Another day another person says ‘there are no true atheists’
I just found this over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable. Professor Paul Campos of the University of Colorado has decided that it is reasonable to discriminate against atheists because we’re different from them, the theists. Not that professor believes we exist to begin with.
Like many of theists past, present and probably future, the professor has attached a new meaning to atheism. In the professor world, a “genuine” atheist is really someone who shows a decidedly “big whoop” attitude to the idea that the universe or even the planet could shake us off like a dog shaking off bathwater.
This is wrong, of course, as an atheist is merely someone who doesn’t believe in gods. The phrase “I’m an atheist” says nothing more than that. But then admitting that makes it kind of hard to come up with reasons to discriminate against atheists, eh?
What I find really disturbing about the professors piece is how he attempts to downplay religious violence.
Still, Steve believes - correctly in my view - that in general the differences between religious believers are less important than the differences between believers and nonbelievers, and that this distinction is and ought to be relevant to political life.
Religious violence is “less important”? Theists have killing each other for centuries over theological disputes. They’re still killing each over theological disputes. Hell, the man the professor is defending made the remark in retort to a theological attack by a heckler. Everywhere we look theists are attacking other theists.
Less important? I beg to differ. I’d say that the propensity of theists towards killing people who believe differently is extremely important and something we should pay a lot attention to before they kill us all.
Of course, this points towards something else. The inability of many theists to be useful in stopping such violence for all time.  Seriously, anyone who can say “stopping people who disagree with me on religous ideas” is more important than “stopping people who will kill me over religious ideas” is by default a part of the problem.
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Hey KC. Thanks. I’ve posted a response here.