PZ: You're right. My impulse said more about me than it did about anyone else. Should've cut that parenthesis.
Peculiarly, I've just finished posting an online edition of a Victorian satire directed largely at early incarnations of some of these issues. (Were the 1870s the first time they could openly be discussed in English?) The author, a rather callow conservative, pushes for an equivalence, not just of atheism with agnosticism, but of atheism with any liberalization of orthodoxy:
The New Republic by W. H. Mallock
To Patrick's very sensible words, I'd only add what EverythingsRuined has suggested: It seems to me that, although we atheist liberals do some very nice talking, the first and most tenacious folks to go out there and actually do dangerous dirty work for our shared humanist causes are often the religious liberals. (My impulse is to say "are usually" instead, but I don't want to have to provide stats.)
In this regard, I've also envied the organizational energies of bad old slavish-to-the-Party-line Communists, whose disbelief is merely one aspect of a larger sustaining faith -- not differing, to my eyes, from a Muslim's disbelief in Jesus Christ as a personal savior.
There may be something innately individuating about atheism (not that this means we have a choice about it). It's hard to build a self-sacrificing community around lack of belief in something that seems self-evidently false. "Make sense to you?" "Nope." "Me either." "OK, we're done." Many times when I hear people bemoan their loss of faith, it seems that they're also bemoaning a loss of community. (Similarly, when people go through agonies over their self-defined sexual orientation, simple quality or quantity of orgasms rarely seems the chief problem on their mind.)
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| 2004 | 3 |
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