When it comes to the crunch, it seems that very few genuinely embrace, or are prepared to admit they embrace, a form of religion that doesn’t make supernatural claims. This finding was backed up by two surveys I conducted, which while far from authoritative strongly suggest that churchgoers do, indeed, hold traditional beliefs about such things as Christ’s resurrection and the need to worship God. (Oddly, many people have claimed I was surprised by these results, when, as I explained in a reply, I have never expressed any amazement at all.)
So where does this leave me and does it constitute progress? The more procedural points merely clear the way for progress, so at best they represent a kind of proto-progress. It is a kind of negative progress to discard, set aside or reduce in importance aspects of the debate that are red herrings or have become too central. On the positive side, I think the real movement has come from grappling with the question of how important literal belief is to religion.
I’m fine with the idea of religion staying locked in a cyclical battle with disbelief for eons. What I’d like to do away with is this fetishization of linear “progress” in human psychology, this Hegelian faith that every thesis and antithesis can be synthesized, this tiresome pose of being the hero with enough balance and level-headedness to lead us safely between Scylla and Charybdis.
Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? We will always ask those three questions because homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, and religion has always been our greatest heritage of meaning. You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and the market economy as four institutions that characterise modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to those questions that humans ask.
Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes. Second, technology: technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn’t help us know what to say. As for the liberal democratic state, it gives us the maximum freedom to live as we choose, but the minimum direction as to how we should choose. The market gives us choices but it does not tell us what constitutes the wise or the good or the beautiful choices. Therefore, as long as we ask those questions, we will always find ourselves turning to religion.
… Individuals may live good lives without religion — the moral sense is part of what makes us human — but a society never can, and morality is quintessentially a social phenomenon. It is that set of principles, practices and ideals that bind us together in a collective enterprise. The market and the state may be driven by the pursuit of interests but societies are framed by something larger and more expansive, by a shared vision of the common good. Absent this and societies begin to fragment. People start thinking of morality as a matter of personal choice. The sense of being bound together — the root meaning of “religion” — in a larger enterprise starts to atrophy and social cohesion is lost. The West was made by what is nowadays called the Judeo-Christian heritage which gave it its unique configuration of values and virtues. Lose that and we will lose Western civilisation as we have known it for the better part of two millennia.
Damn, that’s pathetic. Sacks sounds like a terrible ventriloquist reduced to tearfully pleading with his audience to stay in their seats and please refrain from pointing out how often his lips move.
If we’ve reached a level of awareness wherein we can openly discuss God’s existence in such mercenary, calculating terms, then surely we can take that next tiny step and agree that the values that we generally call “Judeo-Christian” are worth preserving even if the presumed author of them has turned out to be a pseudonym without even an actual being behind it. Would Shakespeare’s plays be any less profound in their effects if it turned out that they had indeed been produced by hundreds of monkeys on hundreds of typewriters over hundreds of years? Meaning is a relationship, one that we are constantly updating and recreating, not a solid object with a fixed place of residence.
Three years ago, Dr Rowan Williams wrote a book about the 19th-century Russian novelist, in part, he says as a reaction to the attacks on Christianity by Richard Dawkins and others. The Archbishop felt that when he spoke to atheists about faith they seem to be talking about something very different to him. In their eyes, faith was seen as “a rather second-rate theory to explain why the world is the way it is or a second-rate psychological crutch for people who can’t bear the weight of reality”.
Dostoevsky wrote that if you tried to get a group of people to agree that two plus two equals four, they were almost bound to say “why not five?” There was something stubborn and perverse in the human imagination that wanted to go beyond the obvious. Dr Williams says, “I turn to Dostoevsky and think, well that sounds more like what I think faith is than what Richard Dawkins thinks faith is.”
Eighteen minutes in, Dr Williams sums up the connection between fiction and faith:
Fiction helps you to understand that whatever the principles, whatever the sort of standing rules and perspectives on the moral and the spiritual life, human beings are every bit as unpredictable as Dostoevsky sets out, that they resist rational cataloguing and categorisation, and they often resist reasonable solutions. And you don’t begin to understand humanity unless you understand that thread of wildness that’s in it all.
