AGR+ Militant Atheism

The Pompotous of love is married to a wonderful, intelligent, kind, patient woman. Who is a Christian of sorts, an Episcopalian to be precise, but not one of the "let's go to church because that's where the money and status congregate" types of Episcopalians I knew as a young Pompotous. She does indeed believe in some sort of supernatural something or other.

Everybody has AGR. This religious belief of hers (along with her perpetual optimism about what she can actually accomplish in a limited amount of time) rank as her high points of AGR.

But over the years of our interactions I've think I've identified some things that may be the roots of the "militant atheism" moniker that has been the topic of discussion lately. (Various blogs have touched it, the most excellent vjack's is always a good place to go.)

Here's the thing: for those of us steeped in the humanities, you go off and do history and historiography and philosophy and cognitive science and phenomenology and psychology and so on and so forth, each discipline taking itself as the lens through which the entire world can be viewed, and if you are interested in consciousness, one of the things that you eventually come across is that sanity is primarily a socially defined construct.

Yeah, yeah, almost everything is a socially defined construct, got it, when does the interesting part come in?

Well, we have all these social constructs that point out what is right and what is wrong, what is "other" and bad, what is acceptable and what isn't. (Think of homosexuality being in the DSM until what, '73? Or putting "God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950's to distinguish the US from "godless" communism. The various ways various groups (Irish, Italians, Jews) have been integrated into American society over time.) The more complicated a society is, the larger it is, the more communication and interactions between people, the more stress will be placed on competing social constructs.

As a professional interaction experience designer, additional interactions complicate things almost exponentially. If you lived in a primitive village and never knew what happened 1/2 a mile beyond the boundaries of the village the simplistic "everything not mandatory is forbidden" (with, of course, memetic variations) might be workable enough. But an empire has to be more flexible. ("Forgive him Caesar- he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature," as Shaw wrote.)

Reason and the scientific method provide us with the tools to examine social constructs as objectively as humanly possible. Most people cannot use those tools. Some of them can only use those tools in limited areas (think so-called "scientists" who claim the scientific method should only be used in the job or in the lab, not in real life, where faith should prevail).

But enough people have been exposed to the scientific method and the fruits of scientific discovery to see, hey, it works! Like the cartoon, only some really fringe anti-evolutionist cases are going to take the antibiotic that worked 20 years ago instead of the one designed to combat the evolved form of the infection.

So when an atheist steps up and says, "Keep your baseless historico-social construct out of my life" what we're really saying is, "You have high AGR -- you have a disconnect with reality." If you believe in something without evidence to back up your beliefs you are, in point of fact, insane.

If some politician started making decisions based on World of Warcraft lore and trying to make policy based on Horde versus Alliance affiliation, that politician would be widely viewed as insane. But from the Pompotous's viewpoint, a politician standing up and talking about faith being a deciding factor in decisions is much the same as yelling, "Horde rules!" during a senate debate. It reveals a disconnect with reality, it reveals high AGR.

My wife knows I think she is insane. But she knows that I admit my own insanity -- everybody has AGR to a greater or lesser extent.

Religion and faith play by different rules. A religionist looks at somebody else who is a different religion and they are wrong or heretics or apostate or whatever, and you may kill them or torture them or pray for them or whatever, but the other whackos are playing at a similar level of AGR.

I've seen several atheists use the argument that religionists are atheists to every god except their own and that's just not true. A religionist's denial of other gods is not based on reason and evidence and all those other good things, it is based on faith and thus isn't atheism. Religion is not rational. That doesn't mean that any specific theist is dangerous -- not all crazy people are dangerous -- but it does mean that every specific theist is irrational on the subject of religion.

Any atheistic declaration is an attack on the theists sanity in a "you people aren't connected to reality" way. That's the attack. That's the "militant" position. It's not comparing apples to apples in a communal way of "mine is better," it's saying, "all of your apples have the same existence in reality as the 'tea' my 2-year old daughter pores for me out of her empty play teapot."

Atheism based in rationality and the scientific method is utterly at odds with religionists about how reality is determined. That is a deep conflict. Imagine someone made it to 40 still believing that Santa Claus personally put his presents under the tree after coming through the chimney -- wouldn't an anti-Clausian's attempt to persuade the poor fool of reality be seen as an attack upon his world?