Sunday, August 15, 2010

Atheism's getting boring

I wrote back in March about how I'm basically done with writing about religion. I suppose that's not entirely accurate, as I have touched on some religious issues. However, I probably should have said that I was done critiquing religion and making a case for atheism. I sure wrote about that a lot, which you can see for yourself if you feel like browsing through my first couple of years worth of posts. Every now and then I feel the need to write another entry on the topic, but I start to feel as though I'd be repeating myself, or writing about something that somebody else already covered.

The thing is, I also used to read a lot of blogs on atheism, and I subscribed to a lot of Youtube channels that dealt with the issue. The problem is that I'm starting to get bored with a lot of them. I find myself skipping over all sorts of content that I once would have been sure to spend some time with in the past. Not only that, but I find that a lot of these guys are starting to taper off in what they're producing. It's either that, or I feel as though they're covering the same territory over and over again. For instance, I didn't even bother reading the last "Sunday Sacrilege" from PZ Myers. I mean, do I really need to read about why the concept of the afterlife is bunk...again?

I think that I know the reason why I'm getting bored with it. It's because the theists aren't giving us anything new. The aforementioned PZ Myers pretty much realized the same thing when it comes to the creationists. They're still pulling out the same old, lame-ass arguments about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a supposed "growing number" of scientists rejecting evolution. Then if you don't have the creationists, you have people who are smarter, but all they manage to do is obfuscate. My fellow member of Alexandria , Ophelia Benson, wrote about a particular case of this just recently.

It's just the same thing from the theists, over and over again. The bottom line is that they just can't come up with a logical reason to believe in a magical being who "exists outside of time and space" and willed the universe into existence. When they make a case for it, they'll either rely on their own ignorance and lack of logical thinking, or they'll make the definition for this "God" so complex to the point where it's meaningless.

Maybe I'm just feeling this way because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I don't really know any theists who are the type to push their religion on me, so I don't feel too oppressed out here. (I know it's different for some atheists in other parts of the country.) Still, I get this feeling that we atheists and agnostics are going to get to a point where we just can't keep making the same refutations anymore. We're just going to have to create a huge list, and the next time a theist posts or says something that's been a billion times debunked, we can just point them right to it.

It's kind of a shame, because I still enjoy talking about this stuff and thinking about it. I'm just looking for a bit of a challenge that's actually worth the effort.

Oh, and in case you never checked out the Youtube atheists, here are some examples from some of my favorites:







The Thinking Atheist (this particular video might just be my absolute favorite):




3 comments:

Holly said...

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Lance Christian Johnson said...

Heh...nice.

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