Alec blogged a link to Brent Rasmussen’s DarkSyde’s What It Feels Like to be an Atheist with the comment “One for Geoff”. (Thanks, Alec.) Here’s Brent’s DarkSyde’s intro:
“I’m amazed everyday of my life that everyone isn’t an atheist like me. But they’re not, I have no idea why that is, but it is reality. And based on many questions over the years it sounds possibly hard for someone who is not one to understand it. So follow me for a bit if you can. And I’ll try to describe the world as seen through atheist eyes.”
As rants go, it’s a real tour de force, and it’s definitely worth reading. However in the final analysis it didn’t really work for me. Rather than tackling theism head-on, Brent DarkSyde offers an analogy:
“Say they believe in Santa Claus; beard, the big red suit, the flying reindeer, the sled loaded with a billion gifts, the North Pole Workshop, Mrs. Claus and the elves; all of it. But in this fantasy world, they’re not content merely to believe in Santa Claus, they want you to publicly agree all the time that you also believe in Santa, in their specific version of same, and they pressure everyone else in numerous ways to pretend that they’re not strange or childish for believing in this.”
While many of his subsequent points are effective, the Santa Claus parallel falls down in two important respects. First, it is too damn specific, too concrete. Different people use the term god to mean totally different – and grotesquely incompatible – things, from concrete physical phenomena to vague psychological or emotional tendencies. On the other hand, Santa Claus is pretty much defined by a handful of 19th century stories and carols and an avalanche of Disneyesque Hallmark products.
Secondly, Santa Claus doesn’t have all of the baggage that the various god-ideas are encumbered with. The importance of this is not that passages like this are a stretch:
“Just two or three-hundred years ago it was totally SOP to take folks, men, women, children, who didn’t believe in a specific version of Santa and stick red-hot steel objects into their rectums and vaginas, boil their limbs, beat them senseless with padded clubs, tear them apart with teams of horses, cut open their stomachs and rip out their intestines while they’re still alive in front of their loved ones, or slowly burn them alive in public; all in the name of Santa’s good will and often on the mere anonymous allegation from some two-bit ten-year old kid or a crazy deranged nutcase suffering from schizophrenia that you once said you don’t believe Santa can really fly.”
No, the problem is that the Santa Claus analogy misses one of the key aspects of being an atheist: the sheer head-spinning contradictions and hypocrisy that we encounter all the time in believers. For example, I simply don’t understand why liberal Anglicans don’t rip out the pages of their Bibles that glorify ethnic cleansing, rape, pillage, and stoning to death for just about everything, or why Bible-belt footballers violate the Sabbath rules set forth in what they view as the word of their god. I guess tradition and tribal identity are more important than intellectual honesty these days.
Brent DarkSyde followed up this piece with one on why he’s an atheist. This was less interesting. Since he claimed he’d been an atheist since he was a small child, he should perhaps have called this one “ideas that sustain my identity as an atheist”. No big deal.
UPDATED 20-Nov-05: As Brent pointed out, the original piece (and follow-up) were written by DarkSyde.