Godless gaffe This[*] accounts for the ironic spectacle of militant atheists who express outrage if Christians depict atheism on its own terms. That’s “insensitive” (or worse). ...
[W]hen issue at hand happens to be a dead atheist, then you’re not supposed to speak the truth–for the sake of the living. How dare you depict the fate of an atheist in atheistic terms! Even though atheism is true (so we’re told), you should spare the feelings of the living by tactfully acting as if atheism is false.**
*Even in context, I have no idea what the antecedent is.
**Sorry, I have no idea what he's talking about.
**Sorry, I have no idea what he's talking about.
I can help; he's talking about how religious beliefs justify psychopathic tendencies.
ReplyDeleteLess-snarky explanation of the hard-to-parse bits of Steve Hays's idiotic comments:
ReplyDeleteTop-level context: Some theists, such as Steve Hays, think atheism implies that life is meaningless, everything is random, people are robots, it doesn't matter if anyone suffers or dies, etc., and that any time an atheist expresses human feelings or cares about anything that's a demonstration of inconsistency. (The stupid, it burns.)
Intermediate context: An atheist called Ken Pulliam recently died of a heart attack at age 50. Steve Hays posted an obnoxious comment along the lines of "The robot known as Ken Pulliam self-terminated by means of a heart attack, and his associates and genetic kin are now executing out their meaningless grieving programs". Since then he's been posting one defensive post after another complaining at how unreasonable atheists are for finding this obnoxious.
So. Here, the initial "this" is the alleged fact that atheists (like politicians) avoid stating unpleasant things they think (such as, allegedly, that people are robots, etc., etc., etc.); the last bit is saying that atheists think that rather than being honest about the (alleged) implications of atheism we should all act as if death is a bad things, people aren't robots, etc., which Steve Hays thinks amounts to pretending that atheism is false. (The stupid, as already mentioned, burns.)
Despite the old saying that "tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner", I find that the more I find out about Steve Hays's meaning and motivation, the more contemptible I find his actions.
Despite the old saying that "tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner"...
ReplyDeleteI've never found that sentiment particularly appealing either.