The SSA Hates Puppies Now?

Well done. 

Atheists love puppies! we even provide post-rapture care for Christian pets!
 
http://www.progressivepuppy.com/the_progressive_puppy/2009/10/post-rapture-pet-care-service-run-by-atheists.html

I would just point out, if we wanted to go the direct route, that Christianity has a rather nasty recurrent history of drowning kittens. I’d rather kick a puppy than drown a kitten, especially since a kick can be a little love tap, whereas there is no really gentle way to drown something.

I, too, enjoy the occasional puppy–but only because babies are so expensive these days when you buy them by the pound.*

*(No, not that kind of pound, that’s where you get the puppies.)

 I went there too. Just so’s you know you aren’t alone in your depravity.

If you read another post by this “Gilbert” guy, you’ll also see that he wants to donate in some way that ‘doesn’t make him feel dirty”.

Do the SSA really need the money so badly that they will accept it from people like that?
I find the “puppy kicking” comment extremely offensive. I spent my life giving shelter, food and care to stray animals, dogs and cats mostly, but I’d do it for a baby alligator if I had the chance.

I don’t want some jerk to associate me with animal cruelty even in jest or as a sarcastic joke. It offends me deeply, probably more than it should, but what offends me even more is that it comes from a catholic. 
I was born in Rome, Italy, and I was baptized in St. Peter in Rome. I know Catholics. This business of fucking small boys is nothing new. I grew up hearing the adults and the other kids joking about staying away from the “padri”. 
Tragic as it is, we had a centuries old tradition of macabre comedy, including the rape of little boys and girls on the part of the Church’s official employees .

If I were still a catholic, I certainly would be very careful about who I go around offending by accusing them of being filthy and molesting the young of a species. Go get a fucking mirror if you want to see some real filth. Asshole.

I’m not even a little bit surprised. The Catholic Portal on Patheos is full of vile, hateful people. It was inevitable that they would flock to her blog since her conversion.

I think it’s reasonable to feel qualms about donating to a cause you oppose.  I had some serious misgivings about donating to the church cleanup last year because money is fungible, and I didn’t support their work.  I can’t blame for having the same doubts when the situation is flipped.  

And Gilbert didn’t feel guilty about donating, but he didn’t want to end up on the SSA’s donor list and get pinged for more contributions or receive cheery updates about atheist growth.  That’s why Adam set up his ChipIn.

An immature child throwing a fit that someone doesn’t agree with him. Nothing new, coming from the religious. 

That’s how it works on the Catholic Portal. Its wrong to sue a fellow Christian. And in that hateful little piece of Patheos, that includes even criticising them.

I was going to make a dark joke about the joys of kicking puppies, but after it was written out I saw a cute little puppy face in my mind’s eye and I was overcome with deep sadness. You can’t joke about that shit. *wipes away a tear*

This is why my comment policy (which I really need to link at the top of the blog) explains that I don’t screen comments except for spam, and I don’t see it as my job to comment on each one to state whether or not I agree with its content and tone.

I let every non-spambot comment through because that way you know not to assume that I approve of the content and/or tone when a comment shows up (as you might if I moderated comments).  And my safe harbor policy goes one step further.  Sometimes commenters ask me why I haven’t rebutted them or someone else in the thread.  If the offending commenter is Catholic, someone might add that I have an obligation to respond, since otherwise people can’t tell if I agree with that person’s interpretation of doctrine.I refuse to be held hostage by the most aggressive commenters.  I respond to the comments that interest me or anything where I think I can help with a quick question or clarification.

 For that to work, we’d have to admit demons exist, then demons actually have to exist, after that we have to find someone possessed with a lot of demons, next we have find a lot of puppies, and then we need a nearby cliff.  Sounds positively exhausting to me. I’d rather just cuddle with a puppy instead.

I reply to whatever seems the most interesting and relevant part of a comment to me.  When people start a comment by calling me stupid, I ignore it and reply as though the entire thing was phrased respectfully if something interesting followed the insult.  

