“A” is for “Apathy”?

I have reason to empathise with Sean when he writes…

“I tell you what Bruce, it’s the first time in two weeks I have enough care to comment on atheist issues…”

Yes. There are times when I find regular interaction with an explicitly atheist community on-line, tiresome. Especially on Facebook!

Before anyone frets, worries that they’ve done something to offend me, thinks that I’m about to rip the scarlet letter off of my blog or suspects that I’m about to de-friend atheists on Facebook, please consider; frustration is a normal part of life, and there is such a thing as healthy venting and constructive criticism.

I’m not angry. I don’t regret expressing solidarity with the atheists I’ve met online.

Truth be told, I’ve probably de-friended at most about 2% of the atheists I’ve met on Facebook and I’ve found discussion with the other 98%+ mostly productive.

All the same, there are certain things that don’t need to be prolific in order to be annoying, irritating and apathy-generating. The healthy thing I think is to focus one’s apathy down on the specific irritation, rather than enact a categorical write-off.

So I’ll do that.

You know what I find really boring? Dodgy Bible quotes as status updates, again and again and again and again and…

Sure, do it if you have to. Maybe if you’ve come out of a particularly traumatic fundamentalist sect then maybe, just maybe, biblical absurdism as you see it is the only thing you’ve got right now that’s stopping you from falling into a state of anxiety. It’s hard to shake some of these things off after all. I’m not so callous as to fail to see that. But…

I’ve never been religious. I’ve long since been aware of biblical absurdisms, at least in certain popular readings as practiced by many Christians. I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read what people have had to say about the Bible.

You know what in principle I learn each time someone points out yet again, another contradictory parsing of parts of a holy text or its factual errors or moral turpitudes? The same thing I learnt the hundred times before that; nothing. I really, really doubt that it’s just me.

It’s one thing if you can work something from the Bible into a pun, or something Pythonesque, it’s another thing to obsess about narrow biblical minutiae that we all know about ad nauseam. Godless people who are happy and healthy about being who they are, aren’t driven by anxiety to this kind of fixation or fetish. Godless people who are informed and confident don’t find this kind of critique to be educational – they view it as conventional, uncontentious and unworthy at least until it actually has consequences.

I’m not saying that religion shouldn’t be criticised – especially not that so frequently proselytized in the public square. That would be stupid. But if you’re amongst atheists who already know this stuff, you’re preaching to the choir and moreover it’s not very inspiring preaching. It’s not necessarily going to be educational for funamentalists either.

It’s not going to score anyone points with the long-time atheists either, as if each time you spout a silly line from the Bible, Richard Dawkins will stamp your rewards card. There isn’t a running score rewarded through in-group benefits and if there were it’d be measured on secular merit like achievements in science, ethics or art, not the finer details of who-you-are-not.

If acceptance is what people want then better to walk like you own the place than to try too hard to impress.

At best this anxious holy myopia stuff is treading water.

Part of the point of this scarlet letter “A” thing is to reduce the marginalisation felt by atheists. I don’t feel marginalised myself, but like others in a similar position I put myself out there in a spirit of solidarity with those atheists who aren’t so lucky.

The biblical absurdism fetish (and behaviours like it) is a barrier. It’s a margin. It comes between some of us and threatens to induce apathy, thereby frustrating attempts to help people truly interconnect. I haven’t de-friended anyone on Facebook over it (I save that for crap like “all Muslims are paedophiles” and other malicious acts of stupidity*), but it doesn’t exactly encourage meaningful interaction either.

If you’re treading water like this, perhaps what you need to do is put down your Bible, reach out your hand and let your cohort pull you out.

But you still want to talk about religion? Okay. That’s fine. But if you really want to engage with atheists like me rather than just a superficial association, it has to be important.

People being arrested in Palestine and Maldives for being atheists? Sure. Human rights are important.

Apostates asylum seekers being deported back to a jurisdiction that may execute them? I’m up for that. The humane handling of the immigration of asylum seekers is incredibly important.

Want a discussion about the anthropology of Eastern Christianity? Okay. Human history is full of valuable lessons.

Perhaps you want to talk about the more moderate, understated creationisms and the way they are prejudiced against things like evolutionary psychology. This could eventually have implications for the provision of mental health care. That’s important.

Do you want to explore what literary criticism has to say about how The Bible is threaded through English literature as intertextuality? Cultural literacy is valuable.

Can anyone see a pattern here? As someone who is non-religious, who has never been messed up by a fundamentalist sect nor escaped from the allegedly post-modern tendrils of religious moderation, religion isn’t important to me until it at least potentially influences something that is important to me.

If not my background, I think priorities like these are shared by many, many other atheists. Subjectively, over a decade of reading other godless types online and off would seem to confirm this.

Framing discussion of religion as influencing something you care about, rather than being the one thing you care about, is bound to be more rewarding both socially and politically. It beats sitting around a Bible sniggering like Beavis and Butthead**.

Still, in future I’m going to have to maintain apathy toward endlessly looped instances the likes of “heh heh… his name is Job… he’s a jobby… heh heh… heh…”, perhaps even thicken my skin so I don’t get distracted from the discussions I think really matter. It’s not because I don’t like the people engaged in the practice. I just don’t think it’s a healthy obsession and even when it merely punctuates otherwise interesting discussion, it can somehow be pervasively boring.

Now I’m going to take a deep breath and get back on with things.

~ Bruce

* Which thankfully hasn’t been at all common.

** Yeah, yeah. Showing my age.

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