Most people I know believe blatantly contradictory things. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; none of us are aiming to fit our lives perfectly under a system of rational organization. But most people don’t have the self-assuredness to stand proudly in the intellectual nude with Walt Whitman and let their non-sequiturs dangle in the breeze. They’ll still feel a sense of embarrassment if you point out those contradictions and will attempt to resolve them, something that probably wouldn’t happen if they were simply being creative or rebellious. Methinks the archbishop is refusing to distinguish the exuberance of imagination from the shame of incoherence.
I’m guessing this is supposed to be some devastating satire of atheism, a reductio ad absurdum, but all it makes me think of is the kind of kid who would complain to his mom that he shouldn’t have to clean his room because it’s just going to get dirty again.
As atheists, I think none of us can find solace in the cliches or numbness in the delusion of an afterlife. Instead, embrace the fierce strong emotions of anger and sorrow, feel the pain, rage against the darkness, fight back against our mortal enemy Death, and live exuberantly while we can. Confront mortality clear-eyed and pugnacious, uncompromising and aggressive.
My, such hostility! It’s practically a parody of a tragic poet, what with all that sturm und drang. Well, I’ll leave the professor to his fist-shaking at the heavens and stroll over here to converse more casually with you all.
You know the old saw about how living well is the best revenge, I’m sure. I think the basic principle applies here, too. All you can do is live. Live exuberantly, if you wish. Or with your passions on a slow simmer. Either way, just enjoy yourself and don’t worry overmuch about death; it’ll arrive at its own sweet pace. Confront it, fight it, rage at it, whatever. It don’t make death no nevermind.
And what’s the point of maintaining this antagonistic relationship with it anyway? Would you seriously want to live forever? Do you honestly believe disease can or should be entirely eradicated? Death is the necessary coda that keeps existence from sprawling out into endless, atonal meaninglessness. Its nature is such that it’s never dignified or convenient for you and I personally, but as a general rule, we couldn’t do without it. Wise men at their end know dark is right.
A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question, that is the experiment.
For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us? The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones. Apparently, a growing number of Americans are running from organized religion, but by no means running from God. On average 93 percent of those surveyed say they believe in God or a higher power; this holds true for most Nones — just 7 percent of whom describe themselves as atheists, according to a survey by Trinity College.
Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism. We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.
Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)
It’s like a cat managing to always land on its feet. You just have to marvel at how fatuous twits, upon being dropped into a crucible of doubt, reflection, and despair, will always manage to make everything about them, to convince themselves that their every banality is profound, and that whatever holds true for them during this particular snapshot of their life must be synonymous with timeless verities. Maybe it just needs to be pitched to him on the sort of mushy self-help level that appeals to so many like him: dude, you seem to have some serious issues with commitment and decisiveness.
I like the Nietzsche excerpt because it’s such a sharp riposte to the typical apologists who claim that the sugar-coated errors and self-centered illusions of religion are necessary to preserve people’s ability to function at all. The impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.
The goggles I wore displayed the view from a camera pointing at my back. Ehrsson tapped my chest with one plastic rod while using a second one to synchronously prod at the camera. I saw and felt my chest being prodded at the same time as I saw a picture of myself from behind. Within ten seconds, I felt as if I was being pulled out of my real body and was floating several feet behind it.
A year after removing his subjects from their own bodies, Ehrsson learned how to trick them into acquiring new ones. This time, the volunteers’ goggles showed them the view from a camera on the head of a mannequin looking at its own plastic torso. Simultaneously poking the arm or stomach of the mannequin and the volunteer a few times was enough to convince the subjects that they were the dummy. They could even stare at their old bodies from their new ones and shake hands with their old self, all without breaking the spell. “It really is very intense and incredibly fast,” says Mark Hallett, a neurologist from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who experienced it first hand.
