Martin Luther King, Jr. Thinks I’m a Cutie
What the heck am I talking about? *Sigh* Who knows. Sometimes I’m able to come up with good headlines on my own, and sometimes I have to turn to my team of chimps. I guess tonight neither of us were on. Curses! I just dropped a flashlight on my foot. This post isn’t going well for you, my young friend. I’d turn back now if I were you.
Did you know that the Brits call a flashlight a “torch”?
*Ahem*
So I was reading a letter to various high profile atheists arguing for a kinder, gentler new atheism. While the author was a scientist and an atheist himself, his point was that if the new atheists are too aggressive, they’ll lose in the eventual backlash set forth by the fundies and they’s pitchforks of righteousness. I guess this makes sense. If the human mind is trained to see the world through a certain set of programming, said programming might take offense when you start telling it that it’s stupid. Or, in the case of my crack team of headline chimps, they throw poop at you. Either way, the metaphor is the same: if you try and piss off your nemesis to prove a point rather than trying to win them over in a positive manner, you’re only going to end up with digested corn in your eyeball.
So, when dealing with religious people, it’s important not to attack them as being stupid or as having caught a “virus”. You know, pretty much don’t do everything that I do on this site. Then again, it’s hard not to point out things like human sacrifice in the Bible, or that Allah created the stars as missles, according to the Qur’an.
As is my habit, I’ve lost my train of thought. My life is just sooo fast paced and action packed that it’s hard to keep my mind focused on anything less than a million radical…soft pillows that I bought at Target. Wait a minute! I think what I was trying to say was that if you’re talking to a religious person, don’t describe their belief as “stupid” or ignorant. Rather, tell them that you value their input, and hope that by giving their children better educations, they can piss them off by one day going to college and appearing in a Girls Gone Wild video.
