Howard

We've all passed a lot of water since I was a regular contributor here; and, when I was, I went around the God/no-God merry-go-round so many times that I'm still a little nauseous. So I thought I'd bring up a topic that maybe hasn't been beaten quite as severely as the proverbial God-horse. (Okay, I'm done with bad metaphors.)

The topic is why non-believers have such a powerful personal investment in the argument. I mean, one can certainly see a strong motivation for believers; they're staking not just their lives, but their eternal afterlives on their beliefs.

But what's at stake for non-believers? Most of us are already anticipating eternal nothingness. If we're wrong it just means there's something. And, like sex, something is almost always better than nothing, right? Of course, we've been threatened with some pretty nasty scenarios for our afterlives - such as burning eternally - but hell (sorry), even a great many Christians and Muslims don't believe in a God who inflicts infinite punishment for finite sins, just because some poor shnook didn't buy into a particular theological tenet.

Now I can understand non-believers being caught up in the external debate, the one they see as a battle between faith and reason, between wishful thinking and hard evidence… not to mention resisting the attempts by religious zealots to impose their theology and morality on the rest of us. But I don't understand the internal reasons for such depth of feeling. It seems that (Caution: Tricky wording ahead) non-believers believe just as fervently in their non-beliefs as believers believe in their beliefs. (Told ya). I just can't see why.

Selsaral

I argue just as strongly about politics, music, games, etc. as I do about religion. I think it's just human nature to be interested in subjects and debate them with other people. I also strongly think ego and pride has a lot to do with it, as I believe diana has pointed out (I hope I am not misrepresenting her position). I often find myself having trouble conceding defeat simply because I had argued strongly in the matter, when 20 minutes later, after I have cooled down, I easily concede defeat. Subconsciously I don't like being wrong or being shown to be wrong by other people, while consciously I desire truth and a fair weighing of evidence. I've noticed this phenomena is stronger when there is a larger audience to the debate (as diana also pointed out), which I think is a powerful piece of evidence for the theory. Even on trivial topics I become emotionally invested in the debate. As far as I can tell, this desire to debate heatedly is just a result of the way we think and feel.

ComestibleVenom

The same as the external reasons. Irrationality is something I feel strongly about because it has strong implications for the future of humanity.

I think we can make ourselves worthy of more noble things, and it requires passionate conviction to make it so.

Tyler Durden

Reason is the slave of the passions.

How we arrive at our convictions are no different from those of others, nor are they qualitatively superior or inferior to anybody's.

Ergo, the motives of the passions dictates the instrumental nature of reason.

Blake

Speaking not for myself but for others I've read, there's no one more zealous than a new convert. Or, in this case, a new deconvert. If one had fervent belief while a theist, then the sense of personal betrayal & waste after deconversion can keep even nonbelief pretty fervent at least for a while.

As for me, I never was a fervent believer, and I'm not a fervent unbeliever. I can't remember when I made my previous post around here, but it certainly wasn't recently.

Hawkingfan

Please consider the following post by American Heretic (who I haven't seen around here in awhile either). It was a response given to a similar question. It's one of the best posts I've ever read:

"The consequence for the individual believer, is nothing. When you die you rot. Your beliefs rot with you, unless you've passed them off or handed them down.The consequence then, for the rest of us, of your religion's ignorance and being "not intellectually studied up" is the following:
1) Myth without factual support is claimed to be as valid as science with it's full body of factual support. Education becomes meaningless.
2) Absolute morality as derived from God and the Bible is claimed to be as valid as reasoned ethics. Philosophy and ethical reasoning become meaningless.
I argue against your religion because I want to obliterate all of your consequences, every last one of them. I want your influence out of our political system. I want your influence out of our educational system. I want your mythology kept completely apart from science. I want your bloody morals discredited and erased from the face of the globe. I want you to have to earn your human worth instead of merely pretending in order to achieve "holier than thou" standing among your peers. I want you to respect others and contribute to humanity instead of gleefully threatening that we will fry in Hell for not agreeing with you, who think you know better, because you think ignorance and myth, and fact and science, are equals."

Amen!

Howard

What you say is undeniably true. In essence, this is a battle, albeit a verbal one, and no one likes to lose… although sometimes we carry things way too far. But I'm not convinced that's the whole story. IMO, most of us do not argue sports and politics with quite the fervor that we do religion and world views. (True, some whackos will kill over sports' arguments, but such people are in the small minority - we hope.)

I think one reason non-believers are passionate is because their beliefs (or non-beliefs if you prefer) define them as the people they are - just as theists' beliefs do. When we are defending our beliefs, we are defending ourselves.

Howard

Okay, but to carry this one step further. Do you personally care if God exists, or is it the argument itself that interests you?

Asha'man

What bothers me most about theism is that it is a lie. I was lied to, and that offends me greatly. People are still pushing the lie to others, spreading it to those without defenses, and that is a great tragedy, a moral outrage.

I argue in support of the truth, not against God.

gcameron

Check out some of the basketball newsgroups on Usenet...

People who post a lot on message boards have already self-selected somewhat, IMO. They tend to have strong opinions and they tend to defend them pretty fervently (or they go away). I've seen (and participated in) incredibly virulent arguments over everything from "does God exist?" to "was Monica Seles better than Steffi Graf?" to "Is Gamecube better than Playstation 2?"

I don't think you have to be a whacko to get carried away like this. (Or, if so, then I am a whacko.) You just have to, well, get carried away. I can't speak for others but every time -- every time -- someone disagrees with me, especially in the generally coarse environment of online discourse -- it feels like a slap in the face. It's very hard for me to just let it roll off my back. My first instinct is to slap back, and I am only sometimes successful in suppressing it (taking a deep breath before typing a response is a good technique...).

I think this is just how we're built. Some of us, anyway.