Or it could mean nothing of the sort?
The abrasive coward known as PZ Myers has posted a rather angry little screed about some survey or other that, on one hand, evidently demonstrates that there is an uptick in the number of non-believers in American society, while on the other hand apparently attempts to downplay any increase prevalence of atheism amongst that same population segment by noting that much of it is comprised of “Nones” — people who are “religious, pray on a regular basis, move in and out of our congregations, even formally belong to congregations,” but who “just don’t claim a particular “religious identity”.
Myers evidently thinks that this downplaying is somehow distorting the facts, and this belief has led him to get his underwear in a twist about the whole thing. The results are, of course, predictable: he rails on about how Religion is a delusion which should be consigned to the madhouse, throws in a handful of profanities, makes his usual vitriolic remarks about sanctimonious believers, and then re-commits himself to his stated goal of relentlessly spitting and shitting upon the beliefs that some people in America, and around the world, actually hold near and dear.
All the while getting upset that the belief he holds near and dear — atheism — is getting what he perceives to be a short shrift, no less.
Hypocrisy, thy name is that of a second-tier college professor!
Myers is, of course, a touch too intellectually myopic to realize that his own assholery is one of the many, many reasons why a significant number of those self-identified “Nones” go out of their way to avoid identifying with (or as) atheists, and then especially as New Atheists. Like as not, most people aren’t cut out to be vitriolic jerks, and really don’t want to hang out with those who make a point of being vitriolic jerks. That’s as true at a philosophical level as it is in real life, by the way. He can’t seem to grasp that fewer people than he might like are willing to commit themselves wholesale to a philosophical and metaphysical conjecture that seems to draw in an inordinately high number of socially autistic tools whose principal delight is insulting everyone around them.
Are the results of the survey a bit troubling? Yes, I’d say so, and I think the Church really needs to re-commit herself to her mission of evangelism, and then in a targeted way that works to identify exactly what it is that makes people drift from being in a denomination to being a “None.” The Church has suffered, and survived, losses such as this in the past, and will do so with this round of losses too, though for the good of society the Church is, I think, obligated to give her very best efforts at reversing the trend.
But I suspect that the results of the survey, troubling though they may be for the Church, are yet more troubling to the likes of Myers, precisely because they reveal that even though people can be convinced to drift away from religious institutions, they cannot so easily be convinced to drift away from aspects of their faith that are, no surprise, dear to them at some level. Moreover, the survey results reveal that precious few people actually want to have anything to do, at any level, with people whose sole joy is to insult and denigrate those “near and dear” things…especially when those same people cannot suffer to hear, for one instant, someone question their own near and dear atheism.
Myers is, in other words, a hypocritical and cowardly blowhard, hiding something akin to fear behind a vitriolic tirade.
(hat tip)
