Another Atheist Facebook Group I've Quit

Actually, it's a group for atheists and theists. There are relatively few groups which are actually for atheists only. Instead of "an atheist group," I should call something like this "a group where atheists and theists can get together, insult and verbally abuse each other, hurl simplistic slogans and strawmen, and not listen to each other."

So what am I saying? That such groups are not filled with the creme de la creme of atheist and theist intellect, and do not provide discourse of a high order?

Yes. I'm saying it. These groups are gathering places for idiots. There are a few intelligent people among the retards, to be sure, but the dumb ones are driving the smart ones away. (Case in point: me, right now.)

So this group I'm in. Lately atheists there having been making posts with pictures of starving or horribly disfigured children and asking, "Yeah! Where's yr perfect God now, hah?" Then just now I saw one with a disfigured baby, asking why religious people didn't donate to charity instead of just saying words like Amen.

That's right: this turnip was asking Why aren't there any religious charities?

Imagine the kind of bubble you need to live in not to know about the many religious charities in operation all around us. If you've spent time in some of these Facebook groups, you don't need to imagine anything, you've been there and you've heard it with your own eyes.

So I blocked the idiot who posted that, and I posted the remark that, C'mon now fr cryin out loud, ya don't have to believe in God in order to notice that there are religious charities!

And right away someone commented that it was the least the religious could do after all the harm they'd done over the course of thousands of years. And I didn't feel like trying for the thousandth time to explain why comments like that are asinine. And since he was an admin and I couldn't block him, I just quit the group and came here to complain instead.

This is what Michael Ruse is talking about when he says that the New Atheists are a bloody disaster.

Well. Keep calm and carry on. The search for intelligent life on Earth continues.

My Apologies To Michael Ruse

I thought I had savagely attacked a piece by Ruse entitled Why I Think the New Atheists are a Bloody Disaster in this blog. Apparently not. I attacked it years ago, but not in this blog, but in readers' comments elsewhere on the Internet.

I don't apologize every time I savagely attack a piece of writing. But in this case I was attacking a piece of writing I had barely skimmed, and which was much different than I thought it was. Ruse published "Why I Think The New Atheists are a Bloody Disaster" 6 years ago, and during those 6 years I myself have come to think that the New Atheists are a bloody disaster, and I've also learned that Ruse is an atheist, like me. An atheist who, like me, hates the New Atheists, among other reasons, for the damage they do to the once-good name of atheism.

I've been meaning to really read Ruse's piece, not just skim it, and now that I've finally gotten around to it I see that I attacked something with which I now emphatically agree -- now that I've gotten to know the New Atheists a bit, and so know what n the Heck Ruse was talking about. I don't agree with every single thing Ruse writes -- for example, as is the case with some other contemporary non-New-Atheist atheists, he exasperates me by not clearly stating that he is an atheist, which has the effect of helping the New Atheists in their attempt to monopolize the public image of atheism -- but he and I share some points of opposition with the New Atheists. Here are 3 quotes from Ruse's piece with which I entirely, wholeheartedly agree:

"I do not think that all believers are evil or stupid."

"If we criticized gene theory with as little knowledge as Dawkins has of religion and philosophy, he would be rightly indignant."

"I have written elsewhere that The God Delusion makes me ashamed to be an atheist. Let me say that again. Let me say also that I am proud to be the focus of the invective of the new atheists. They are a bloody disaster and I want to be on the front line of those who say so."

I too want to be on that front line. For the sake of atheism. for the sake of the legacy of Hume and Nietzsche and Russell and Sartre.

The fact that I've complained in this blog about people commenting on posts of mine which they've barely read makes my earlier abuse of Ruse doubly embarrassing, and makes this post doubly necessary. I reacted in amazement (until it happened often enough that I got used to it) when people reacted to my abuse of Michael Paulkovich by assuming not only that I was an historicist but also that I was a Christian. And here I had done pretty much exactly the same thing to Ruse.

Oops.