical verificationism in its grave hundreds of years ago; if you, in light of that, still want to pick absurd evidentiary standards for claims you encounter–on the Internet no less, epistemologically impoverished ground that it is–that’s your prerogative, but it can certainly make you impossible to talk to, much less take seriously. Different contexts, situations, and topics require different relative levels of verification for claims; on the internet in the discussion section of a blog post, what you seem to expect is something nobody can provide.

The fact that you think prayer, as an activity, excludes all consideration of evidence leads me to believe that you’ve never actually asked anyone who does it what they do, how, and why. Understanding what you criticize, at least to my mind, is crucial to making your criticism valuable. My friend in the original anecdote certainly had all the competing options and rational reasons for them rattling around his head when he decided to step back and pray; it’s uncharitable on a gross and unwarranted level to assume that because a person prays they immediately turn their brain off. I’m curious what makes you assume the contrapositive; why do you believe that if, instead of praying, a person actually did use their mental faculties in a secular way that they, personally, would have come to any better conclusion than the disastrous ones in your counterargument? People make bad decisions all the time without the interference of prayer. Why do you believe prayer is the decisive factor that magically transmutes otherwise good decisions into bad ones?

Alvin Mitchell, above, figured out the essence of what I was claiming and stated it with impressive simplicity and clarity, so I know a person can certainly understand what I meant from what I wrote.  So what, exactly, is your problem?

Your standpoint seems to be based on a misunderstanding of 3lemenopes post. And your inability to adjust it based on presentation of evidence seems to indicate that you may be one of those exceptions that 3lemenope mentions (in his reply to kagekiri).

This long text is getting silly. There should be a limit to the number of nested replies (or the nesting should stop).

she is a FRAUD. end of story

she has a degree in modern myth. 

damn el, all this time and I had no idea you were a closet theist. Ya think ya get to know some invisible Internet guy, and then bam! Secret like like this gets out. I bet you didn’t even know. Time to join a church I guess. I’d recommend the one with the best donuts. Try not too listen to the sermons too much. I can teach you the secret Lutheran handshake if you want.

I guess the real bet is whether she goes Catholic or fundie evangelical.

That’s really the best you can do? That I seem “proud” of myself?

Considering the amusing muddle you posted in his defense, I can see why 3lemenope’s maunderings might seem impressive to you; but you commit the same basic error: assuming that because prayer can sometimes generate a decent answer, that it does so at the same rate and level as rational decision-making. And of course even those who try to think rationally can be sidetracked by wishful thinking or other factors, but that doesn’t invalidate the rational process as a whole. If anything it reinforces its value, because the error enters when rationality is abandoned.

I’m nobody special. I’m a guy of moderate intelligence and fairly wide reading, that’s all. But it doesn’t take a genius to spot a crappy argument.

 Lighten up, Francis?

“Secularness” is not a word. She should have said “secularity.”