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"Us... and them... / and after all, we're all just ordinary men."
--Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, "Us and Them"
Now, I know it's rather unusual for me to start a rant with any sort of quote whatsoever, much less a quote from the lyrics of a song. Such a thing is quite a MySpace or LiveJournal thing to do, and given my adopted-from-Maddox preference for a black background and light grey text, people may start worrying that I'm becoming a stereotypical Goth. Far from it; most of the things I do have some sort of method to their madness, and this is no different. Poetry, it was explained to me, is condensed literature; it attempts to convey an extremely complex message in as few words as possible via extensive use of metaphor. As you can see, I'm not very good at writing poetry, at the very least, and tend to wax verbose on even the simplest of topics. I include the quote above because, in short, it summarizes everything I'm about to say. You can go look at Battlemech designs now if you really want to.
As of late, I've been perusing the Bad Astronomy blog of the good Dr. Phil Plait, a decent blogger and indeed the only blogger I frequent (although I may start looking into Kaz Maslanka's, but that's because I know him personally from work. Different thing.). In particular, I've gotten myself into a few discussions concerning the magesteriums of religion and science, particularly in a blog thread concerning on how the supernatural does not exist (I am "The Centipede" in the comments). I agree wholeheartedly, but due to a different reason and that's a different rant for a different time. Essentially, once again, a few members of the skeptical crowd (not all of them) went just a little over the edge and once again asserted that faith/religion/whathaveyou are not only irrational beliefs (true) but also essentially diseases diametrically opposed to reason and Western Enlightenment and started grouping all religionists--which one would logically conclude to contain theistic heathen Deists like me--together with the fundamentalists of various religions and, as could be expected, started tarring with a rather large brush. They see it as the fight between rationalism and superstition, two extremely different things, and they believe (unlike Stephen Jay Gould) that these two entities cannot coexist because they're a measure of the rational function of one's mind; a mind that accepts superstition, no matter how slight, will have its rational faculties damaged and therefore, as rationality is our rallying cry, we must destroy superstitions that threaten our existence and progress, which happens to be all of them
Group dynamics is a very well-studied part of sociology with practical application to cults. In particular, an ideology becomes hard to break when one has invested emotional currency in it, say, by defending it against outsiders or even sitting there and saying "This is right: if it is wrong then I am wrong" and one thing that most people with high IQs have a problem saying is "I am wrong;" and when there is a ground for believers to get together and support each other's ideology. It doesn't matter if this ground is a church or a blog thread; the fact is that like attracts like when it comes to ideological struggles and the faithful can gain support from others who believe the exact same way. Therefore, the 'religion as a disease' argument can be consistently supported by people who agree, who only entrench their opinions further. This entrenchment naturally creates a distinction between "us" and "them," highlighted by any differences we can find while all similarities are conveniently ignored.
Essentially, I took the argument that atheism is, granted, not a religion. Ontologically the statement "this thing does not exist" is different from "this thing does exist," because of the way Western rationalism works: the null hypothesis is the default. This is good because it prevents people from pointing at a phenomenon and saying that fairies or unicorns or leprechauns were responsible for it; if 'existence' were the default hypothesis, we'd have to believe in absolutely everything and that's just silly. My argument was that, in the eyes of Joe Public, which is who the skeptics seriously wish to aid with the power of rational thought, strident atheism looks like a religion and, perhaps, those zealous atheists would do better to choose their battles. So long as someone with a religion doesn't point at a natural phenomenon and say that it happened because "Goddidit" as an active agent--i.e. God becomes a "how" rather than a "why"--and, being moderate, they're relatively predisposed towards science anyway, there's no point in lumping them with zealous religionistas and making them additional enemies towards The Cause, as it were. More people thinking rationally are better than fewer people thinking rationally, and hearts-and-minds is a matter of appearance, so let's tone things down a bit.