I think you and I just have different purposes in comment threads.  I don’t and won’t take responsibility for calling out every instance of bad behavior because it would take over my life and distract from responding to the interesting ideas.  It’s fine if you think that’s shirking my responsibility as admin, but this is just a particular example of my general approach.

Nope, that’s not my policy.  I only respond to the good and ignore the bad across the board.  I’d rather the commenter engage with the meat of my response than get the opportunity to divert into a discussion of tone.

I don’t feel an obligation to police and call out comments on other people’s blogs and I don’t feel more of an obligation to judge them just  because they appear on something I’ve written.

Again, once you commit to calling out every inappropriate comment or term, you’re essentially saying that aggressive people go to the head of the line for responses, since they are the only people who must get responses.

“Again, once you commit to calling out every inappropriate comment or term, you’re essentially saying that aggressive people go to the head of the line for responses”

That would be true, except for the part where the comment to which this is a response said this:

“no one’s saying that you should call out every instance of bad behavior,
but you should at least call out people when you’ve already decided to
respond to them for other reasons.”

You are misunderstanding or misrepresenting the point being made here.

 Well, OK, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to have much of a meaningful conversation with anyone if you just ignore chunks of what they say, especially the chunks you disagree with.

An odd observation, perhaps, but 300+ people on that staircase and bridge was not a great idea. You probably got way too close to its weight rating, and did it all with a temporarily static load. Next time, how about a group shot of the assembly on the floor level, taken from the bridge above?

So I’m the guy who wrote that comment. Chana has a point here, that comment wasn’t particularly well-considered. Now let me make it worse by elaborating on it.

The point I’m most embarrassed about is probably not quite the one most of you want me to be most embarrassed about. Chana notes that the SSA is nicer than other atheist organizations and that probably is true without. And for all I know that is probably true, because I normally don’t take notice of which particular atheist organization is doing what. I tend to blur atheist activism into a uniform whole.

That is particularly bad because it drives me up the wall when your side does it. While Christianity is portrayed as Catholic in entertainment most zealous  atheists seem to have stereotyped it as Evangelical. For example, many Internet atheists seem to have missed the memo that we Catholics don’t have a problem with evolution, don’t take everything in the bible literally, etc. For a while I used to follow the various religion debating reddits and found it somewhat amusing how the atheists would always pose challenges that presume a type of Christian simply not hanging out there, then tell the answering Christians (mostly liberal, which is a different both from what they wanted and what I am) that they weren’t really Christian and then complain that the Christians weren’t engaging their arguments. It’s basically an exercise in rehearsing the strong points.  By the way, Leah not doing this is what got me hooked on her blog back when she was an atheist.  She was basically the only atheist on the Internet who wanted to fight Christians with arguments actually interesting and relevant to what I believe. 

So I suck for amalgamating movement atheists into an undifferentiated stereotype and for having a double standard when they do it. 

On the other hand, and as I said, this is probably not the point most of you want me to be embarrassed about. Some might even suspect I’m trying to drive in a wedge. Thing is the SSA doesn’t relate to other atheist organizations like religious denominations relate to each other.  It’s more like different organs of one movement and I think most of you wouldn’t really want to be seen as different from those  more nasty atheists over there. I would suspect there is quite some membership overlap with the meaner organizations.  So I don’t quite get what Chana means when she suggests I “make alliances where [I] can”. I would be rather surprised if the SSA wanted to ally with Catholics against meaner atheists.  So there’s not that much sense in sorting the organizations into totally different categories when they are actually different vehicles for one movement.

Next point: Chana explains that atheists face discrimination in the United States, which makes them look less like the kicker and more like the kickee. But that’s not a question of who is better behaved but quite simply a question of who is in power.

