For one example of non-inclusiveness, politics. Most the atheist groups I've encountered deliberately exclude uncloseted conservatives. Open hostility towards conservatives is pretty common, as well. Back in the Bush era, when libertarians were treated by the left as honorary liberals, this wasn't quite as big a deal for me personally. Since Obama is in office, we've been lumped in with the conservatives again.
For a specific example not involving politics, the last atheist - in that case humanist - meeting I attended featured a supposed neurologist who came up to the podium and started claiming that religion was a mental disorder and started describing the similarities of the disorder to dyslexia (getting the details of dyslexia grossly wrong, to boot). My dyslexic sister, who I had narrowly convinced to attend the meeting with me, was -not- amused.
(Every organization wants to be a cult, and all that; the extreme people drive off the moderates. Religion is actually -really good- at keeping its less extreme members interested. Contrary to all expectation, my experience is that religious organizations tend to be the -least- cultlike ideological organizations.)
Religion, for all its own extremists, hasn't actually made any effort at going around and knocking down atheist organizations. That's a rather flimsy rationalization for why atheists have been completely incapable of replicating the good aspects of religion - we can't build our own stuff until we've knocked down things that aren't actually standing in our way?
Consider all the secular activities churches support and engage in. Hell, a church near me revised its policies a few years back - it added a second day of religion-free services. No, I have no idea how that works, and have never attended one. But as an atheist I have to acknowledge that I've taken advantage of a lot of the organizations, buildings, and services churches make possible. Until and unless there are secular alternatives to at least most of those offerings - supported on the same voluntary basis that churches exist upon today - atheism has absolutely no business even -thinking- about tearing religious institutions down.
...Consider all the secular activities churches support and engage in. Hell, a church near me revised its policies a few years back - it added a second day of religion-free services. No, I have no idea how that works, and have never attended one. But as an atheist I have to acknowledge that I've taken advantage of a lot of the organizations, buildings, and services churches make possible. Until and unless there are secular alternatives to at least most of those offerings - supported on the same voluntary basis that churches exist upon today - atheism has abs
Today's post, Raising the Sanity Waterline was originally published on 12 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Striving to Accept, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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