My Encounter
with the Arch-Atheist
"He is a holy man. A true seeker. Among my people a True Seeker is treated with the utmost reverence and respect. It doesn't matter that his Grail may or may not exist. What matters is that he strives for the perfection of his soul and the salvation of his race, and that he has never wavered or lost faith." -- the Minbari Ambassador Delenn, in the "Grail" episode of Babylon5.
Let me first preface this little tale with this statement: everything that happened to me I deserved. Last year I got kicked off of Madilyn & Robin Murray-O'Hares Atheist BBS (they're based here in Austin). How this came about was rather instructive, and definitely quite funny.
I was downloading and perusing the text files in their Atheist Press libraries, generally full of contemporary and historical accounts of the various horrors committed in the name of religion and seemingly endless essays and litanies decrying the stupidity of the faithful. Their assessment was that most religious believers are predictably incapable of reason and are predominately a bunch of superstitious ignorant dolts. The conclusion reached throughout these volumes of ASCII text was that the mindless sheep who espouse the Christian grab-bag of superstitions are generally the source of much of the world's evil as well as the causative agent in the political repression of Atheists. The Murray-O'Hares did as good a job of anyone in their claim to victimhood, and while it was all pretty predictable and sometimes patently offensive (even to a non-believing lower-case atheist/agnostic like myself), it was mostly just silly.
But then I came across a particular monograph on agnosticism. It recounted the 18th century historical roots of formal agnosticism and finally arrived at the conclusion that (I paraphrase, but accurately convey the meaning of the text) agnostics are GUTLESS because they keep 'one foot in the God camp.' I took exception to this comment and posted a question to Ms. Robin Murray O'Hare (Madilyn's daughter) as to whether they actually continue to stand by such an acerbic assertion. She insisted that they were completely correct in their assessment of lower and upper-case agnostics as nothing more than 'gutless' believers unwilling to abandon their faith. She had no answer to my question about lower-case agnostics who, taking the literal meaning of the word 'AGNOSTIC' (without knowledge), have no faith to abandon; not everyone is obsessed with keeping a security blanket ready. I stressed my point that most self-professed informal agnostics simply DON'T KNOW, AND MOREOVER, DON'T CARE.
I also pointed out that whatever religious phenomenon the faithful claim to have experienced is as real as any other stimulus in the material world: they've had a religious experience if they say they have. Belittling their right to religious experiences is tantamount to decrying their right to dream dreams or experience a realm outside of themselves. Running up to small children and telling them there is NO Santa is just as fruitless.
I brought up the whole matter of scientists, intellectual humanists and rationalists who pursue the numenal experience, sometimes with reckless abandon, because the phenomenology of the mind is such a compelling study. Certainly an ethnobotanist can remain an atheist but still have (albeit drug-induced) religious experiences in the process of going native.
I'd like to point out that Karl Popper's emphasis in his philosophy of science is this: a theory can neither be proved nor disproved if it is not testable. In this case, the existence or non-existence of God is simply not testable.
In that vein, I had the unmitigated gall to remind Ms. Murray-O'Hare that lower- and upper-case atheists should keep their sense of humor lest they be guilty of committing the same intellectual 'sin' of which they accuse the faithful: Insisting in proving (in the Popperian sense) something that is scientifically unprovable (in her case, the NON-existence of God). I nailed her to her own cross of rationalism and reason: attempts at proving the NON-EXISTENCE OF GOD are completely futile; it is impossible to prove the non-existance of something, especially when that something can neither be described, quantified, or tested.
In the case of my final discussion with Robin, she invoked the legitimacy of science to back up her claims, accused me of being an agnostic (what an insult!) and then asked me whether I believed in the Tooth Fairy or Zeus. I simply responded that I understood that Tooth Fairies go dumpster diving behind dentists' offices and that Zeus, not Joseph, was the real father of Jesus (OK, OK my sense of humor is dangerously heretical and irreverent & I'm gonna pay by going to a Baptist Heaven).
It was shortly thereafter that I was unable to log into
the Atheist BBS.
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