I hear all the time from religious people how atheists, skeptics, and other non-religious people are arrogant. Consider myself. Now I happen to be an arrogant person, you can guess that from my tone in my posts, I do not deny that, I am not ashamed of it, nor do I think it is necessarily a bad thing, in some cases it can even be a virtue. However, my arrogance is unrelated to my skepticism. Saying, "you are arrogant because you are a skeptic" is a logical fallacy. If that argument was valid, then the following argument would also be valid, "you are arrogant because you are a male". See how stupid that is? This is basically the "correlation is equal to causation" fallacy. Just because two properties are shared together, does not imply that one caused the other.
What the religious believer should really say is that being a skeptic induces arrogance in the person. I find this statement very funny. For the following simple reason. Religious people know exactly what happens to you when you die, they know where the universe came to be, they know the ultimate objective morals for people, from an ancient text. That is not arrogant?! You claim that skepticism is arrogant. Look at yourselves instead. I am the one who says I do not have the answers. I have no idea where the universe came from, I have no idea what happens upon death, I do not know where the soul comes from, and so on and so on. I happen to form my own positions regarding these questions based on my best possible understanding of the world around us. But I by no means claim to know these answers. Religion is soaked in arrogance, claiming to know the answers to the big questions. So do not tell me that I am arrogant because I am a skeptic! You can condemn me for arrogance, that is fine, but that is part of my personality, not my philosophy.
But there is another laughable point from religious people who say that skeptics are arrogant. Let us consider our place in the universe. We are not the center of our solar system. We are way off the center, not even close. We are not in the center of our galaxy. Indeed, we are a feeble point in the corner of our galaxy. Our galaxy, in a group of galaxies, is quite pathetic, tiny, and insignificant, off the center. And I can assure you that the galactic group we are in is not even in the center of the universe, if there even happens to be such a location, it is a lost location, a random location, somewhere out where in the universe. I look at all of this and say that we are a rather unimportant species. The religious person, despite all this information that we now know from astronomy, says to himself, "God made all of this for me!".
Who is the arrogant one?
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First of all, you're confusing arrogance with a healthy sense of self-important. The two are not identical.
ReplyDeleteArrogance results from a strong feeling that the person is right in everything all the time and concluding that anyone who disagrees with him is therefore wrong. In this regard, the religious fanatic and atheist fanatic are no different from one another and it's not religion or atheism leading them to be arrogant but their own personality defects. If Chris Hitchens was a religious Muslim he'd be backing the Taliban.
A healthy sense of self-importance, on the other hand, is necessary for functioning productively in society. If I ascribe no importance to myself, why show up for work? Being unimportant, what does it matter if I'm not there? Why date? Why marry? Why become a parent?
Your final example shows this misunderstanding. Until such time that you can prove there is other life in the universe then as far as we know we're it. All that space, all those stars, all that ether, and we're it, the only intelligent lifeforms around. If God created this universe for a reason and He created us for a reason, then it follows that He created everything else for us since we're the only things in the universe that can intellectually understand what it all means and appreciate it. This is not arrogance.
"First of all, you're confusing arrogance with a healthy sense of self-important.":
ReplyDeleteYou are right, I should have used "self-important" instead of "arrogant".
"If Chris Hitchens was a religious Muslim he'd be backing the Taliban.":
You are wrong on this point. You are confusing the body of a person with the soul of the person. What makes a person the person that he is, is his soul. We do not care what a person looks like. To make Christopher Hithens (who I happen to love) be a Muslim, is to imply that you have the same body of Hitchens by you have changed the mind of the man, so you have destroyed the real Hitchens, replaced a different person, by keeping the body intact. You argument does not work.
"If I ascribe no importance to myself, why show up for work? Being unimportant, what does it matter if I'm not there? Why date? Why marry? Why become a parent?":
This is really not a hard question to answer. I answered this question back here ( http://skepticbutjewish.blogspot.com/2010/03/nihilism-is-not-depressing.html ).
"If God created this universe for a reason and He created us for a reason, then it follows that He created everything else for us since we're the only things in the universe that can intellectually understand what it all means and appreciate it.":
First of all, even if believing in God makes your life better, makes you a better worker, makes you a happier person, makes the world a better place, even if all of that is true, it does not imply that God is real. Obviously, you know that. Say a religious man is happier than an atheist is like saying a drunk man is happier than a sober one.
Second of all, having a reason does not make us important. It all depends on what the reason is. A good God who loves people and does good thinks for people, will have a good reason. But an evil God can have created us for his own entertainment, to watch at how we suffer and to put suffering on us. Of course, I do not believe in an evil God. I am only saying that having a reason for existing does not make your life better if the reason itself is an evil reason, it is better to have no reason than to have an evil reason.
First, I disagree about Hitchens. Had he been born in Saudi Arabia to a devout Muslim family, he would right now be preaching jihad to the world. His passion, his firmness of conviction could be identical but applied to a different set of values they would lead to different results.
ReplyDeleteAs for believing in God making my life better, I don't believe I wrote that. I wrote that one of the beliefs of Judaism is that we're all alone in the universe and that God created the whole thing for us to live and thrive in. That makes us extremely important because otherwise why maintain the whole structure?
"Had he been born in Saudi Arabia to a devout Muslim family, he would right now be preaching jihad to the world.":
ReplyDeleteI cannot imagine that. He said was an atheist ever since he was a little kid. He just was unable to buy the religion stuff. He is an extreminist, nothing wrong with that, but he is not a violent person.