For the Sake of Science

PZ currently has a series of posts going where people write about why they are atheists. If anything, it serves to debunk his claim that atheists ought to be holding up a bunch of particular progressive views: people have their non-belief for a wide variety of reasons, not due to a certain set of normative views. Attempts to place everyone under the banner of atheism, as if that’s a coherent thing to do, just won’t work. For the nth time, atheism is 100% descriptive.

I’ve only read two of these posts and maybe skimmed another one or two. I don’t care that much about why Joe Schmo is an atheist. (It’s no better than Joe the Plumber from 2008.) But one of the two I’ve read caught my attention:

Simple. I read the bible. At 11. After reading through Norse, Roman, Egyptian and Greek mythology. I recognized they were the same. My mother was ecstatic, My father not so much. Oh, and I am African American. My mother was an atheist, and so are my children…they also came there with some guidance, but of their own volition.

Gwen
California

I liked this from the get-go because of its punctuated pace. But then I got to the irrelevant part about Gwen being black. Who cares? I understand that atheism amongst blacks in America is lower than it is amongst whites, but it really isn’t important to the issue. A valid question, however, is why I have said in the title of this post that this offends me.

I remember in the first or second grade being given an assignment to write a paragraph. I chose to write about my dog. I can no longer recall the details of everything I said, but I distinctly remember writing the sentence, “He is a boy.” It was out of place and did not pertain to the topic sentence, so when the teacher asked people if they could identify possible changes that needed to be made, a few students pointed it out. The teacher agreed and I learned something.

And that brings me to why Gwen’s irrelevant line offends me: It’s bad writing. She’s black? Fine. Create a blog post expressing experiences had while living as a black atheist. It would be an interesting topic. But to randomly mention it is just an attempt to get PZ’s attention. Everyone knows he’s going to go out of his way to promote a member of a minority group if he can. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with that, but he obviously did not pick Gwen’s piece because it was the cream of the crop. At best I can grant that this is effective rhetoric – it got her posted, after all – but it is not quality writing.

I have written at other times about my concern for language. (I especially liked a South Park episode that distinguished between the gendered sense of the word “fag” and the looser, more generalized use of the term.) I’m not pretending that I’m the perfect writer – I bet I have at least one non-typo error somewhere in this post – but I do have a genuine interest in how people use words. Language has an impact on us every single day. There are even comprehensive philosophies which use it as their cornerstones. It matters. It is the most common, most important way in which we communicate with each other over the course of our lives. Let’s not abuse and misuse it.

Filed under: Philosophy | Tagged: atheism, Gwen, Language, pz myers, Rhetoric | 17 Comments »