Are athiest the new gays? — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

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Are athiest the new gays?

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	I appreciated Dawkins' [i]The Selfish Gene[/i] (this is where the term "meme" comes from by the way--if you haven't read it, I would recommend it). I thought it was a well-written and informative book. Some of this other stuff has been a little more... inflammatory, shall we say? Personally, though, I find Daniel Dennett to be [i]far[/i] more condescending and annoying. Dawkins gets more press, maybe, but he's definitely not the worst out there. Dennett, in [i]Breaking the Spell[/i] (I wrote a [url=http://www.liminality.org/archives/115/]review of the book[/url] on my site last year, if anyone is interested--it is a bit on the long side, though, so be warned), elaborates on the analogy to gays, at least in terms of terminology. His reasoning is that "gay" is a term with a positive connotation embraced by the community to which it refers. It was intended solely to act as a replacement for offensive slurs aimed at homosexuals, not as a value judgment on non-gays. That is, homosexuals can be "gay," but this doesn't necessarily mean that heterosexuals are "glum"--they are "straight." In the same way, non-brights are not necessarily "dull," they are whatever term they choose to identify with. I'm not sure I entirely agree with this logic. Words like "gay" and "glum" refer to variable states of mind. I can be gay one day and glum the next. It doesn't really say much about me as a person. If you tell someone that they are happy or sad, that is not an insult, even if it is not true--it's just not true, that's all. But "bright" and "dull" are words with connotations of intelligence and intellectual capability, and their use can be construed as either a complement or an insult. Because of the human tendency to see things in binary terms, calling one group of people "bright" implies, whether you like it or not, that those who are not bright are dull. The reason that no one got upset about not being gay is because happiness is not an aspect of character, while intelligence is. On the other hand, I can understand the quest for a positive term to describe atheism. Terms like "atheism" or "non-theist" are negative versions of the positive "theism." In other words, atheism is defined as being the negative of theism. In fact, I get the impression that at least part of the impetus behind the brights movement is to demonstrate to theists how it feels to be defined in the negative. The problem is that terms dealing with values, beliefs, etc. have to be defined from a certain point of view. Take the Sea of Japan, for example (which isn't even a value or belief, just a really big puddle). The name of this body of water is derived from the fact that it is more or less ensconced by Japan, at least on the eastern side. In Korea, though, this body of water is referred to as the East Sea. Most of you are probably unaware of this, but there are many Koreans who are quite adamant about getting this body of water renamed in English texts. I don't happen to agree with them, mainly because "East Sea" is just as biased as (if not more biased than) "Sea of Japan." What good is it to simply replace one bias with another? What about other bodies of water, like the Indian Ocean? It washes up on the shores of many countries, not just India, and you don't see them complaining. Anyway, my point is that you will never be able to come up with a single term for an idea or issue for which there are varying viewpoints. I call the Sea of Japan the East Sea when I'm here in Korea, but if I were to go over to Japan I would call it the Sea of Japan. If atheists want to call themselves "bright," more power to them. I won't call them "bright," but they can call themselves whatever they want--as long as they understand that, yes, the term is indirectly insulting to those not part of their group. Of course, that's all just a big, long rant on terminology. As for atheists being the new gays, well, I don't know. Just for the record, though, D'Souza is a committed theist, so he would probably rather choke on his own blood than agree with anything Dawkins might support. [Edit: Fingers, meet brain. Brain, fingers.] [Edit2: Yet another flub fixed.] [img]http://www.liminality.org/asylum/sigs/suho_taegeuk_sig2.gif[/img] ___________________________ Suho: [url=http://www.liminality.org]www.liminality.org[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/4837]Cell 270[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/5689]Sig Rotator[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/22173]the Fellowship of Sup[/url] [small](Edited by [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/user/2031]Suho1004[/url] on 11-14-2007 03:25)[/small] [small](Edited by [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/user/2031]Suho1004[/url] on 11-14-2007 05:21)[/small] Loading...
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