Comments on: Are You a Pro-Gay Bigot?

By: Ben In Oakland

Ben In Oakland — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 22:44:28 +0000

What a relief!

Though i do like the new term.

Antheist: n. from American “an’ I don’t believe it matters.”

By: Timothy Kincaid

Timothy Kincaid — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:30:30 +0000

oh lord, that was a typo!! he he
I thought you had come up with a new term for yourself… very well, atheist you are.

By: Priya Lynn

Priya Lynn — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:53:02 +0000

“Julia Gillard is the Prime Minister of Australia. She is an atheist. She is also a fierce opponent to marriage equality and a significant reason why it is not the law in Australia today.”.

I hate her.

By: Ben In Oakland

Ben In Oakland — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:27:59 +0000

You hate me because Im a terrible typist and somewhat dyslexic.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:32:57 +0000

I liked your answers to this questionnaire, for the most part. I’m not sure I would have resisted some of the baiting, necessarily – some of the questions have underlying assumptions that could, frankly, be interpreted as insulting. I think you handled those instances very thoughtfully. Thanks for publishing that.

By: Timothy Kincaid

Timothy Kincaid — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:23:42 +0000

Ben,

Then I will happily categorize you and an antheist (mostly because that itdoesntmatterist could require either hyphenation or unsightly line justification)

By: Ben In Oakland

Ben In Oakland — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:46:29 +0000

Timothy, one could define things that way. I call myself an antheist simply because it takes too long to describe what an it-doesn’t-matterist is.

I’m not an atheist because I actually believe “there is no god.” I’m pretty sure there isn’t, but the question doesn’t have a lot of meaning to me, simply becuase there is very little useful evbidence that there is, which is why I mentioned leprechauns. I could equally have mentioned Zeus or Xenu.

and I would never express certainty on the issue, except for the statement that if there IS a god who created the entire universe, he’s in no way as obsessed about my dangly bits as a certain class of his followers are.

Strictly speaking, I’m an it doesn’t matterist. It matters to an agnostic, it matters to an atheist. It doesn’t matter to me.

By: Reed

Reed — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:27:46 +0000

Thanks for this, Rob. It made my week.

By: Timothy Kincaid

Timothy Kincaid — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:13:00 +0000

chiMaxx, thanks for the clarification.

I guess many of the more emphatically self-declared atheists I’ve encountered are more of the evangelical sort, out preaching their beliefs about deities and the absence thereof. I guess it makes sense that – like most religions – there are a large body of less strident or extreme adherents who simply don’t announce it as often. I made one of those errors similar to looking at the Pope and thinking I saw a typical Catholic.

By: chiMaxx

chiMaxx — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:07:23 +0000

No, Timothy: It’s atheism.

It means that you don’t foreclose the possibility that there might someday be evidence of a god or gods (or ghosts or vampires or leprechauns or unicorns or superheroes or intelligent life on other planets that wants to communicate with us).

Choosing to put them in a mental box labeled “highly improbable in the absence of actual evidence” rather than “impossible,” doesn’t make one any less an atheist.

And it allows you to enjoy them all with a certain distance as just cracking good stories, good for a night around the campfire or, in the hands of a skilled storyteller, a tale where they serve as rich metaphors for human struggles that are hard to articulate directly, but nothing more.