In his latest trick, published in May, Ehrsson convinced people that they had jumped into a tiny Barbie doll. When he prodded the doll’s legs, the volunteers thought they were being prodded by giant objects. And when Ehrsson tested the illusion on himself and a colleague touched his cheek, he says, he looked up and “felt as if I was back in my childhood and looking at my mother”.
…He also occasionally gets angry letters from people who have had out-of-body experiences themselves. “They believe that their souls have left their bodies, and they feel threatened that a similar experience can be induced in a lab,” says Ehrsson. He offers a diplomatic response, saying that he has “no way of disproving their ideas”. Metzinger is more forthright. “Henrik’s work speaks to the idea that there is no such thing as a soul or a self that’s independent of the brain,” he says.
Hee hee. It’s like Schopenhauer said — if forced to choose between a personal deity and personal immortality, people would turn atheist in a heartbeat. Who cares about arguing over God’s nonexistence? It’s far easier to disprove the idea of an immaterial soul, and far more devastating to traditional religious conceptual frameworks. Even most theodicy has to rely on some invocation of God’s mysterious ways, which aren’t readily apparent to the untrained eye. Few believers would be willing to allow an average life on Earth, bounded by the physical events of birth and death, to stand as proud affirmation of the inherent worth of existence.
Reviewing familiar principles and maxims in the face of mortal illness, Christopher Hitchens has found one of them increasingly ridiculous: “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive.
Or, as George Carlin said, much more succinctly:
Here’s more middlebrow bullshit philosophy. “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” I’ve got something more realistic: “That which does not kill me may sever my spinal cord, crush my rib cage, cave in my skull and leave me helpless and paralyzed, soaking in a puddle of my own waste.” Put that in your T-shirt, touchy feely New Age asshole!
Yeah, it’s a bit of a shame that of all the things Nietzsche wrote, this should be possibly the bite-sized quotation that’s become part of the collective consciousness. He wrote much more profound stuff, really! But I think Hitchens is right in saying that all he really meant by it was to attempt to affirm the few periods of pain-free existence he had as he aged, in keeping with his thoughts on the eternal recurrence and all that. And the romantic in me can sympathize with the proud, defiant gesture of it. Like the eternal recurrence, treat it as a thought experiment rather than a factual statement, a brave attempt to hold on to all that gives your life meaning even when facing unbearable suffering, and I think it sounds a lot less facile.
…adding, this is just fucking stupid. Of course it’s not “true”. Is logical positivism suddenly back in vogue? What simpleton ever took the phrase literally in the first place? And what is this “atheist list” of maxims from which it must be scratched? We have our own official list of U.S.D.A. certified godless aphorisms now? Is it a list of sayings by atheists, for atheists, or both? What are the penalties for quoting unapproved sources?
Religious people distrust the world’s estimated 500 million atheists as much as rapists, a study found Friday in the wake of a poll that said less than half of Americans would vote for an atheist president.
“Where there are religious majorities — that is, in most of the world — atheists are among the least trusted people,” said lead author Will Gervais, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
…“While atheists may see their disbelief as a private matter on a metaphysical issue, believers may consider atheists’ absence of belief as a public threat to cooperation and honesty.”
Not to tie the faith-minded up in logical Gordian knots, but who would a believer consider more trustworthy, then: an atheist who tells you so up front, or one who publicly makes a minimal gesture toward piety while privately rolling their eyes at what they need to do to appease the simpletons? Doesn’t matter, I suppose; they’re both equally flammable.
…I had a hard time finding any sympathy for Teofilo Ruiz while reading The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization. Ruiz follows Frazer’s model pretty well, offering up a historical document with a helping of his own personal problems on the side. The book ostensibly explores how men and women throughout time have dealt with the immense weight of living in a world with incredible suffering and pain — through religious belief, through art and aesthetics, through decadence and hedonism. Like Frazer, he tracks particular behaviors to find their universality. For example, some of the citizenry responded to the Black Death that killed half the population around them by imagining they were being punished by God and tried to make amends. Others decided to eat, drink and screw until the end came for them. And then others wrote a collection of tales about a society trying to function amid the backdrop of plague and terror and called it the Decameron.
