Saturday, February 2, 2013

Would she accept any reasons?

"A Message to the 'Nones': Don’t Reject God Because of Human Suffering or Christian Bullshit" is a rather inaccurate, misleading, and disingenuous title. It reflects Dollar's thinking rather well. Even though she briefly notes in the very first paragraph that the "nones" are not necessarily atheists she rather quickly treats the term as if it is a synonym. I also am struck by the idea of rejecting God. How does an atheist reject something they don't regard as being real? What's to reject? Dollar also very quickly establishes that she is writing from a rather blatant set of biases.

"Instead, I want to speak to a problem that many good-hearted, quick-minded people have with religion, and particularly Christianity as it is practiced and articulated here in the U.S.—the failure of religion to adequately answer the problem of evil and suffering."

It's nice that  she concedes that the Nones can be "good-hearted" but would have been better if she didn't immediately follow it with "quick-minded." Considering she is talking about an issue that has been widely discussed and debated among philosophers and theologians for over a thousand years, I fail to see it as anything resembling "quick." She would have to assume that at least a decent portion of the nones are unaware of such a long-standing debate or have ever seriously consider it on their own. That's a pretty big assumption. Perhaps she is the one being "quick-minded."

A few paragraphs later she basically attacks the author of the CNN piece "Why I Raise My Children Without God." Most of Dollar's writing from this point on seems to be focused primarily on the author. She insists that the logic is flawed but never really makes her case. I admit that the piece in question could have been better in its presentation but Dollar's main critiques rely on a series of assumption that she never backs up with anything more than her on ignorance and biases.

As far as I can tell the CNN piece is not meant to represent Christianity, let alone, religion as a whole yet that is how Dollar seems to take it. In a few places Dollar actually seems to agree with the author.

"She utterly fails to recognize that 1) most Christians are as horrified as she is at the idea that God would allow children to be murdered for a reason, any reason, and particularly to fill a need for 'more angels,' and 2) many Christians are indeed responding to Newtown by renewing our commitment to more effective gun-control measures."

The author was talking about a specific sub-set of Christians. Rather than bash her wouldn't it make more sense for Dollar to also publicly criticize that type of Christian. She does seem to disagree with them so why take offense at someone outside Christianity stepping up and saying what needed to be said. There are similar examples of this type of nonsensical crap through the rest of the post.

This all leads me to an assumption of my own. Dollar is being incredibly disingenuous. She is not interested in accepting any reasons an atheist may have for not believing. This is simply an opportunity to attack and smear an atheist(s). Unlike her assumption mine are at least based on something that is clearly contained within the writing in question.

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