Remember when you were at that bush party in high school and that one guy, Crazy Dave, got the idea he should set the abandoned Chevy on fire? You were the voice of reason: “No Dave, don’t do it. That’s stupid. What if there is still some gas in the tank? What if the grass and trees catch fire?” You kept right on protesting but eventually your wise entreaties were drowned out by the growing mob chant “Burn it! Burn it! Burn it!” What good did all your protests do? Nobody even cared. They kept chanting, Dave burned the car, and everybody thought you were just a priss. “Dude, don’t invite that guy next time.”
That got me thinking. Perhaps I’ve been wrong to protest the practice of social marginalization by the use of empty rhetorical labels like “believer”. Maybe I’ve just been kicking against the goads. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
With one significant tweak.
Believer = believer in naturalism, that philosophical position that denies the existence of all absolute agent causes and which is embodied historically in Democritus’ metaphysic of atoms and the void, of Lucretius’ great poem “On the nature of things” (De rerum natura) of Bertrand Russell’s famous essay “A Free Man’s Worship” and the programmatic philosophical projects of other modern thinkers ranging from W.V.O. Quine to Wilfred Sellars, David Papineau, Daniel Dennett … and our own John Loftus. Believers one and all in the great project of naturalism. Now try to say it with a hiss: believers.
Skeptic = skeptic in naturalism and the ill-begotten projects of its many would-be luminaries.
There. Perfect. Mutually assurred rhetorical destruction makes so much more sense.