For example, here in Germany a wacko court recently ruled that religious (male) circumcision is a crime. No need to panic, that will soon be fixed by statute. But I find it interesting that people opposed to that fix can be basically divided into xenophobes and – secularists. That’s right, secularists both individually and through their organizations are speaking out for a state of law that basically sums up to banning Judaism in Germany. Let me repeat that: banning Judaism in Germany.

Or look at Britain, where people who disapprove of homosexual behavior (which in practice mostly means people taking their religion seriously) can’t adopt anymore, because in theory the kid might turn out gay.

And of course even in the United States nondiscrimination is increasingly a stick to beat Christians with, like forcing wedding cake bakers to bake for “weddings” they disapprove of or forcing pharmacists to stock drugs they disapprove of, or with that student who didn’t get her counseling degree because she didn’t approve of homosexual acts.

Of course all these examples are debatable, but then so are Chana’s examples of discrimination against atheists. 

Basically I’m pretty sure you are not the good guys, because to the extent you get to be in charge religious freedom is destroyed. Of course y’all have good intentions, but then so have the folks at Exodus International and I don’t see many atheists calling them the good guys.

So on the demonizing charge, I’ll confess a partial fault: You are not trying to be evil and implying you are is uncalled for. But materially you do stand for evil and it’s not only OK but actually necessary to recognize that.

That, finally, brings me to the wording of my comment. Yes, it was more angry than was called for. But honestly, of all things that happen in a day, is that the thing to get upset about? At the end of the day a guy intensely conflicted about giving money he thinks will be used for evil (which, b.t.w. I did end up doing) expressed his disapproval of that evil a bit more stongly than would have been polite. I can already find worse overreactions in the comments to this post. To be blunt, if this is important enough to get worked up over, it’s at least in part because you want to take offense.

It’s hard to lean into criticizing this, because it’s clear that you put a lot of thoughtful effort into it, and I respect that.  But there are definitely points that need addressing.

First, I don’t see what’s wrong with atheists “blurring” Christian denominations together.  The whole idea that a religion which has a lock on “truth” can be split into denominations which DISAGREE about that truth, simply undermines its credibility.  If you’re all working from the same book, and that book is inerrantly true, then it seems that the ONLY people who can be considered credible are the ones who all AGREE on what the book says.  Yet so few of you do, and those that do are at odds with others.  If you can expect us to extend equal respect to every variant demonination, I don’t see why we can’t expect your religion to be consistent and INvariant.  If your religion is so pliant and vague that EVERY adherent can bend it to their own interpretation, doesn’t that make it inherently unreliable?

Second, you need to take a step BACK from what you call “evil”.  Much of what you say above, I call SLANDER.  You say that atheists–or “secularists” if you prefer–are attacking religious freedom.  But I think there MUST be some limits on that freedom.  Look at what kinds of “freedom” you’re championing!  The “freedom” to be able to tell gay youths that their parents or guardians “disapprove” of them?  How is THAT a “freedom” which someone needs?  Have you ever tried growing up gay in a household where homosexuality is “disapproved”?  It isn’t fun.  Are you really more interested in protecting someone’s need to look down their noses at vulnerable youths, than you are in protecting the mental well-being OF those youths?  If we want to say that we actually CARE about the health and happiness of gay youths, then NO, we don’t want to be putting them into the hands of people who will raise them to loathe themselves.

And, oh no, a baker or pharmacist, who runs a PUBLIC business, might have to serve a member of the public!  If you want that baker to be free to discriminate against weddings he disapproves of, is it ok if that includes interracial weddings?  Does his religious freedom extend to refusing baking for Jewish weddings, if he doesn’t approve of them?  Can the pharmacist refuse to dispense AIDS medicines, because his religious doesn’t “approve” of stopping god’s punishment against gays?  Where does this end?  Is there anything that CAN’T be justified by “religious freedom”?

