NOTICE:

[xenologer]

LGBT activism isn't about creating more gay people; it's about supporting and advocating for the ones who're here. Still, atheist activism is framed (by people who aren't doing it) as evangelism. We don't care about converting you; we're just... out. Get over it.

Jeez.

Comments

Re: I wish this was true, because it's very well stated.

[mothwentbad.livejournal.com]

"Limits of tact" can also be a matter of when and where. I don't knock on people's doors to tell people what I think about religion and why. They have to follow me over to Livejournal or Facebook, and I don't confront believers uninvited in their spaces - churches, wall posts, whatever. That's my policy for now, anyway. I don't think tact is the end-all and be-all of discussion. Substituting "theist" for "blonde" in a joke would be out of the question, for example, while referring to a lake of fire as a dwelling place for unbelievers "fucking awful" is totally warranted.

Only if I were actually having a sincere conversation with someone who really didn't understand that would I go to any extra lengths to try to break that down further in a less polemical way. It takes a lot of effort to have that kind of conversation, and I don't want to bother unless I'm specifically writing an outreach piece or if I have a very specific audience.

I don't know if there is any way to beat the immortal "I want to believe" argument. In any case, I would've found Dawkins convincing if I had read it when I was a very young agnostic. I also oppose the use of "evangelism" because it's overloaded with connotation and was invented as a word specifically for Christianity. Yeah, that's not atheism. Calling it "atheist evangelism" because "it just means trying to convince someone of something you believe" is just a bait and switch for conflating science with superstition, and inquiry with submission. Anyone who makes a point of using the term has an agenda, and anyone who's ever seen street preachers scare the young and the naive with talk of hellfire should know better.

Re: I wish this was true, because it's very well stated.

[count-fenring.livejournal.com]

I don't think tact is the be-all and end-all of discussion either. Also, I think the "not in their spaces" thing is certainly an important distinction, but I'm not sure how it maps onto the discussion - as far as I could tell, we were mostly talking about situations where it's nobody's explicit space.

I can certainly see making that case against using the term "evangelism," in fact, I largely agree, but that's not (as far as I could tell) the case V_Fell was arguing, or the case I was arguing against.