Stardate 20030506.1234

(On Screen via long range sensors): David Sims at Clubbeaux made a post on his site, and later it was noticed that the site Raving Atheist made a post which was disturbingly similar. Not to put too fine a point on it, much of it was a direct word-for-word crib. Sims cries "Plagiarism!" and is quite right to do so, but proceeds to use this event as a way of making a series of collective condemnations of atheists, such as this:

I’m flattered that Raving Plagiarist is such a fan of Clubbeaux, and I appreciate that atheists don’t feel the need to follow traditional Christian morality, it’s a bit of a surprise to find that plagiarism is perfectly acceptable to them, however.

In the comment thread, someone using the name "Delilah" makes a rather unfortunate statement, and Sims responds to her:

See, Sage, here's the intellectual power of atheists on full display: I said genuine racial crimes against blacks were rare. That means that there are crimes against blacks that aren't racial in nature, and that the instance of racial crimes against blacks is rare. Delilah, in all her atheistic intelligence, reads this as me saying "no real crimes against blacks."

But I guess if she had any brains she wouldn't be an atheist.

With all due respect, it's no more possible to make categorical statements about "atheists" than it is about any other equivalent group, such as "non-Americans". The category "Non-American" includes Ethiopians, Frenchmen, Chechens, Chinese and Australians; obviously about the only thing you can conclude is that they're all human but none of them live in the US.

By the same token, the category "atheist" is defined by a negative; it means someone who doesn't believe there are any deities. However, it doesn't say what they do believe in, if anything at all. So "atheist" covers not only mechanists (like me), but also secular neo-Marxists (whom I despise), and a wide variety of other points of view all of which contradict one another.

And even among mechanists there's no particular consensus about such things as ethics, because the basic axiom of mechanistic atheism (that the only thing which exists is the material universe and the matter within it, which interacts according to the laws of physics) doesn't provide any kind of guidance in those areas.

We atheists are not all members of some sort of club, who rally to one another's defense. We're about as disorganized as any religious group can be. I think what Raving Atheist did was contemptible. (From my point of view, the fact that I'm also an atheist is uninteresting.) But to conclude from his behavior that "atheists think plagiarism is perfectly acceptable" is an example of bigotry. "Atheists" think no such thing, because "atheists" collectively agree about very little.

I, in particular, have a major and deep disagreement with Raving Atheist about at least one aspect of atheism. He thinks that atheism is actually susceptible to proof. I know that it is not. Mechanist atheism is a belief; it cannot be proved, because it is impossible to distinguish by observation between a mechanistic universe and one where there's an apathetic deity.

Sims disagrees with Raving Atheist on the subject of plagiarism, and I agree with Sims that plagiarism is wrong. Oddly, it's clear that Sims and Raving Atheist do both agree on the other subject, regarding the decline in the number of true racially-motivated white-on-black crimes.

"Delilah" made a comment seeming to disagree on that point, but unless there's a history of posts by that person indicating that she (?) is atheist, there was no particular reason to conclude atheism from it. Nonetheless, Sims unloads a round of buckshot on Delilah for being a stupid atheist, despite the fact that Raving Atheist agreed with Sims on the basic point (proving it by the most sincere form of flattery). Again, Sims seems to demonstrate bigotry towards atheists.

Atheists can be just as stupid and deluded as anyone else can be, but some atheists such as Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill have been very wise and very intelligent. (Those two have influenced my own beliefs and attitudes very strongly.)

There actually are white-on-black racial crimes in this country, including murders (for instance, the brutal murder of James Byrd Jr., for which two of the three murderers rightly got the death penalty) but they're much less common than many would like to believe. The days of wholesale lynchings are long gone, and good riddance.

Part of the problem is that any activist group once created takes on a life of its own and those involved in the group won't want it to cease to exist even when triumphant. Such groups never voluntarily disband; they fade out due to increasing irrelevance and declining support.

They respond to that by trying to pretend that the problem still exists so that they still have a reason to continue the struggle. And as their victory becomes ever more complete, they become more and more hysterical and agitated about ever smaller things so as to try to keep their contributors and members dedicated to the cause.

Interestingly, that then becomes an indirect way of evaluating just how successful any given activist movement has been. The NAACP is a good example of that; it unwittingly demonstrated recently just how much progress had actually been made in race relations when its most recent high-profile protest was about what symbols should appear on certain state flags. If that's all they could find to be irate about, things must definitely have gotten a hell of a lot better than when I was a kid in the 1950's, when there were still "Whites only" drinking fountains in the South. (I'm glad such things didn't exist in Oregon when I was growing up.)

Is there still a race problem in the US? Of course there is; it would be idiocy to claim it had been totally eradicated. But it's far, far less serious now than it was 30 years ago; we're in the "cleaning up the remnants" stage now.

Unfortunately, David Sims proves that bigotry is still alive and well. Fortunately, most enlightened Christians don't hold the kind of prejudice towards atheists that Sims demonstrates, despite his "Some of my best friends" disclaimer.