Ashley said:
We need to talk about our tendency to think we are better than other people and better than religious people in particular. We need to talk about how we think that religion is the reason that bad things happen in the world. We need to talk about our culture of turning a blind eye towards the despicable behavior we see among ourselves. All of those things we do are exactly the problem with the religious institutions we hate: tribalism at the cost of morality.
In all seriousness, what the heck do you think the Pit has been doing for the last 4 years?
This is precisely what the Pit does. And anyone who approaches the Pit with any degree of intellectual honesty knows that this is so. And that is proven by the wide range of disagreement among the Pit members, and the almost total lack of consensus or so-called purpose.
As I say, there is almost no consensus among Pit folk -- with some very minor exceptions. I know the tribal commentariat here at FTB, with rage tears in full flow and fondly remembered porcupines a-dangle, will do its tribalistic best to vilify me, my claim, and every Pit person who ever lived, and in trademarked FTB rage and reaction condemn us all as all sorts of unspeakable filth and evil. But what I say is true.
And I think the best proof in that pudding is that there have been dozens, literally dozens of FTB bloggers and commenters who have given the Pit fair view -- meaning using actual skepticism, critical thinking, and good faith -- and read as many posts as they could
without focussing only on those they disagreed with, and discovered in noted surprise that the FTB bloggers and commenters who described the Pit as racist, homophobic, misogynist, anti-trans, etc., and so on, were in fact lying. And most of those FTB bloggers and commenters have then, themselves, joined the Pit as regular visitors and commenters therein. This is simple fact.
The primary problem here is that the majority of the FTB / A+ / Skepchick wing of contemporary atheism is so deeply, profoundly, embedded in the angry tribal identity politics of SJWism, that the blinders are two feet thick and immalleable. Cataracts to reality and the intellect.
So, anyway, I support much of what you say Ashley. But I really think it's time to review the wisdom of a borrowed poetic religious quote:
1. Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4. Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
I am a life-long atheist, without dogma, but I nonetheless feel that that quote is profoundly apllicable to many FTB bloggers and almost all of the FTB commentariat, and certainly to the majority of SJWs -- self-described or otherwise.
And for the record, despite angry SJW rage to the contrary, Pit people are constantly trying, if not always succeeding, in casting the beams out of their own and each others' eyes on a daily basis. That is to a very large degree what the Pit is about, and in that instance, that is very much and profoundly what the Pit approach to free speech is all about.
