I am having a gathering to celebrate something that I have knowledge of. I know for a fact that the day I exited my mother's womb and took my first breath of fresh air was on March 24th. I have knowledge of what happened. There is no uncertainty or disbelief in my birth or the date that it happened, therefore the gathering of like-minded individuals to celebrate my creation.
The Reason Rally, on the other hand, is gathering to celebrate several things. If atheist, then by definition they are rallying around lack of belief that there is a God. If agnostic, they are gathering to celebrate lacking the knowledge to prove (or disprove) something exists. If secularist they believe that public education and politics should be without religious influence. Hopefully that's not the reason for Reason Rally. According to their site, it will not be. In fact, on the about page the question is raised, "Are we just going to use this opportunity to trash religion?" With the answer given being, "No. This will be a positive experience, focusing on all non-theists have achieved in the past several years." I wish that were the truth, but I have trouble believing that for several reasons.
For starters, look at the list of speakers they are featuring. Among those speaking are Bill Maher, Paul Provenza and Richard Dawkins. I dare say that they have hate for Christians. That would be based on the vulgarities they use as well as the names they call Christians. How can you have a positive experience focusing on all that non-theists achieve when you have people featured who use their bully pulpit to call Christians idiots and worse?
Secondly, how is one of your sponsors formally inviting Westboro Baptist Church to the Rally fit in to your expressed agenda? You are claiming that you want to have fun and talk about what non-theists have achieved. Those are mutually exclusive goals. That is sensationalism and media seeking at it's very worst.
Imagine my brother in the Army died in combat. I let everyone know the funeral is a celebration of his life and we want to recognize his service to country. Later that day I send an invitation to WBC asking them to join us in showing our respect to the deceased. It would appear that the expressed purpose in inviting everyone to the funeral was dishonest based on the invitation extended to WBC. Just like the expressed reason for the Reason Rally is sullied with the invite to WBC.
I feel this was done so that the Rally can film two segments. First, here are the non-theists. See how we are polite and speak nicely to each other. We are kind, loving people. Now look at the Christians, how they shout hate speech and wish us ill. We are so maligned by Christianity. Poor us, we are so mistreated and the Christians are so mean.
That is sad! Pointing to WBC and saying that is how Christians are is like me pointing at Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Benito Mussolini or Jeffrey Dahmer and saying that is how non-theists are. It would be completely unfair of me to make that blanket accusation. Hope to see those who claim to have reason actually show it at the rally and in the subsequent discussions that they have after it is over.
I truly hope that the Rally helps non-theists figure out ways to improve living conditions around the world. I hope that they discuss all of the humanitarian efforts that they are involved in, and how they can come together for relief efforts and to provide services and basic needs after natural disasters and in areas of high poverty. I would have loved to see tents and semi-trailers from non-theist instituations manned by non-theist volunteers giving out supplies when I was giving psychological first aid in Joplin, but I did not.
Hopefully, that is what Reason Rally is about: helping those less fortunate, struggling with physical and mental illnesses, funding/staffing humanitarian efforts and showing love for their fellow man. Unfortunately, based on the speakers that are there and the invitation to WBC that was made I am led to believe that they have a completely different agenda.
You begin this post by drawing a contrast between knowing for certain the basis of a celebration (your birthday) and "on the other hand" what the folks putting on the Reason Rally are doing. It's not clear to me what the contrast actually is that you are trying to point out, but you seem to then spend the rest of your post speculating on their motives: "I wish that were the truth, but I have trouble believing that for several reasons [...] I feel this was done so that the Rally can film two segments [...] based on the speakers that are there and the invitation to WBC that was made I am led to believe that they have a completely different agenda."
ReplyDeleteHere's the feeling I get from your post by way of analogy. You tell me that you're celebrating your birthday this weekend, and I reply that I'm not so sure that you ARE celebrating your birthday, I think you have other motives. Where would the conversation go from there when I don't trust what you claim about your celebration, and why would you want to keep talking to me if I'm doing so? It doesn't matter at all if you are doing things for your birthday celebration that I question or don't understand, because it's not my birthday.
This goes both ways - It is a poor choice I think for the organizers to second guess the motives of evangelical organizers who are planning to come. Both sides are guilty I think of short-circuiting conversations with "well I don't think you mean what you say you mean." I think conversations would be far more productive if we say to each other, "ok, let's see how you accomplish what you say you want to accomplish" and then deal with that at face value. There are too many different alternative explanations for actions (e.g. I think that a predictably absurd WBC demonstration would actually make many secular people there laugh and have more fun, but I have no real reason to say it will play out this way) to use said actions as ammunition against the motives of the organizers.
Luke 15:7
ReplyDeleteI tell you there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.
Luke 6:37
Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.
Luke 6:41-42
Why do you look ay the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see.the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
I find it amusing that those who gather to celebrate not believing (atheists) and those who celebrate their ignorance (I don't know what I believe (agnostics)) poke fun at people of faith.
ReplyDeleteFaith will always be misaligned by the pseudointellectuals. Look at the Apostle Paul, he went to Rome and the supposed learned men of the day tried hard to destroy his faith, not only did it fail but many of the learned en became great men of faith. See faith cannot be destroyed or debunked by human intellect, scientific endeavor or philisophical pursuits. Faith is an internal personal action that can be proved y the individual for the individual. Each person's faith is different from the next, even in the same religion/denomination. So to make a day to celebrate how ignorant faith is, well that is just an ignorant action on its own part.
