Atheists: Like Those Mean Girls in High School, in a Way
Over at the LJ community

nebris reposts an article called An increasingly outspoken community of atheists and agnostics is getting fed up with being marginalized, ignored and insulted. It's mainly about Dawkins's and Hitchens's success with their books about atheism and how it gave a lot of Americans the guts to own up to the fact that they're atheists (apparently atheism is next to communism in the good ol' USA).

It's a direct success when

roseross replies, in the first comment:
Militant atheists are the only group other than the Dominionists who scare me because they are so intolerant of others' spiritual beliefs. They insult people who believe differently than they do. They insist that ALL will some day believe as they do, because they're the only people who have it right. They often feel using the government to enforce their worldview is a good idea. In short, the only way to tell the difference between a militant atheist and a Dominionist is which creed they intend all of us to adhere to. For our own good, of course.
People call her on her bovine excrement, but she insists:
Can't count the number of times I've heard militant atheists long for religion to be made illegal. After all, from their point of view, spiritual beliefs are all childish delusions and it would be doing a favor to take the purple unicorns away from the silly people who have not reached the lofty state of atheism on their own. They seem to have no idea why any of that would be insulting to others, or perhaps they just don't care since the insulted folks are just braindead religious folks in the first place.
But why wank when you can have an orgy?

bobdole asks:
The only other group? So militant atheists scare you in this regard but militant Muslims, for example, do not?
The definitions of the words creed and faith need clarification. Religious scientists get their feelings hurt. People get flashbacks of being outraged. The Constitution is invoked. And much, much more for who is willing to rake through the tl;dr and the "quote-marks."
And will somebody think of the non-Abrahamicists?

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limyaael
2007-06-24 01:30 pm UTC (link)

Militant atheists are the only group other than the Dominionists who scare me because they are so intolerant of others' spiritual beliefs. They insult people who believe differently than they do.

Because I know that when I hear crazies talking about replacing the American Constitution with the Bible civil code, the next place my mind jumps is in fact, "Oh, no, gasp! What if they insult my beliefs?"

Now, granted, I'm an atheist so I'm automatically "intolerant of others' spiritual beliefs," since

roseross said so; "smug and convinced I've gotten it all figured out," since some of the agnostics I meet online say so; a "fundamentalist atheist," according to any number of Christians who've read Dawkins, although I haven't yet figured out what beliefs I'm supposed to be fundamentalist about; someone who worships Darwin, according to the Christians in my neighborhood; and someone who "tried to oppress Christian beliefs," according to one of my students, since he insisted on knowing my religion when I told him the Bible was not an academic source for his rants against homosexuality and I told him I was the dreaded a-word. So I'd better get back to being all those things instead of worrying about Dominionists.

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	cat_mcdougall 2007-06-24 03:03 pm UTC (link)
	since he insisted on knowing my religion when I told him the Bible was not an academic source for his rants against homosexuality and I told him I was the dreaded a-word. ... Wait. What? That sounds like an interesting story actually. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

limyaael
2007-06-24 03:11 pm UTC (link)

It's a normal policy at the university where I teach: the students are supposed to find a certain number of academic sources per paper, and largely, academic sources are "books, academic journals, and government documents." The Bible doesn't count; it can still be used, but not as an academic source. Most students just accept it, but this particular one went a bit nuts (he was trying to write a paper about how homosexuality should be outlawed based on the Bible, and some verses were practically the only source he had), and demanded that I tell him my religion right now. When I told him I was an atheist, that seemed to be enough for him, and he wrote that I was oppressive towards his beliefs in his evaluation of me.

He still had to change his whole paper topic, though, since he couldn't find a single academic source that supported him. *whistles innocently*

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	barankhy 2007-06-24 04:22 pm UTC (link)
	I want to propose to join with you in a civil union, the ceremony being conducted in a giant water tank by manatees. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	limyaael 2007-06-24 04:38 pm UTC (link)
	My non-religion demands kinkajous conducting the ceremony in the jungle instead, but otherwise I agree with this proposal. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	singe 2007-06-24 06:03 pm UTC (link)
	And I will be the flower-girl! ♥ (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	seiberwing 2007-06-25 02:36 am UTC (link)
	Can I bring the chips and papayas? (Reply to this)(Parent)

	greenling 2007-06-24 07:31 pm UTC (link)
	Wow. That's impressive, considering how many Religious Studies academic discussions of the topic in question I'm sure there are. Lazy bastard. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	limyaael 2007-06-24 08:15 pm UTC (link)
	My students are 17-19, and, because they're so used to researching on the Net, tend to have a condition in which they are allergic to a very specific thing. The thing is "going to the goddamn library." (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	greenling 2007-06-25 02:28 am UTC (link)
	But that's what JSTOR and Google Scholar are for! Gods know I wouldn't know half the stuff I do if it weren't for ~~roleplaying forums on~~ the internet. Tsk, students. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

limyaael
2007-06-25 02:56 am UTC (link)

Ah, but for them, "resarching on the Net" amounts to "grabbing the first three items that look vaguely related off Google." I even attempted to introduce them to the wonders of JSTOR and using Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" on scholarly works our library doesn't have (not that there are very many of those; it's a research library with 1.2 million books), and still I receive papers with, at most, government documents cited.

