Stumble it!Who exactly are the nice guys?
posted in Politics by themaiden |A post at TruthinContext got me thinking about a pattern I’ve noticed and I’d like to beg that it stop. The following snippet is what did it. The quote is out of context, I admit, and the snippet I’m quoting isn’t really key to the post. It is peripheral. Nonetheless, this bit is what caught my attention. It caught my attention because it is such a common assertion. I’m seen it time and again.
“I have found myself in a couple of dialogs on atheist blogs. I have found the conversations enlightening, they tend toward ad hominem attacks and to fallacious reasoning, but what does one expect when they so violently deny the truth and the one who is Truth.”
I am one of those atheist bloggers and my experience with ad hominems seems to be quite different. In my experience the ‘faithful’ dive into a thread with a predicable pomp and exhibit generally bad behavior. After having this pointed out to them over the course of several exchanges, those that stick around then settle down and the conversation becomes much more productive.
I really hate this dynamic, thus this post. I’d very much like to skip that initial bluster and just get to the productive part. It annoys me to no end to have to spend three or four posts smacking someone around until they stop attacking my intelligence, my sincerity, my honesty, my integrity… Apparently, if I don’t swallow the mythology whole then there is something wrong with me and consequently it falls upon the Christian– it is the duty of the Christian– to be insulting. Hmmm… something is wrong there and yet that is the conclusion that my six-odd years of observation lead me to.
To be fair, it isn’t just the Christians. The defenders of any evidence-less and faith based ‘theories’ are prone to the same pattern. I’ve seen it with astrology. I’ve seen it with homeopathy. I’ve seen it with creationism of various stripes. In fact, this latter is the hands down stronghold for such nasty behavior. It has to be something about having to defend a position for which there is no evidence, or for which there is slim evidence to be very generous. Having to defend a position but having no evidence that is meaningful to a non-believer must be terribly stressful. In a way, I sympathize.
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