ReplyDeleteThe contrast I am pointing out is that I acknowledge knowing when my birthday is. By definition a birthday is the day that one born. The definition of an atheist and an agnostic have them celebrating either lacking belief in something or lacking the knowledge to prove something. That is the contrast, I am celebrating that which I have knowledge of and the Reason Rally consists of two types of people who by definition don't have that. I felt the contrast was pretty well spelled out.
ReplyDeleteThere is a difference between assuming that I have a hidden agenda with no evidence otherwise and looking at my actions and coming to that conclusion. I believe the point was made in my blog but I will present it in a different way. If I were to tell people that at my birthday we are going to have a fun time and celebrate all that I have done in the past year, then invited a group of people who hated me and took every opportunity to vilify and degrade me it would seem that the reason I stated for my birthday was not factually reported.
Furthermore, the WBC is good at several things. They are good at getting under people's skin, provoking them to do things that they normally would not and then suing them. I would personally hate for my son, who is 4, to be subjected to the hate that they spew and witness the violent actions it sometimes causes normally calm people to commit. I also hate for the children in attendance at the Reason Rally to be subjected to it as well. Maybe that is just me being too empathetic, I don't know.
Thanks for clarifying the contrast there - sorry I didn't catch it the first time around.
DeleteThe point I was attempting to make was that this rally is more complicated than a birthday part if only because it involves many more people. For that reason, I don't think you can take their plans as evidence for or against anything, because the potential outcomes of their plans are many and you wouldn't be able to decide what their motivations were.
My point with WBC specifically was just this - there are too many potential reasons for inviting them. Let's take another analogy. Suppose you are walking down the street and you hear a black person call another black person the n- word. You could absolutely assume that this is a horrible racist insult, but you could also dig deeper and find that these individuals are probably taking control of this hateful speech and making it their own for their own purposes. Why can't the Reason Rally be doing the same thing with WBC? Embracing them can be a way of diffusing their 'power' but my overall point is that we won't really know until the thing happens, and it's poor form to use this as 'evidence' for a particular motive.
I agree that it is more complicated than a birthday party. Personally I have a lot of black friends who feel that it is completely degrading to call each other the N word and refuse to do it and get angry if it is said to them. I know that they don't want their children running around dropping the N bomb either. They still see it as degrading, but I digress. It is not really possible to embrace the WBC. I have seen them at a funeral before. If they have that little respect for a funeral, I can only imagine how the Rally will go.
ReplyDeleteSo for now how about I hold off on using the information that I have been presented with to come to a hypothesis. I guess that would be wrong of me to form a hypothesis before the experiment is conducted? That would be like me saying that the Higgs Boson particle exists without actually observing it and not having proven it. Surely nobody would ever do that, so I must have been wrong to do the same thing. Perhaps my memory of the scientific method is foggy.
Sorry about the sarcasm, but science is full of people looking at what is offered and creating theories without physical proof. It is actually a large part of the scientific process. They used to wait until after the experiment was completed and they had definitive proof to publish, but those days are long gone. Now they are trying not so much to prove what they believe in, but to refute what they do not believe.
I thank you for reminding me of how science used to be done when it did not have an agenda. You do not publish results until after the experiment is conducted and the results analyzed. You then either say that your theory was proven right or not proven. I will wait until next week to see what is released by the sponsors and the Reason Rally about the WBC and then write a blog that will either say my theory was proven right or my theory was proven wrong.
I'm glad that you have black friends who feel differently about the N bomb. My point wasn't as much that it's universally helpful or not for a black person to use the term, only that there are different motivations for doing so. You cannot necessarily tell by a given action what the motivation is behind the action.
DeleteSarcasm aside, I'm not sure how this topic is related to science. The success of science depends on how good the original question is. You're absolutely right that science doesn't work when someone says, "How can I disprove God today?" Your question here is, "what agenda do the Reason Rally organizers have?" and I'm simply saying that this is the wrong question. Attempting to find a hidden agenda is an interesting exploration but is in no way testable or scientific. A scientific question would be, "Did the event seem to accomplish what the organizers claimed it would accomplish" because you can actually measure accomplishments (tangible ones at least) whereas you cannot measure motivations (outside of difficult psychological experiments). You can form a hypothesis whenever you want, but my point is that your question is not scientific because there is no way to measure the hypothesized outcome.
One more analogy - there's a word of advice that says "don't call something a conspiracy when it can be explained by incompetence." For example, did 9/11 happen because thousands of Americans were psychopathically behind the conspiracy, or because many Americans didn't do a great job at putting the puzzle together before it was too late? Similarly, if the organizers of a rally (secular or otherwise) do something questionable, is it more likely that they are executing an underhanded and secretive agenda or that they made a few mistakes? All that aside, my overall point still stands - it's not scientific and it's not possible from our perspective to figure out the motivations of some group of event organizers whom we've never met. We can only determine whether the outcome met the stated purpose. Guess we'll know soon enough. Thanks for the post and discussion.