The Art of Antagonism

[Doc.]

Actually this article was posted on the forums about an year ago :]

 

[Case]

Actually this article was posted on the forums about an year ago :]

As I have pointed out in my post earlier, yes.

And this is the URL:
http://www.leagueofreason.org.uk//viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4615&start=40 . Thread locked though.

 

[Guardian Angel]

Actually this article was posted on the forums about an year ago :]

As I have pointed out in my post earlier, yes.

And this is the URL:
http://www.leagueofreason.org.uk//viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4615&start=40 . Thread locked though.

I just read that. looks like things really got out of hand.

 

[Gnug215]

I'm surprised to read that. Have you actually read the article (rhetorical question, my point being that the author's own antagonisms are quite easy to detect)?

First he complains about some guy wearing a t-shirt, then he complains about the fact that there's books in the bookstore, he goes on to notice that there's (behold!) Atheists on his forum, then he complains that there are people on there expressing their relief that an evangelical racist misogynist anti-choice homophobic bigot isn't able to spew any more hate by inciting his nutcase fundamentalist audience. "Death of somebody you disagree with" doesn't quite capture the case of Jerry Falwell. I might add that nobody in his story called for Jerry Falwell's execution or murder - but after his natural death, these people seem to express exactly what I said - relief. There's nothing wrong with that as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't give a shit about some guy who just hates women/black people/atheists, but I do worry if there's a guy (with an audience) who calls for action against (the well-being of) said groups of people and I assume that the guys on his forum would agree with me here. He goes on to speculate that atheists may have wished him dead for reason blablabla, but he doesn't cite even one guy who did. And wishing him dead is totally unnecessary (even before his death), first of all it doesn't help (should be about as effective as prayer) and secondly, he may be a valuable member of society as long as he shuts the fuck up. That's all you need to hope for if you want to hope for something in that matter.

He goes on to claim that Atheism was a motivator, which it is not. It's not a set of teachings from which actions can be derived. If he *had* said "both Atheists and Christians can do bad things", I would totally agree with him. Equating belief and non-belief is just nonsense. But Mr. Wrong goes even further;

We're putting aside the question of which belief system has killed more people by percentage of population

so he claims Atheism already HAD led to the death of anyone, which is grossly inaccurate. He chews on his "Non-belief is a belief, too!" bullshit some more, after which he concludes his "You're both stupid" paragraph with the idea that nobody can know if crime committed by people from the "other side" would cease if the "belief system" ceased to exist. As a matter of fact, if nobody believed in gods, crimes committed by people motivated by the idea that what they're doing is commanded by (or approved of) their god(s) would definitely drop to zero by definition. Whether other crimes go up is not part of the hypothesis.

Atheists, you know that Christians have freaking died because they refused to walk away from what they believe. That goes beyond simple human stubbornness.

How so? A lot of humans have died while trying to achieve some goal or another, I doubt that Christians deserve any special credit for that.

But you'll have a lot less angst if you remember that

There's a lot of snide comments like this one in the article.

Okay no more time, and I'm only at #2 anyway so just re-read the article yourself and you'll find that there's a LOT of antagonisms in his article, which "side" gets the worse of it I'll leave to your judgement.

That, together with the fact that he interspersed his story with irritating, supposedly funny pictures leads me to conclude that he can go fuck himself.

I disagree with your rather harsh assessment.

The guy admits to being sympathetic to both sides, really, himself being slightly Christian, it seems. He goes on in dichotomized, "Cracked" fashion, trying to diffuse some of the antagonism between the two sides.

While he makes some errors along the way, I have sympathy for his goal, and I think he achieves it fairly well.

He blasts both sides for some of the stupid mistakes they make (and yes, both sides do). He generalizes while doing it, but you're supposed to realize this and look past it. He is, after all, writing a Cracked article, not trying to save the world.

The biggest mistake he makes (ignoring the generalization, because I'm fairly sure he's aware of that) is by misusing the term atheism. However, I think he's doing that out of sheer ignorance - an understandable ignorance, it seems, when you're in the US, where the debate between theism and atheism has been polarized, dichotomized, antagonized and generalized. I think many people in the US genuinely think that atheism is a kind of belief, or at least a movement, and even that Stalin's supposed atheism is (at least partly) to blame for his atrocities.
Seeing how this debate between theists and atheists has carried on in the US, I'm actually more than willing to forgive the author for this massive mistake.

Now, my OP linked to this article with the purpose of sparking a debate about antagonism, not so much the specifics (and mistakes) of the article.

With that in mind, you have clearly become antagonized by the article, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

However, as I think the article somewhat demonstrates, in addition to that other article about science denial, antagonism is very likely never the best option in winning a debate. It will usually just make things worse.

 

[Case]

With that in mind, you have clearly become antagonized by the article, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

Oh I just don't like hypocrites.

 

[Gnug215]

With that in mind, you have clearly become antagonized by the article, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

Oh I just don't like hypocrites.

Heh, well, I actually don't think he's a hypocrite so much as he's a fairly regular American with theistic leanings.

As I see he is making a "can't we all just get along?" plea. Granted, he may be ignorant, generalizing, and under the constraints of writing a comedic article that has to follow a certain format, but as a "plea for peace", I think he's doing an ok job. At the very least he manages to bring attention to some very typical fallacies that either side in the "war" commit (all the while making some of his own, sure).