Of course, some would have nothing of it. One person did the typical "that sentence is a logical fallacy and therefore your entire argument/stance is null" tactic, and another (or was it the same?) had a grammatical complaint. There's no point in debating matters of opinion with people who read for structure and not for content, so I pretty much ignored them. In short, what things boiled down to, after I had to repeat myself several times that New Atheism looks like a religion, not that it necessarily is one, is that I finally got the concession that arguments centering around how bad religion is because of religiously motivated violence (the obligatory references to Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, sectarian violence, et al) was a paper tiger for two reasons: religion has also motivated a great deal of good, and people are going to fight anyway whether they have to resort to religion or science to give them an excuse why they can't just talk over it like rational people. Science and reason, with an ulterior motive, gave us racialist 'theory,' eugenics, and other fun things. The Spanish Inquisition in terms of lethality doesn't hold a candle to the Holocaust, which, to be fair, was a melding of traditional religious hatreds with the 'proof' of sciences that were soon to be disproven but no one knew it yet. Yes, the Northern Ireland conflict broke up between religions, but the underlying cause was a civil war between loyalist and seperatist factions which happened to be divided between religions due to history. The current Iraqi civil war is broken down by Shi'a and Sunni lines, yes, but is motivated by the acts of zealots in those areas with mixed populations who then inform the opinions of people in homogenous areas out in the desert. What it comes down to is that somewhere in human nature there are natural "us" and "them" delineations: they live in the fertile plains, we live in the desert; they have dark skin, we have light skin; they have, we have not. Those delineations are then reinforced by things completely ungermane to the issues at hand: they are Sunni, we are Shi'a; they are Muslim, we are Christian; they believe in gods, we do not. The next step is the inherent belief that the two sides of this black-and-white divide are mutually exclusive and the two simply cannot coexist.
We know empirically that this is patently false. Point at "them" and they are "us." Pogo's famous quote is "I have seen the enemy, and they are us," and that holds true for practically any ideological conflict. We are all human, we all have the same flaws, and yet we are not all identical. There really are "us" and "them" to some extent, and to say otherwise would be patently false... but it's the same as saying there are red flowers and blue flowers. They are both flowers. The fact that some are red and others are blue, or some are taller and others are shorter, does not have any influence upon that sort of Platonic Ideal that gives them their flower-ness; they are flowers and thus, to a disinterested observer not particularly preferring blue over red or vice versa, equivalent. Rationalists and religionists, Protestants and Catholics, Shi'a and Sunni, all of these can coexist with each other because they are all made of individual people, and the human being as a moral agent can choose whether to coexist or not, no matter their beliefs. Even if beliefs are technically mutually exclusive, say New Atheism and any sort of belief in a religion, people have to choose to eradicate the heathen by word or by sword, and here we come to tolerance as taught by South Park: "tolerance" doesn't mean you have to agree with everyone. You don't even have to like everyone. Essentially, you just can't be arsed to put the infidels out of their miserable existence like the zealots are exhorting you to, and through coexistence, you eventually learn that they are we and actually decent folk (if still completely wrong, but that's okay).
"Us" and "them" are perfectly natural categories for the human mind to utilize. To say 'never use it' would be about as healthy as the Victorian emphasis on suppressing human sexuality. One can only realize one is thinking this way and remember that they are us and we are them and therefore we must grow past the tendency to seperate ourselves, to create ideological divides, and instead actively work to understand "them" (at best) or at least be willing to tolerate "them" so long as they don't constitute an existential threat to our persons (at worst).
I'm torn between continuing this essay and not because it seguays into something related ("they are us") and yet with a different basis: morality, especially concerning pride and hubris. I'm thinking that's a different rant for a different time, because it has to do with the nature of the "evil man" and not simply the delineation of "us" versus "them" and the need for tolerance and forebearance between the two. The big problem, for me, is that both that rant and this one rely on the same essential thesis, so you could consider it either two seperate rants or one in two parts. It doesn't really matter, in the long run, and it'll make a good closing. Here goes:
Point at anyone. Absolutely anyone throughout all of human history who isn't verifiably insane, no matter how crazy his ideas.
That person is you.
Think about that for a while, and I'll see you in a week.
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