Faith

A comment by evil_genius spurred a lot of writing, and I’ve decided that it merits its own post. This is a continuation of the protester conversation.

The truly scary part, to me, is that these people honestly want to do good in the world, they’ve thought long and hard about how to do it, and this is what they came up with.

As we try to shape their beliefs, I think it’s important to acknowledge and to keep that visceral and active desire to do good in the world. They don’t wake up in the morning wanting to do evil … they wake up willing to drive thousands of miles to do good … but somehow they miss and wind up getting spat on by the likes of me.

What we need to do is to steer them away from the damaging and scary propositions they’ve fallen into – and here’s the critical part – we need to do it without destroying that desire to do good.

The biggest problem with most of the atheist movements out there is that they don’t have “doing good in the world” as a core goal. Those few who acknowledge that faith leads to a great deal of good in the world (along with considerable suffering) seem to assume that the good and charitable people of the world will simply turn around and keep doing their positive activities after we prove that there is no God out there.

The reality is that religious organizations provide an absolutely vital, and massive, social support network in every city, state, and nation of the world. They feed the hungry, they clothe the naked. If you go and do medical work in the developing world … by and large you will find yourself working side by side with people of faith. The same is true of disaster relief. The same is true in fighting urban poverty.

So, I disagree with this:

Religion is ritualized collective superstition and should be eradicated.

Until you’re willing to step up and replace it with something that will do similar good in the world.

This is why I stopped going to the local Atheist club. I was sort of hoping that we could adopt a highway, contribute to a food bank, or something similar. Instead, month after month, we sat, smug and complacent, shooting logical fish in a dialectical barrel. Arguing the hell out of people who weren’t even there to defend themselves.

While I loathe the stance these protesters have taken – and while their reasons for doing it are illogical and incorrect – at least they’re doing something.