Had a random tweet go very mildly viral yesterday, which was fun to watch. I’d like to expand on it just a bit, to explain why I stand against the sort of people who don’t just think in terms of Manichean dichotomies (as we all do from time to time) but who actually go so far as to publicly promote this sort of black and white thinking.
Skepticism and freethought are not just labels for people and their movements, they are processes for thinking about difficult problems. Over a hundred years ago, W.F. Jamieson sought to clarify and solidify both the affirmative and negative principles of the original American freethought movement. They are all worth reading and for the most part timeless, but I’d like to focus here on just the twelfth affirmative principle:
12. “Hear both sides, then decide.” Never decide until more than one side has been thoroughly studied. “Any system which shuns investigation openly manifests its own error.”
In the original context, freethinkers like Jamieson were encouraging people who were brought up in the Christian faith to give a hearing to the arguments from the other side, but this is also a fundamental principle of jurisprudence, arbitration, and various other systems in which truth must be hashed out between parties with competing interests and ideas.
Given the current bifurcation (rifting, if you like) of online atheism into factions representing those who seek to prioritize social justice within the movement and those who’d prefer to focus more on freeing minds from theism and the social injustices it does to those without the movement, we are at a point where we simply cannot afford to fall into overly simplistic us vs. them thinking. Like Michael Nugent, and unlike some of the flamethrowers on each side, I am unwilling to give up on the value of dialogue as a means to clarify and perhaps even resolve some of our differences.
Black and white thinking doesn’t merely hamper our ability to come together as a movement, however, it also holds us back from sharing what we’ve learned with those whom we’ve come to consider too far gone. On that point, I’m going to defer not to Jamieson but to a far more contemporary philosopher named Daniel Fincke:
Here’s the deal, atheists, every time you say that trying to educate people is a waste of time all I hear is “I surrender!” But I know some people who don’t think that trying to get everyone to understand is a waste of time. I know some fucking indefatigable people who will be deterred by nothing in their relentless pursuit of every mind and heart they can influence. They’re Evangelical Christians, they’re Mormons, they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, they’re proselytizing Muslims… and they’re spreading ignorance and bigotry like a virus. And they are not deterred. Do you really want to surrender the minds of your fellow citizens to them because it takes some effort, patience, skill, persuasiveness, and calm to get through to people? Because that’s what you recommend every time you say we should stop trying to talk to those supposedly hopelessly ignorant and unteachable and bigoted people that the religious proselytizers will be happy to meet with as many times as it takes.
Let us strive to become the sort of “fucking indefatigable people” who are completely undeterred by the amount of “effort, patience, skill, persuasiveness, and calm” that it takes to get through to the other side, on whatever issue we are discussing and on whatever side we happen to find ourselves.
