The same article I referred to in my last post—about unconstitutional prayers at Fresno City Council meetings—has also engendered a different kind of response. This one is not so obviously vicious, but it is equally unreasoned and just as disquieting.
From “markos13“:
I can’t help but feel sorry for these athiests, and those that defend them. I cannot imagine how it would be to have no beliefs. To be so empty that the only way to feel worthy is to attack those that believe in God and are spiritual. The hate in the posts from some on here is chilling…I feel so sorry for your children…ugh…to be taught that this is the only life you will have, and there is nothing after this. Very sad.
Which was followed by:
Ummm…no…I have never considered that I might be wrong…simply because I am not
This person is not as overtly vicious as the others, but the failure—and refusal—to understand life without belief in God, coupled with condescending pity has a similar effect. You have no reason to “feel sorry” for people who don’t share your beliefs, especially when you cannot even understand that their lives are not “empty” and that advocating a religiously neutral government is not an “attack [on] those that believe in God and are spiritual.”
Maybe the people who express views like the one above really believe they are taking a gentler approach. But when someone claims to pity you, the message is clear—and hardly gentle: the pitier is superior and you, the pitied, are inferior. Sometimes there are good reasons to pity others. But a profound misunderstanding of the pitied position by the pitier precludes the possibility of justified pity.
The message from people who say things like the comment reproduced above is simple: “I do not care what you think, I refuse to understand or learn about you, but even so I believe you are inferior.” There is nothing gentle, or even genteel, about that message. Cloaking it in noble sentimentality does not improve it.
It’s a smug sort of arrogance isn’t it? It is an unthinking assumption of arrogant superiority that I find is all to common in the religious community.
The shining example is the belief held by Christians that non-Christians are “empty” – waiting to be “filled” with the Holy Spirit.
Whenever I encounter this attitude toward myself, it is like fingernails on a chalkboard… worse, because that example actually doesn’t bother me.
I’m guessing these people have never much read the Bible. It does, after all, require Xians to deal with non-Xians with a kind demeanor. But I’m also guessing that they’d scream “Who are you to quote the Bible to me?!” if we pointed out those verses.
I think this “markos13″ person did have a relatively “kind demeanor.” But it was disingenuous, or even “passive-aggressive.” Where does the Bible prohibit that?
The Bible simply gives a lot more reasons to treat outsiders with pity or contempt than it gives reasons to treat them as fellow sojourners who might have something valuable to say. And the prophetic tradition in the Bible not only fails to condemn the contempt of outsiders, but uses the phenomenon to great effect: prophets can wail and moan louder and more insistently than anyone else, on behalf of God, precisely because they are treated contemptuously and pushed beyond the margins of the society. Modern Christians ignore that prophets were so loud because they were so marginalized—since that aspect of the prophetic books is not immediately apparent to unsophisticated readers—and fail to learn the lesson that outsiders like nonbelievers might have something important to say. The fact that Christians’ condescension to outsiders—which could serve as a hint that the Christians themselves might be in the midst of deviance—is bolstered by other, less subtle parts of the Bible is just another consequence of people putting an ancient text in the middle of their modern lives without the literacy to make any sense of it. If Christians were paying attention to reality at hand, instead of blinding themselves with their ancient text (and their ignorance of that text), then they would surely notice the foolishness of their ways.
All of which is just to reach this point: textual arguments with most Christians will be wholly fruitless. Either they will be so enamored of their illiterate understanding of the ancient text that they will ignore present reality, or they will be so sophisticated with their analysis that they will consistently elude the possibility of the text having any fixed relation to reality—giving them the freedom to remain nominally within a religion “of the book” while recognizing the thorough immanence of the book, without feeling any need to explain why they are still supernaturalists.
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