A friend and I arrived after a 5 km long drive. We were of course talking on the way and he ended up with "You atheists put a lot of pressure on us theists". What? I told him, "On the way just now, we saw at least 10 hoardings which tried to sell you god, various brands of religions and spirituality and so on. Did you find one board trying to sell atheism? Who is putting pressure on whom?".
"But there is invisible pressure." He said. I had to retort, "You theists are used to believing in invisible, non-existent things anyway. So your accusation does not mean anything."
Even though this may sound acrimonious, it was not. All in good humour. So it was fun.
Today Ravi sent me this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14135523
Very funny, very interesting.
The sentence that caught my attention was the one that starts with "A self-confessed atheist, Mr Alm says....". Self-confessed? Being an atheist is no crime to confess to, surely. Self-proclaimed, self-declared will do nicely, thank you!
You think that I am being over sensitive about this? Not at all. It is a point of diction. As Richard Dawkins says, the feminists raised our consciousness by objecting to sex bias by objecting to words like chairman, workman (and even HIStory) and so on. This is also like that. I would want to rewrite that sentence referred to earlier as: Mr Alm, an atheist, says ....
To prove a point to myself I asked a colleague if she was a self-confessed Roman Catholic. She looked at me with incredulity. QED
Now, who puts pressure on who, please?
What do you say?
That brings into focus.... closet atheists, atheists coming out, etc. Myself, I am simply confused!
ReplyDeletehttp://musingsinthether.blogspot.com/2009/09/dvg-n-murthy-rao-charlie-brown-and-fly.html
Confused is perhaps a good state to be in. It means that your mind is open and you are questioning. That IS a positive. No? It is also interesting for you hto observe how you act - as if there is a god or there is no god?
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