Letters to the Editor
Xrandadu Hutman
Published Letters: 3054 Editor's Choice: 53
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rtf100 -- keep quoting CS Lewis till it turns your blue
[Read the article: Proud atheists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility."
Funny you mention that, because if you read the article, clearly Pinker and Goldstein have plenty of humility. So do a great many atheists. What makes you think they automatically do not? I found the CS Lewis quote extremely wrongheaded -- had the man never met a Buddhist?
Singling out Christians as the only people with any humility is a joke. Jerry Falwell is but one example of a man sorely lacking in humility. So is Pat "I think we should assassinate Hugo Chavez" Robertson.
"This is why atheists are reviled...because they are absolutists and a "very proud" bunch."
Dude, I've met so many absolutist, "very proud" Christians it's not even funny. They are the most prideful and judgmental people I've ever come across -- and I mingle with a ton of people. Especially bad are fundamentalist Christians. Ever have somebody look you in the eye and tell you you're going to hell? Yeah -- that was a Christian. Sounds like arrogance, absolutism and pride to me.
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Ramus 1 and ESP
[Read the article: Proud atheists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ramus1 writes:
"At party years ago I arrived with my friend, a man from England. Out hostees immediately asked him, who very close to him, had just died. He replied that nobody close to him had just died. Our hostess was certain someone he loved had died. In the middle of the night ..about 6 hours after the hostess had proclaimed it, my friend got a call, in the middle of the night here, that his mother had been found dead in her apartment."
Okay, let me ask you -- what kind of crappy hostess asks a total stranger if somebody they know just died? I would throw my drink in her face. That's just rude, man. But did you ever go back to the hostess and ask her why she said that?
"The other instance was when an Indian woman who I had never met, but who had met my son (native American) came to me at a place where I was teaching a class and told me my son was in danger..and that he should stay out of small boats, especially anything that was paddled. It was January..I told my son. Two days later his girlfriend drowned, in a boat that had been being paddled as if it were a canoe."
Do strange women just follow you around? Again, did it occur to you to take down this woman's name and number? Maybe report her to the police? Any chance she was stalking your son and secretly poking holes in his canoe?
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What I learned from reading this Salon article and the resulting letters
[Read the article: Proud atheists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](1) Salon's editors will misrepresent an article's content for clicks. The headline says "Proud atheists" and the subhead calls them "America's brainiest couple," refers to atheism as "America's most reviled subculture," and says they don't think "scientists can explain everything." Yet if you read the article, the subject of atheism is just one aspect of a larger discussion that includes mind/body dualism, cognitive science, the nuances of language, etc. It's a very thoughtful and good-natured discussion, and even when they say they're "proud atheists," they're laughing at themselves for saying it. Salon's editors picked the one hot-button aspect of the interview and used it, dishonestly in my opinion, to hook people in.
(2) Many readers did not read the article. I have read every letter in this User Comments section. The majority of them do not refer to the article directly, and many of them (from people who seem fairly bright) willfully misrepresent what Pinker and Goldstein say, or take them out of context to build a strawman they can then knock down. Many people here do not seem to even understand the fields that Pinker and Goldstein work in, which are made up of several interlocking academic disciplines (philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, etc.) and yet attempt to judge the duo based on outmoded reasons.
(3) Many of the comments are completely unrelated to the article and instead hop on the atheism vs. religion debate. It's a stimulus-response thing -- "the screen says 'atheism' therefore I will paste a CS Lewis quote! It's my job! I must push the button every 108 minutes or the world will end!"
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Addendum to my last message
[Read the article: Proud atheists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](4) There is a direct connection between Salon's practice of misrepresenting its articles and the tendency of User Comments to be off-topic. That's why only two of the comments are Editor's Picks....because Salon directed an audience to a story that wasn't really for that audience.
I've seen Salon misrepresent articles in the past. They do it quite a bit. I know they want page-views, but journalistically their practice is questionable. One of the most egregious examples was for the Farhad Manjoo article about Netflix. The subhead said, "Blockbuster gives Netflix customers an incentive to switch. The trouble is, Netflix won't let them leave." The subhead made it sound like Netflix was doing something nefarious. Then when you read the article, it turned out the only thing Netflix wasn't doing was going WAY out of its way to make all of its user data (like movie queue and reviews) easily transportable to the other service. Then when you read a little further, it turns out that Blockbuster was guilty of the same lack of transportability! This rendered the Salon subhead completely misinforming. Salon editors: Do you intend to continue with this sort of crap? Other online magazines, like Slate, do not resort to such misleading headline tactics. Why do you?