Religious freedom should mean worshipping how you please.  It SHOULDN’T mean that you are absolved of the duties of your employment, it shouldn’t mean that you can disparage good citizens who haven’t committed any crimes, and it shouldn’t mean that children are at the mercy of their parent’s superstitions.  I won’t wade too deeply in the circumcision debate, as such a long-standing tradition, it’s hard to support the argument that any real harm is involved, but again I wonder about the limits of religious freedom, when someone insists that they can’t practice their religion unless they can cut their child’s penis.

In short, I think the concept of “religious freedom” is often maliciously abused, and frequently just taken too far.  You don’t need to be able to vocally denigrate gay people in order to practice your religion.  You don’t need to withhold legally prescribed medicines in order to worship your god effectively.  What we are “destroying” is not your religious FREEDOM, but your religious PRIVILEGE, and religious OVER-REACHING.  When EVERY Christian can come together and deliver the SAME message, then we might be able to consider that this message has some relevance.  But as long as each of you preaches your own personally customized version of that message, the rest of us are justified in being suspicious of it, and suspicious of the motiviations which drive you.

I haven’t read the other responses to this post yet, but I just want to give a broader sense of why I wrote this piece. You’re right that language is not the most important aspect of this debate. In fact, I mostly don’t like to talk about uses of language, since I agree with Leah that there are more interesting things to talk about, but in this case, in the context of attacks (the DoS) on the SSA and the extraordinary response of donations for the church clean-up, I thought your comment was offensive and, honestly, cruel enough to warrant a defense of the SSA.

I really appreciate you writing this comment. I don’t agree with your characterization of us as evil, unsurprisingly, and I have more to say on the alliance point, but I just want to thank you for explaining where you’re coming from. I definitely didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt of being so conflicted, I thought you were taking cheap shots based on a common and harmful stereotype. I hope in the future we can have interesting and productive discourse about our relative beliefs’ strong points. 

 haters gonna hate, but you sound like one too.

 Thanks.

You love puppies??

OK, no money from me, I fucking hate dogs!

 😉 !!!!!!

Hermann

Except for the inherent assumption that you and your particular splintered faction of “Christianity” know right from wrong, and everyone else is wrong, I kinda understand your position.  “Us” are always more comfortable when unchallenged by “Them.”  

The difference is, we (or “Them”) are willing to coexist on terms of human parity. We are not willing to be subjected to diminishment or be condemned as “evil” based on your (Christian) imaginary yardstick.  That’s all, really.

I agree about the mailing list issue, but you seriously underestimate the implications of your puppy-kicking comment.  It simply invites responses referencing the Inquisition and the Holocaust — genuine events with far more serious consequences done in the name of your God.  Better not to bring such matters up in the first place if we are to survive as a species, and just stopping doing all of it.

Evil, like most human behaviors, is a relative term, and needs to be recognized as such.  Eating pork is evil?  Circumcision is necessary?  I was raised to believe eating meat on Friday was a sin (evil).  Better to invest our time on addressing real issues like poverty, criminal economics that propagate violence and disease, and stopping the abuse of puppies.  

Seriously, if there is a task worth doing, like disaster relief or combating racial prejudice, are you NOT going to participate  because the sponsor group disagrees on transubstantiation or the constitution of the Trinity?  That’s just insane.  Do similar thoughts occur to Athiests when dealing with Christian charities?  Of course — we are human, too. But we are also actively wrestling with these issues, not just doing what we are told as some symbolic act of submission.  

If there is one thing I have found in history, it is that the reason there are so many branches of Christianity is that individuals (men) of conscience took individual responsibility for their beliefs.  I don’t agree where these beliefs took them, but I do respect their acceptance that they, not some committee or God, grappled with concepts they did not have the information to understand.  At one point, all were considered loonies, and many were/are.  Please allow us all the right to be wrong, or right, or simply confused.  

So far as “what constitutes ‘freedom of religion that isn’t in ‘freedom of worship,’ the answer is found in the wording of the Constitution:

“Freedom of expression.”