Ah, it’s these tiresome and duplicitous mythology fanboy tropes again.
Item one: most of us here avoid mythology fanboy forums, and therefore by definition don’t “evangelise atheism”. The only time the topic becomes a focus for debate, is in response to mythology fanboys gatecrashing this and other atheist websites, trying to evangelise for their brands of mythology fanboyism. At which point we explain, with varying degrees of rigour depending upon the respondent, why we simply don’t accept the blind assertions about various cartoon magic men that are peddled by your ilk.
But I’m used to seeing mythology fanboys project their modus operandi upon us, as if this is anything other than an admission of failure on their part. Asserting that we purportedly behave the same way that mythology fanboys do, when the observational data says otherwise, constitutes such an elementary level of failure, that mythology fanboys should be embarrassed to have to resort to such discoursive elisions.
Item two: atheism isn’t something you “convert” to. In its rigorous formulation, atheism is nothing more than suspicion of unsupported mythology fanboy assertions. That is IT. Equivalently, it consists of “YOU assert that your magic man exists, YOU support your assertions”, preferably with something better than the usual offerings mythology fanboys serve up. Which consist mostly of a mixture of “my mythology says so” combined with apologetic fabrications of varying degrees of stupidity and duplicity, that an astute five year old child would point and laugh at.
Quite simply, the fortunate are never infected by mythology fanboyism, and never have to abandon it as a result. The less fortunate have to undo years of being lied to by the usual suspects.
Item three: the “militant atheism” trope is not only tiresome, but duplicitous, in the light of the contrast between atheist and mythology fanboy approaches to the relevant topics. For 1,500 years in Europe, mythology fanboys spent time barbecuing anyone who didn’t conform to doctrine. By contrast, all that atheists do is point out inconvenient facts that make mythology fanboys squirm. It should be obvious which of these two approaches is genuinely “militant”.
Indeed, I’m reminded at this juncture of the manner in which groups such as the creepy Dominionists, are seeking to impose a hard-line Christian theocracy upon the USA. I’m also reminded that there are individuals among the fundamentalist Christian Nationalists in the USA, who openly call for the extermination of atheists, Randall Terry and Tom Willis being two individuals I’m aware of who have expounded public proclamations to this effect. Some of them are also in the business of exporting this ideological poison to other countries, and have been disturbingly successful at doing so in parts of Africa. Fortunately, their efforts are mostly met with ridicule here in the UK where I live, but as a result of said export efforts, we now have our own home-grown Christian Nationalist loons.
Bullshit. For the reasons I give above. NOT treating unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as fact, is the very ANTITHESIS of a “worldview” or “belief system”. Indeed, those of us who take the matter seriously, reject “belief” itself as purportedly constituting a source of “knowledge”. Not least because, as mythology fanboys routinely demonstrate here and elsewhere, “belief” consists of nothing but uncritical acceptance of unsupported assertions. Indeed, when one has evidence for a given postulate, “belief” is superfluous to requirements and irrelevant.
And we have another demonstrable lie.
First of all, there are (admittedly a minority, but they do exist) scientists who are also religious believers. For example, Kenneth Miller, who testified at the Dover Trial against the ID brigade, is both an evolutionary biologist and a practising Catholic, though I for one regard the juxtaposition thereof as baffling. Likewise, Georges Lemaître, who was a seminal contributor to Big Bang cosmology, was a Catholic priest. John Polkinghorne is both a theoretical physicists and an ordained Anglican priest. Though it’s telling that the religious believers among the scientific community leave their religion in the locker room while donning their lab coats.
I suspect all three of the individuals I’ve cited above, would reject being labelled “scientific materialists”, despite being tenured professional scientists.
Of course, as [url=https://www.nature.com/articles/28478[/url] this article in the scientific journal Nature informs us, religious belief is disappearing among the scientific community at a record rate. But that’s a separate question.
In the meantime, in your manifest, failed and duplicitous attempt to use “scientific materialism” as some sort of not so thinly veiled insult, there’s just one problem with this. Those of us who accept scientific postulates do so precisely because scientists provide EVIDENCE for those postulates, and as a corollary, our acceptance thereof does not have an “ideological” basis (See my above remarks on belief). Though in the 14 years I’ve been dealing with mythology fanboy assertions, I’ve seen this tiresomely emetic misrepresentation of atheism being peddled frequently by your ilk. It’s telling that the only way mythology fanboys can deal with atheism, is by misrepresenting it as a “doctrine” or an “ideological choice”, in order to distract from the manner in which mythology fanboys all too frequently reject demonstrable scientific fact, in order to prop up THEIR deliberate ideological choice. Creationism being merely the most malignant manifestation of this.
Here’s a clue for you: acceptance of evidentially supported postulates isn’t a “world view” in the usual sense of the term. Genuine “world views” have a habit of relying upon one or more assertions being treated as purportedly constituting “axioms” about the world, regardless of how much reality treats the “axioms” in question with scorn and derision. That observational data is informative about the world around us, isn’t an “assertion”, it’s an established fact, and your famine-free, disease-free life surrounded by expensive electronic toys is a colossal manifestation of that established fact.
Consider the above an object lesson in what happens when you fail to apply rigour to your thinking.