Usually incorrectly.

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mmanurere
2007-06-24 10:20 pm UTC (link)

I spent a couple of years in my 5-year "break" from university at a community college with a good number of students like that. One philosophy and logic class, in particular, was pretty bad with respect to this -- the prof had to spend almost half his time on a few days trying (futilely) to explain the difference between "being anti-Christian" and "not accepting Bible quotes as grounds for making empirical claims." Take away "I believe X, therefore you're oppressing me if you disagree publicly or don't accept my reasons as rational" and some people flail. (Of course, this being a branch of religion wank, everyone is shocked when their assertions are challenged, even those agreeing with the prof. Especially those -- we had an atheist student who discovered that professors, too, struggle with "get off my side, dammit!" syndrome.) (I still think the most amusing moment in my community-college exile was having a prof publicly invite Satan to appear before us and prove his existence -- and watching half the class look surprised when Satan was nowhere to be seen.)

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limyaael
2007-06-24 10:51 pm UTC (link)

Oh, yes. I actually took to teaching my class logical fallacies for a semester or two because I had waaaay too many who didn't understand the difference between "The Bible says homosexuality is wrong" and "Homosexuality is wrong because the Bible says so."

I've only had one student who publicly identified as an atheist. Guess which one I caught plagiarizing?

Of course, I teach in the Bible Belt, which ups my exposure to crazy Christians. I've finally switched to mostly teaching environmental literature, mostly because a) I want to and b) I'm interested in it, but also c) to avoid students like the Baptists who wanted to write about the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses being cults, and the Mormon who wrote her paper specifically to convert "people who believe in Jesus but haven't seen the truth." (Really, the atheists don't have to beat up Christians; they do a fine job of tearing each other apart).

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seiberwing
2007-06-25 03:30 pm UTC (link)

We had an asshole who was Christian in our class on the theory of evolution and its effects on society. He'd sit around and roll his eyes while the teacher talked, then went on about how carbon dating was flawed and the usual young-earth idiotic arguments. It was like the class was some way for him to get information on 'the enemy' or some shit like that.

Then he wrote his paper on how Christianity was the universal base to Darwin's universal acid. God, he was a smug bastard.

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limyaael
2007-06-25 08:52 pm UTC (link)

I can't get along with creationists. With most other brands of Christians, I'm usually willing to live and let live (unless they attack me just for saying I'm atheist, or come to my door and try to convert me), but I've lost two Christian friends because they couldn't accept that I accept evolution, and creationist losers who try to change the school curriculum to outlaw mention of evolution are just...no.

I am glad I did not have to share space with the one you describe. I assume it was a biology class?

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	seiberwing 2007-06-25 10:03 pm UTC (link)
	Sorta-kinda. A mix of sociology and biology, a lot about how the theory of evolution influenced society. Teacher was an atheist, but he wasn't a dick about it like the creationist in my class. (Reply to this)(Parent)

queencallipygos
2007-06-25 06:48 pm UTC (link)

See, I'd almost want to allow that -- because there's a way to pick apart the argument based on "different scholars have translated those passages differently."

There's even a New Testament passage that, according to some translations, could imply that Jesus Himself was okay with homosexuality, after a fashion; there's a story about a Roman soldier asking Jesus to heal one of his favorite slaves, and Jesus says sure and the slave is all better. But some scholars say that "slave" isn't the accurate translation, and the actual Greek translates to something closer to "boyfriend."

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limyaael
2007-06-25 08:50 pm UTC (link)

I think I've read about that passage! (I am sad when I turn out to know the Bible better than some of my students).

In this case, I couldn't allow it because of the lack of academic sources, but he was also one of those who was set on his church's interpretation of the Bible verses being absolutely correct, and his paper included the sentence "The Bible is miraculous, because despite thousands of years and over forty authors not one word of it has ever changed." Failing his paper for being a stupid interpretation of the Bible would have literally not made sense to him.

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