If Ruiz is writing about humans’ avoidance behavior, looking for all the ways we manage not to take responsibility for the state of the world, he is doing so with a significant amount of judgment. The word “avoidance” does not have a positive connotation, nor does “removal” or “ahistorical,” other words he uses instead of “coping strategy.” For Ruiz, there is something shameful about these methods of distracting ourselves from what he sees as the “meaninglessness” of existence. The religious are particularly scorned, as Ruiz believes they use the promise of an afterlife to check out from the here and now. He somehow forgets that throughout history, Christianity was the one reason not to check out.
…Frazer held the religious as superior over the magical. Magic was superstitious, but religion was a higher state. Ruiz takes that further — religion is an emotional crutch, an “attempt to step out of historical processes, to escape the crushing reality of everyday expectations,” and pure rational atheism is not only a more honest belief system, but also a more ethical way to go through life.
…Agnosticism is at least an open, fluid, humane state of being. Pessimism, rigid disbelief, and a view of life as essentially meaningless is its own avoidance behavior. Frazer wrote that there is no true religious belief without action. Religion is (supposed to be) about engagement, not hiding or twisting away from life. Believing that we’re all fucked no matter what, as Ruiz appears to think, is a way of avoiding reality, or at the very least, of refusing to be a part of the rehabilitation process.
It might be churlish of me to point out that Crispin has already shown herself to be highly defensive over this topic and therefore sure is one to talk about authors letting their prejudices spill into the story they’re telling, but I’ll do it anyway, because I am an ornery li’l cuss, after all.
Not having read Ruiz’s book (though it is on my wish list, hint hint), I can’t say whether he is indeed being unfair. I will say that Crispin is overreaching in trying to define religion according to her sensibilities, in suggesting that clearly seeing the fiction of inherent, universal meaning is just another form of avoidance, and in implying that only a progressive, teleological view of human nature and history allows one to act compassionately and morally. Some of us just do the right thing for its own sake, tautologies be damned, even if human history is cyclical, even if the earth will one day be swallowed up by the sun and render this all moot. But arriving at that point does indeed mean letting go of comforting old fables.
So there are three factors at work with how we believe: the clarity and comprehensiveness of the belief; the conviction we currently have of its truth, and our willingness to contemplate its potential falsity. And it’s the third factor that is most important when it comes to identifying what constitutes militant or aggressive belief. People are often accused of being aggressive if they criticise opponents directly and strongly. But it seems to me there is no virtue in itself in being either intellectually pugnacious or accommodating. What matters is not how strong and clear own our views are, nor how vigorously we defend them, but how much we really engage with our critics. It’s about taking seriously the best case for the opponent being right and the strongest case that you might be wrong. What is really objectionable is not conviction and clarity, but the abuse, mockery and refusal to acknowledge any weakness that signals a lack of openness to the possibility of being wrong, and sadly, this is all too common.
That’s why the fluffy brigade can be as guilty as engaging in pointless argument as their supposedly more aggressive peers. It may appear respectful and polite not to challenge your opponent at all, but in reality, all that means is a refusal to engage with the deep differences between you. As Frank Furedi puts it in his latest book, “instead of serving as a way of responding to differences in views, tolerance has become a way of not taking them seriously.”
I readily admit that I can be irritable, impatient and generally prickly in close quarters. That can carry over into my attitude toward metaphysical beliefs. It’s not that I’m unwilling to contemplate the possibility of something like the traditional concepts of God and the soul being true, it’s just that I have been around the block a few times, I have spent a lot of time following painstakingly pedantic debates and arguments about those topics, and I feel it’s a safe bet that you’re not going to be the one to finally advance the same old “proofs” that have been around since the Scholastics. I did my homework, and I don’t feel like starting from square one each new day. I apologize for any bruising to your self-esteem, but your feelings, whether agreeable toward the possibility of a happy afterlife or disagreeable toward me for being crotchety, do not constitute an argument.
