"Atheists realizing the best defense is a good offense" [View All]

[More Than A Feeling]

In the specifics, what this comes down to is the fundies say teaching evolution in the classroom is wrong because it contradicts their religious belief. By playing that card, they’ve provoked the freethinking side to challenge their armor and ask why it is specifically that religion can assume that it should go unquestioned. By using what was just a mundane defense mechanism as an aggressive tool to get into secular territory, the fundies have put this defense in danger and sure enough, in response to this aggression, you’re seeing the freethinking side up the amount of attacks on the very idea that faith deserves respect—just look at the number of titles coming out just this year not just arguing that atheism is right but that religion doesn’t deserve respect.

Because the fundies have gotten more aggressive, in other words, they’ve created an opportunity for anti-religious thinkers to flood the media with our point of view and also to get more aggressively anti-religious, not just arguing that fundies are wrong but that faith itself is fundamentally flawed and damaging. And in order to examine the “religion deserves special respect because it’s so good” defense, people are amassing evidence and it’s damaging this defense mechanism even more. From an evolutionary theory perspective, what I’m seeing happening is by invading the secular spaces, the fundies forced freethinking to become more aggressive and now there’s a chance that freethinking is probably going to spread.

Oddly enough, the group that stands to lose the most members in this struggle is going to be the mainstream churches. With the sheer number of arguments out there about how faith is overrated going up, the number of people who are going to be persuaded by that argument is bound to go up as well. And I have a feeling those people aren’t going to be the fundies, but people who don’t have many reasons to be religious other than the fact that they grew up thinking it’s a generally good thing and no one has challenged their beliefs aggressively. And the realization of this is what’s prompting the Amy Sullivans of the world to beg of freethinkers to find a way to attack fundamentalism without attacking faith itself. But what I think a lot of mainstream Christians fail to realize is that as long as the fundies are using what are merely defense mechanisms in mainstream religion (predominantly the social stigma against attacking another’s faith) as weapons to invade secular territory, they can expect freethinkers to attack the weapons being used, even if the fallout is the mainstream churches lose members to atheism. http://pandagon.net/2006/11/18/atheists-realizing-the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense/

The whole thing is worth reading. If this is right, it would explain a lot of what goes on in this forum as far as religious/atheist relations go.

Edit: Just to make things clear, I am not Amanda, and I did not write this. She did. Go to her blog at www.pandagon.net for insightful feminist commentary and other thoughts. It is well worth your time.