There is a not-new but growing trend of self-appointed nerds who believe that their Atheist views are all at once novel, interesting and most importantly based on the sciences (even the fairly guessy ones like Climatology, Astronomy and Medicine). They seemingly don’t grasp that Science is not really a counterpoint to a discussion of a God or relevant to a criticism of religion. Furthermore, they envision everyone standing across from them are slack-jawed Jesus loving science hating idiots.
These phantom idiots largely only exist in their minds and make-believe stories where they mentally and rhetorically dominate some fundie co-worker/friends wife or husband at dinner/ or person who should be smarter but surprisingly isn’t (for their purposes, this person is often someone who has an advanced degree of some kind) using their pristine logic based on sciences and the scientific method, as they learned it from having a Reddit account for the last couple months. A sure sign of a new Redditor is the usage of the words “herp” or “derp”. They think this is endlessly funny. It’s how retards talk. Get it?
Their beliefs are based on the laws and sciences collected on a tiny spec of dust within a mind numbingly infinite desert of similar dust particles, so vast in fact that these junior-scientists will not see nor visit even the closest flaming dust particle closest to their closest dust particle– yet they are experts on the hows, whys and whats of this vast expanse because on their dust particle they know how things seem to work.
A-ha.
Let us pause for a moment and go back to the “self appointed nerd” part:
Since the word nerd is now cool you can’t really call yourself that without appearing like someone who really needs a title to lean on. And why are you a nerd? Because you play video games, write Python, watch science fiction and fantasy movies and subscribe to scientific beliefs held in consensus by most everyone on the face of the earth?
Oh you.
I get that religious people are idiots sometimes, but i got it about 20 years ago the first time I met them and was invited to a “Christian youth group party”. I made a mental note of it and moved on. That party sucked, those people were weird. Avoid. What the fuck happened to you? What are your other hobbies? Challenging old people to fistfights and telling 5 year olds that Santa Claus is a bullshit story made up to make the holidays more fun for children? You’re a brave warrior.
And further, the fact that this collection of beliefs, verbal traditions (arguments and terms) and community is starting to look quite a bit like a religion– which presumably the ironic raison d’être opposition for any organized Atheism movement to begin with.
“I’m an atheist ” (smugly) is their “Allah Akbar”. We all need traditions and rituals to keep us feeling like there is some continuity and safety to things but coming from the group that seems to hate this kind of groupthink it’s a little confusing. And like most movements of this type, it again ironically follows a very Judeo-Christian format: things used to be better until these people came along and now we must work collectively to spread the word and get back to this purer time. All of the religious fanatics are ruining everything for everyone. Like what? For every post about religion or God or Jesus I see 10 about Atheism.
Ultimately, my biggest problem is with people who make an effort to proselytize their non-beliefs or non-practices. You don’t eat meat? Ok scoot over, let me eat it. You don’t drink or use drugs? My friend Keith does, i’ll pass this to him. You don’t believe in organized religion? Cool. I don’t believe in playing racquetball, find me a racquetball playing dickhead right fucking now. I’m not sure why, but I gotta set that guy straight.
One last but important thing to note is that Atheists, for some reason, don’t seem too interested in pointing out that extremist Muslims do a lot of bad shit without much reproach from the moderate sect of their religion. In fact, they rarely mention Islam at all. Exotic religions deserve some sort of deference because, while Islam is the only religion that currently has extremists oppressing, killing and attempting to gain official power, well– those guys fight back. Oh yeah, and they also have to co-mingle with the “I know more about cultures and propriety than you do” idiots out there. Strange bedfellows indeed.
Stale one-sided arguments about why science is so important and how you once made a volcano out of ordinary baking soda and vinegar below in the comments please.