So why are atheists “among the least liked people … in most of the world,” in the words of a research team led by University of British Columbia psychologist Will Gervais? In a newly published paper, he and his colleagues provide evidence supporting a plausible explanation. Atheists, they argue, are widely viewed as people you cannot trust.
“People use cues of religiosity as a signal for trustworthiness,” the researchers write in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Given that “trustworthiness is the most valued trait in other people,” this mental equation engenders a decidedly negative attitude toward nonbelievers.
Oh, izzat so? Well, good. I didn’t want to borrow your money or babysit your fucking kids anyway. Seriously, whatever. More fuel for the flames of my smug sense of superiority, that’s all.
Let me remind you, though, as I’ve noted before, that we facially behaired people are also seen as untrustworthy. When you combine beardedness and godlessness in one perilous package such as myself, well, as Nietzsche said, I am no man, I am dynamite.
Looking at the religious aspects of many intergroup conflicts, at the violence carried out by zealots in the name of religion, some people conclude that the world would be safer “religion-free.” They may even try living this way themselves. But too often they only practice a form of self-delusion. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the human spirit. As C.S. Lewis said, the opposite of a belief in God is not a belief in nothing; it is a belief in anything. Sweep the demon of religion out the door and, like the story in the Gospels, you may only succeed in making room for an evil spirit worse than the first — this one accompanied by seven friends (Luke 11:24-26; Matt. 12:43-45). Zealous atheism can perform this role of demonic pseudoreligion.
This language could have come straight out of a Christian gospel tract: saying that atheists are in the grip of self-delusion, that we’re worse than the violent zealots we condemn, or that we’re practicing a “demonic pseudoreligion”. And, lest I overlook it, this passage clearly implies that it’s necessary to believe in God to be a UU – or even just to be a good person. I expect this kind of hostile, sneering denunciation from Bible-thumping fundamentalists, but to hear it from the mouth of a Unitarian Universalist minister was an awful shock.
I don’t really care what the official UU stance is on atheism; as a doctrinaire grouchomarxist, I likewise declare that I wouldn’t want to belong to any group that would have me as a member. No, my eye was caught by the other excerpt. With all due disrespect to C.S. Lewis, he’s so full of shit, I’m surprised he wasn’t covered in flies when he wrote that.
I was recently called a nihilist in all innocence; no insult intended. It’s just one of those things we take for granted — you don’t believe in God, so you must believe in nothing, right? Well, no. Now, bear with me here. I’m not splitting hairs to be difficult; this is just a fine but very important distinction. A nihilist is someone who is still desperate to believe in something, anything. Nihilists take the concept of nothingness and reify it, raise it to the level of Absolute Truth where their God used to reside. They still want to believe in the sort of one-size-fits-all universal truth common to Platonic philosophy and Christianity, but if they can’t believe anymore in some kind of eternal meaning, they’ll settle for believing that nothing ever means anything. The enveloping, inescapable rule of Nothingness becomes the blanket they cover up with to keep out any existential drafts. It’s what allows them the security of being able to shrug off responsibility and say “I was just following orders.” The poor melodramatic fellow we had such fun laughing at last month is a nihilist; he’s just frantically trying to cover up the sour stink of his fear with some Jesus-scented air freshener, and probably not even fooling himself. Nihilism is quite literally the shadow of God.
I feel that it’s quite apparent to anyone who looks carefully that there is no inherent meaning in anything. There are no souls, no absolutes, no guarantees. Meaning is something we create out of the contingent pieces of our shared existences, themselves contingent, and it is always an unfinished work. The absence of belief in inherent meaning is not a positive affirmation of the substance of meaninglessness. So how, then, as my interlocutor asked, does the non-nihilist person live in the absence of such active belief? Well, as Suzuki Roshi said, you do it every day.
