Thursday, September 19, 2013

Choosing your battles

Steve Shives recently posted a new 5 Stupid Things episode about YouTube (06:20) and raised a point about "Comment Wars" about trivial disagreements and "Drama" where YouTubers get bogged down in distracting diatribes about other YouTubers.

This raised some general questions about how much energy we spend broadcasting our points and exercising our debate skills. The Bible has been thoroughly debunked and science prevails, yet the religious keep coming at us with the same unswerving thoroughly debunked claims. Which of these are actually seeking a perspective and which are simply wasting our time?

Some of us love a good argument we already know we will win. Science is like that because it has evidence. What is stopping us atheists from simply ignoring religious claims and not participating in further debate is the danger religion poses to the education of children. Atheists must defend science against the relentless ignorance, bigotry, bullying and violence of religion.

Unfortunately from my perspective most of the battlefields are being chosen by the religious. I continuously see trolling in social media where it's easy to get lured into a time-consuming debate in the comments.

What many don't seem to realize is the people we need to reach are not here in our little enclave on the Internet. Each community, page, circle, group, or whathaveyou is a bubble composed of a material completely invisible to everyone except those who know the correct search words to find it, and is populated by members who are already fully aligned with Reason.

There are too few examples of heroic public efforts to spread atheism in the real public sphere, and here is a really good start: AaronRa (Communicating Atheism)


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