Robert B. Winn #fundie

Robert B. Winn #fundie amazon.com

Atheists worship nature. Everything they call science today is worship of nature. We could discuss relativity and the Galilean transformation equations if you want to. Atheists worship a false miracle called the length contraction

31 comments

old comment by Nomen Nescio

fucksakes, while i can't speak for other atheists, i for one am not even that sure what "worship" is.

i mean, i can take an educated guess based on context and what believers seem to be doing while in church on sundays, sure. but if i were to spell it out it'd be something like "communally engaging in mutual and self-delusion; reenforcing their own misconceived delusional beliefs about reality", and experience has shown that such conclusions are best kept to myself unless i actively want to annoy the religionists. and even if i do, i still have no real understanding --- beyond the most superficial, intellectual-level guess --- as to what the believers themselves are getting out of it. i'm sure it must be something, most likely on some fairly deep emotional level, or they wouldn't bother doing it; but just exactly what, i've never comprehended.

old comment by practical god

@Nomen Nescio

I can explain. What they get out of it is a sort of deferral of responsibility. Imagine the kind of situation when you are at your wit's end and there is nothing you can do about what ails you. It would be nice to be able to throw yourself at the mercy of some more powerful benevolent being in the hopes that it will see your sincere misery and resolve it. Keeping the possibility of that alive even when you're not in trouble, even when you're instead kind of thankful and glad that things are going well, that's underlying emotional benefit of worship, a belief in providence on your behalf. No different than being a happy loyal subject to a human king.

old comment by pyro

@Nomen Nescio

As someone who has actually done it, I might be able to give a more first-person description.

It varies.

The singing part is almost exactly what you would expect; it's music and chanting and dancing. People do the same thing in concerts and sports arenas.

Prayer, in it's more extreme forms, is the same way (JEEEESSSUUUSSSS! Yeah!), but it can also provide a sense of closure and safety. There's a ceiling and a floor that you can't fall below or rise above. No matter how bad it gets, it cannot get arbitrarily bad.

Sermons are, usually, everyone's least favorite part of a Sunday service. It's a lecture on what the congregation believes to be important matters, so listening is a very good idea.

old comment by Senomaros

"Atheists worship nature."

Setting aside the gross overgeneralization and lumping together of people into monolithic blocks, this might hold some grain of truth in it if you squint really hard. Speaking for myself (I consider myself an atheist) I would say I hold a great deal of awe and reverence for all the subtle intricacies of physics that permit the universe as we understand it to exist, and of chemistry that allow the tiniest pieces of matter to arrange themselves and interact with each other in specific patterns that we recognize as life, and of biology and evolution that arrange and mold that life into the array of forms on our planet that's so amazing in its diversity and complexity - "into endless forms most beautiful," to quote Darwin - including one particular form (Us!) that's capable of discovering and observing and contemplating all this as well as its own place in it. In this light, I find nature to be wondrously beautiful in its complexity and intricacy, entirely deserving of awe and reverence. (Nature, for me, consisting of the entirety of the universe and everything in it.)

This is about as close to worship of nature as I come, and even then, "worship" isn't the term I would use because, to me, that word brings to mind images of drooling knuckle-draggers intellectually shackling themselves and participating in their own willing enslavement to an Orwellian, Big Brother-esque invisible fairy in the sky. But this is my own particular view, and generalizing my particular outlook to include all atheists everywhere makes you an idiot.

"Everything they call science today is worship of nature."

Then you fail to understand what science is, and this makes you an even bigger idiot.

"Atheists worship a false miracle called the length contraction"

And you're an even bigger idiot still!

old comment by practical god

@Nomen Nescio

You were asking about the principle of worship in general, as in what on earth happens in the fundie mind at worship sessions.

For the purposes of this quote, the fundie uses the word worship to denote a hierarchical relationship. In fundieland, it goes like this:

god --> man --> nature

In sane people land, it goes like this:

nature <--> man

All his quote is saying is that atheists think that nature is bigger than them and relate to it as such, i.e. nature's laws are absolute. He seems incapable of grasping that it is possible to admit that something is more powerful than you, while at the same time being actively engaged in trying to understand it to redress the power imbalance. A scientist is not seeking to either control nature or defer to it, only to understand it better and improve one's condition thereby.

Fundie thinks that since an atheist believes himself to be a product of nature and subject to its universal laws, that means that atheist is treating nature as his god. This is because the fundie cannot seem to understand that an atheist includes himself as part of nature and seeks to achieve the best possible ecological equilibrium with the rest of nature.

Robert B. Winn #fundie amazon.com

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