I read this post on Love, Joy, Feminism earlier, and went away thinking,
See, THIS is why I like Libby Anne’s blog. [I’ve been saying that to myself a lot lately!] What she said about religion at the end there is pretty much what I think about it. And that’s why I don’t like atheists like, oh, JT Eberhard [remembering a post of his I read recently about Chris Stedman’s ‘Faitheist’ book].
And then I stopped, and blinked, and thought about what I’d just thought. I flash-remembered some words from Dan Fincke around the time of his shift from Freethoughtblogs to Patheos, about disagreeing with a whole laundry list of his fellow FtBloggers on some things, but still liking and respecting them and working with them.
Wait, wait, wait. Why – wait. I DISAGREE with JT on the value (or lack of value) of religion. That… doesn’t mean… I have to say I don’t LIKE him…. I don’t even KNOW him. I might like him if I did. Even if we disagreed! That’s a thing… that you can do? Whoa. You CAN.
So I came back out here and started to write a comment on Libby Anne’s blog, then quickly realised it was going to get wordy so I changed it to a post here. This paragraph only has one sentence in it that bears on the topic. Somewhere, all my English teachers are crying.
This seems like it shouldn’t be a revolutionary concept, I know. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for me, at least a few years ago. I distinctly remember reading this and finding it very powerful. I even started feeling more charitable towards my political opposites, more willing to look at where they were coming from. I remember liking it, that feeling of being willing to get along with everyone (or at least everyone who was willing to get along back).
And then, the 2008 election happened. And all the conservatives, at least all the ones whose voices I heard, went completely batshit. And suddenly I was no longer willing to hear where they were coming from. First just the hardliners, then quickly the moderates as well, and those who looked like they were thinking about being moderates, etc., etc. My facebook block list has grown amazingly fast over the past year. And probably the depression was also feeding into this (irritability is also one of the symptoms, kids). Patience basically went out the window. And it wasn’t particularly pleasant, no; it’s tiring to maintain that level of irritation all the time. But I didn’t seem to have a lot of control over it. I’m out of practice at the whole “agreeing to disagree” thing. So yes, this really does feel like a new concept.
It’s also not one that I’m willing to necessarily extend across the board. Unless it’s somebody I already have reason to be invested in, I will probably continue to block friends of facebook friends based on frequent sexist, racist, classist, or homophobic statements (frequency requirement to be determined by me and my hormones). I don’t see any value in agreeing to disagree on “should my friend’s mom and her wife be treated as less-human-than-thou”. They should not be. While there may be hurt occurring on both sides of that argument, real, actual people are hurt through no fault of their own when discrimination is practiced. When discrimination is prohibited, the only hurt that occurs is self-inflicted hurt, by people who are affronted by the very existence of homosexuals on themselves. Ok, I’m going to end this paragraph before I start writing another, completely different blog post.
Back to JT. Right now, I honestly can’t put my finger on what it is about his writing that occasionally makes me go “graah, forget you and all of your works!!” and click away. It’s not the anger at religion, because a lot of other people I read (Libby Anne, Dan Fincke, PZ Myers, Greta Christina) have the same anger and I don’t feel the same irritation with them. I think maybe it’s because JT’s take, to me, comes across as “There is no value in religion, and no value in religious people until they stop being religious because until they do that, they are deliberately contributing to all that is wrong with humanity.” OK, I guess I can put my finger on it.
Thing is, I don’t believe that he means to harm anybody with this. It is, in fact, because he wants to prevent harm to people that he broadcasts this message as stridently as he does. Now, one could argue that someone who truly believes that being gay is harmful is acting in the same way, but I don’t think it’s quite true. For one thing, I admit that it’s hard to find somebody who could be actually harmed by what JT says except in the sense of feeling offended, which in large part is something you are doing to yourself. For another, I think if he did encounter, say, a recovering addict holding onto their Higher Power as the main anchor keeping them sober, I don’t think JT would get in their face about how they need to drop that. On the other hand, many Christians have no problem telling gays to their faces, “God loves you, but he also commands you to be somebody else.”
Besides, I’m still working on this concept. Cut me a little slack. Perhaps one day I’ll have figured out all the nuances and details of how we should decide who we accept and who we agree to disagree with and who we choose not to interact with. I doubt it though. I’m pretty sure that’s one of those lines that we all just have to learn to decide for ourselves. For now, I’m just trying to push it back so it doesn’t make a neat outline directly around my own feet.
creekofconsciousness 
i’m so proud to have contributed at least two or three people to your block list. 🙂
You know some incredibly obnoxious people. 🙂
Alright, I may be misunderstanding this, because I did not read the post five times to sort things out, and I would need to do that because I’m doped up on pain meds (I tried moving things on Sunday that I have no business moving, and I’m still paying for it). So forgive me if I’m fuzzy.