I, on the other hand, don’t tend to walk around with glowing atheist belt buckles. I’ve been atheist since I became aware of the term, but my material is not all about religion – not by a long shot – and when I do address the topic it is to point out where religiosity meets discrimination. Many comics write about what makes them angry, or, at least, what they observe in the world that is at odds with how they feel it ought to be. This is the case when Seinfeld talks about muffins or McIntyre talks about Argos (brilliantly, I hasten to add). I just happen to be less preoccupied by parking spots and soup nazis, and more by homophobes and creationists.
Most people don’t know I’m atheist, though I do confess to a fair collection of kitschy t-shirts advertising the fact in one way or another (though I tend to save those for times when I don’t plan to meet up with anyone I know). But here on the Internet, where I have yet to meet one more godless than myself, I like to part company with my more conciliatory brethren, who are happy with benign mistakes as long as they lead to beneficial results, and take it a little further: it’s easy to condemn religion for its ill effects; it’s a little more sporting to me to criticize it for being rooted in irrational soil to begin with. I’m glad that some people manage to be religious while embodying it in a way of life that coexists easily with mine, but I’d be happier if they took a more direct route to that understanding.
Granted, pure rationality is neither attainable nor desirable. And I honestly don’t have any desire to convert as many people as possible to my way of thinking. But I think as a general rule that you should still endeavor to see as clearly as possible, even at the cost of personal discomfort, and I like the idea of serving as a prod, a stimulus, an irritant, a gadfly to perhaps push other people in that direction.
By the way, it’s funny, that Browning quotation — when I heard it, I took it as a suggestion that heaven is actually unattainable, simply a projection. I don’t know what he meant by it, though.
I wouldn’t argue that Dawkins and Hitchens are crypto-believers, far from it, but it interests me that religion continues to hold a fascination for them, even if it is an appalled fascination. That tells you something about religion’s persistence, endurance. When I read Hitchens’s God Is Not Great – which I found good in parts – I liked his passion, but there is something so angry and disappointed in that literature, and you think, ‘Why do you care so much?’, and then I think it must be because of the way followers of Jesus Christ fail so lamentably to follow what Jesus preached.
Well, I suppose if there’s nothing else in the philosophical pantry, we can always reheat some Freud. Perhaps Dawkins and Hitchens are like little boys shooting spitballs at a girl to show how much of a crush they have on her.
Look, I’m not sure it really needs any explication as to why people should have an interest in the Big Questions, or in those those who claim to have the final answer, and if I may get all Nietzschean about it for a moment, it’s equally natural to be concerned about a belief system which has had great power for thousands of years, especially if one considers oneself to be an ideological enemy of it. And continuing in that vein, I’ll add that outright disbelief is still enough of a novelty in our culture to provide an iconoclastic opportunity for distinguishing oneself. Oh, sure, I’ll admit it: there’s a bit of an egotistical thrill upon feeling as if you’ve seen through a venerable deception that has gulled so many important and powerful people.
But, as Scott Atran has pointed out, the whole point of religious faith is that it is contrary to what we know by material means—that is why it’s faith. In other words, it is because it’s impossible for the sun to stand still that people value their belief that God made the sun stand still for Joshua.
As Atran puts it, “religious thought is insensitive to the kind of simple-minded disconfirmation through demonstrations of incoherence that [Sam] Harris and others propose.” So when you come along and say science shows the Sun can’t stand still, you’re failing utterly to speak to the reason people believe in the miracle.
Of course, if you point out that the reason people believe in miracles is either ignorance or a narcissistic need to believe in magic, that the universe itself is favorably disposed toward them and regularly intervenes on their personal behalf for the most petty reasons, and you suggest that this is not merely a false security but an unhelpful mindset that they might do well to leave behind, you’re accused of being rude and condescending. You’re not allowed to make a case against religious belief with science, you’re not allowed to make it with logic and rationality, and you’re not allowed to make it with psychology. It’s almost like certain apologists want atheists to just shut up and go away altogether. Oh, wait…