I don't feel dirty and all churned up when I spend time at websites like that. And I feel like doing something instead of being angry and all churned up.
I would welcome some suggestions for other websites to visit and recommend.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Beyond Hate Talk Internet
I needed some relief from the anti-religious saturation of my usual internet reading so I decided to find a haven and linger there for a while.
I don't feel dirty and all churned up when I spend time at websites like that. And I feel like doing something instead of being angry and all churned up.
I would welcome some suggestions for other websites to visit and recommend.
I don't feel dirty and all churned up when I spend time at websites like that. And I feel like doing something instead of being angry and all churned up.
I would welcome some suggestions for other websites to visit and recommend.
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My computer has been eating these comments; hopefully this one gets through.
ReplyDeleteI quite agree with you. I've given up finding a place on the webs where I'm comfortable. I tried making one; that didn't work (no surprise). I'm fully exhausted encountering atheists who can only whine about not having every person on the planet confirm their prejudices. I wonder, in fact, what they would do if, life the proverbial dog, they caught that car? IN a world where no one is a theist, would anyone still be an atheist? And without that, what identity would they have?
I leave them all to it. I don't even want to run into them anymore, not even virtually.
Considering the Pew survey's that atheists so love to cite, almost always distorting the numbers, have atheists hovering at between 2 and 2.5% of the American population (and nowhere hear as many in even places such as Britain and Sweden as is claimed) it is remarkable what an over-blown presence they are on the leftish internet. They entirely dominate so many allegedly non-atheist themed blogs and news sites, driving out religious people who, by sheer numbers, must comprise the large majority of left of center. And they do so dishonestly and obnoxiously and, as the history of the left since the late 18th century shows, so counter-productively. If the fundamentalist right eventually turns into a problem for the right has yet to be seen, so far it hasn't been the problem for them that the atheists, or, more precisely, the anti-religious atheists, have been for the left.
ReplyDeleteI am entirely convinced that the negation of rights, moral obligations, free will (the thing that was the original final straw for me, and it was on Baby Blue) that materialism leads to hollows out the left and is the reason that the overtly atheist, anti-religious regimes of the alleged left act not that much differently from despots of the right. Though, if anything, materialism being a monistic and absolute system could be related to the more efficient depravity of some of those supposedly leftist despots.
I remember back when my sister went to a catholic college, way back when they were required to take courses in theology and related topics, her Cosmology textbook (I think by Kenneth F Dougherty) , presented in the old fashioned way declared "Monism is repugnant". I remember showing it to my brother us getting a laugh out of the outright declaration. Only, now, I understand is true even if not for the same reasons he held that.
I was reading comments on Salon yesterday, and ran across one wholly unrelated to the article, complaining in passing that Salon was notoriously anti-New Atheist.
ReplyDeleteAt which point I gave up. No doubt the author of the comment was sincere, but good grief, why waste one's time wading through so much drivel?
I gotta get back to more constructive uses of my time.
The "New Atheists" are virulently anti-fundamentalist Xian (only Sam Harris includes Islam in his diatribes, but he seems to have fallen from favor, for the most part). The more I see of it the more I realize it's a knee-jerk response that needs the fundies in order to exist. And it is that negativity that is hollowing out the left, as you say.
ReplyDeleteWhen all you are is against, there isn't much else to offer. It's the reason the GOP is flailing (and if the Left would be less afraid of Not Being Them and more interested in offering something positive.... But that "positive" would have to be a positive with richness beyond a chicken in every pot or a rising tide that will float all boats....).
As for that 2% number; I was talking to my daughter recently about the part of town we live in; near, but not in, some of the most privileged neighborhoods in America, proximate (in space, not income) to people earning far more than the majority of the population of either this city or this country. We were talking about how the children of such people (and the earners themselves) think their high incomes and subsequent material comforts are normal and normative.
But they also know it isn't, so they fear the part of town I live in, and ignore entirely the parts of town where most people of truly low income (which is the norm) live, although they could drive to those neighborhoods in less than 10 minutes. They aren't the "1%" so much as they are the 10%, maybe; but the drop off in income is so sharp, these 10% might as well be 1%. Yet they are quite sure they are the majority; or at least the deserving power structure.
That's all atheism wants: power. Dawkins wants to squash all who disagree with him, Harris wants to nuke Islam (no, not countries; Islam); Maher mocks what he cannot and will not understand (putting him several levels below Colbert and Stewart). But it's all about wielding power and, in that fine modern American tradition, playing the powerless victim. Like the dog chasing the car, what would the New Atheists do with culture if they got control of it?
Probably, as South Park predicted, war among themselves for the supremacy of their version of "atheism."
Feh. There have to be better things to pay attention to, if only it's the plants I'm trying to grow in my garden.
In my first blog I imagined such a thing among the Dawkinsites and Harrisites.
ReplyDeletehttp://olvlzl.blogspot.com/2007/01/my-friends-what-we-see-here-is-cult-not.html
If I were not so lazy I'd go collect my old posts from the various blogs they were posted on. It's amazing to read things you wrote that you can't remember having written.
I've been reading some of my earliest posts. It sounds arrogant to admit how interesting they are to me; rather like admiring the smell of your own farts, as Auden put it referring to a slightly different subject.
ReplyDeleteBut I use them as signs toward where I should be going. Rather like Dante, I feel sometimes I've lost my way mid way through life's journey. I don't need to go to hell, or purgatory, or even paradise. But I do need to reflect, in every sense, on what is important, and distinguish it from what is not.