First, was it the 2008 election that screwed things up, or just this recent one, the 2012 one? I can understand it being 2008, maybe, but your context implies this recent election. At least, as far as I paid any attention to politics. Which is to say, not at all until this year.
Next, let me try to get this straight. JT preaches (heh) -against- religion and people who follow one, and state that doing so is harmful to themselves and others? Without reading him, why? Is it because religious people can’t seem to not force their views on other people? I’d point to my parents as examples against that. And definitely, not everyone who’s religious, nor even everyone who’s Christian, is anti-gay.
So the argument might be that being religious is harmful to yourself and others, much as other people see being gay as being harmful to themselves and others? Again, I think in misunderstanding things here. I’m sorry.
Still, the point, that we don’t have to hate everyone whose viewpoints we hate (or dislike/dislike) is a valid one. My grandmother, in particular, has some very conservative viewpoints, and she and I see almost black and white opposites on political matters. But we still get along and love each other. And I can still enjoy a pleasant afternoon with her. And not just because she’s my grandmother, I don’t think.
No, it was 2008. My lj has a mention of the book, I believe, so that’s how long ago it was.
And I really can’t answer your question. I am not JT, so I can’t tell you why he thinks what he thinks. I also do not read him often or regularly, and I have not gone through his archives in-depth like I have with some others. I spent most of my drive home from work yesterday trying to figure out how I could respond to this comment. And then I got home and was constantly busy, so there was no blogging time.
Because I can’t answer your question the way you want, but I can give guesses. I thought, well, I could make a short list of the ways people have used religion in harmful, harmful ways, and just in the last two or so years, not even counting the rest of recorded history. But the big problem with that is, how do I condense roughly two years’ worth of activist blog-reading into one comment? And we’re talking depressive-style blog-reading as well, which means I was reading when I should have been doing other things, like taking care of myself or my job or my son. I can’t do that condensation; there is too much.
I’m also not really interested in getting into a debate on whether or not religion has value in this comment section. Telling me that there are religious people who are pro-gay or that your parents are good people really doesn’t change anything here. For one thing, I already know that, both about your parents and, well, my church voted to be explicitly accepting of alternate sexualities before the main ELCA did, and we have openly gay members on our church Council.
My guess (re: Eberhard) is that it comes down to the fact that religion, for the most part, says “Believe this set of impossible things [physical resurrection, wine into blood, Egyptian plagues, etc] based on the fact that some guy a long time ago said so.” Because that attitude leads into a tendency to be suspicious of reality (i.e., anything that might point out that those beliefs are false) and a blind acceptance of authority (i.e., the “church”). If you want more than that, I’ll have to badger Andrew or someone to come over here and comment, or you could just go read about him, but reading through blogs can take up a lot of time (I should know).
And since he, like many other currently active atheist voices, WAS formerly a devout Christian, telling him that not all religious people are bad isn’t going to change his mind about anything. He knows that. For him (and many others) the fact that your parents and others don’t push their religion onto people doesn’t come anywhere near balancing out the fact that many of our elected officials are trying to use our own laws to push their religion on us, causing real and lasting damage to many people in the process. And thinking that that damage is acceptable because their religion teaches them that those people don’t really matter.
I’ve been sitting on a pot of thoughts on atheism, and in particular new wave atheism (or whatever they call it), for the purposes of writing a similar post. I’ll save most of it for the post but I just wanted to say while true, atheism is not a religion, skepticism is not a bible, and rational thinking isn’t any version of double-think, I think this new wave atheism, the kind that openly puts down people with belief, regardless of their actions, is as much a source of identity as being a christian, or pagan, or jew, or whatever, is. I am not familiar with this JT, but the guy in my line of sight as an example of an asshole atheist is Matt Dillahunty. And they do preach. Granted, the vast majority of what they preach resonates eerily with my own take on the world, but that is the whole point I suspect. When an idiot young earth creationist comments to them, and they blast them with how unscientific the person is being, it isn’t for the ultimate purpose of getting them to understand how science works, and nudge them to a little more evidence based conclusions in their life, it is a rally call to other atheists.
As an atheist, it is really easy to get your blood boiling on some of these matters. I sometimes watch The Atheist Experience on youtube, that is often hosted by MD. I refer to this as my atheism porn, because it is just that. A release of private frustrations that while cathartic and enjoyable for the moment, actually do nothing.