Allahpundit, please clearly state your reason(s) for posting the video.

The timing of their video release made it topical, I suppose, and yet you had initially resisted posting it. You said that you felt provoked by Graham’s column which “rang in the season”.

If it was not Christmastime, would you have hesitated to post the video? In what way did you become obligated to post it at this time rather than later, if at all?

At first you said you did it because the NRO had “extended the middle finger to athiests”. Apparently, you perceived an insult in Jennifer Graham’s column. What insulted you, if anything?

You said that by posting the video, you would return the gesture. But later you said you intended no insult by extending your middle finger. Howso?

You said:

It’s more that I’m strapped for content and this dropped in my lap yesterday. Although I figured someone would accuse me of [poking the faithful] [...] Like the Horsemen say at the beginning of the first clip, religious people love to feel offended. I expect this thread will provide another example.

You imputed motive to those who felt offended. They love it, you said. But you asked others not to impute motive to you.

Some did say they were offended, and gave their reasons, in discussion of the subject. But you hinted that discussion was predictable and uncalled for. Even thought what the four horseman said in their video was cliched and fraught with mischaracterizationis.

You spoke of your being obligated to post this video and you spoke of your readers not being obliged to read what you posted. Did you post it to discourage people from watching the video? Of course not.

Some readers chastized others for presumably not watching the video; but most of those who noted the perceived insult also watched the video. The athiests here have done a little too much to justify the stereotype of athiests.

Meanwhile, it appears you underestimated when you said that commenters were just playing “the aggrieved victim”. Minus your express, and calculated, intent to insult, they ought not to feel offended by an extended middle finger timed just so?

But, doriangrey (the particular commenter you had quoted and replied to) had said, at the outset, that he understood you. That given your temperment and purpose here, you couldn’t resist. But he’d forgiven you. Later, with less irony, he said he was not offended but was rather amused by your post and by your subsequent comments. He had good things to say about athiests in general.

I thought that commenter was merely pointing out that your ironic tone, and pose, only thinly obscured the irony of your going tit-for-tat based on what you, as an athiest, (mis)perceived to be an insult by Graham.

Maybe you were just playing the victim (without actually feeling a middle finger had been extended to athiests), in your opening remarks, but later you seemed to earnestly breath life into that role.

This became very obvious in the following part of your exchange.

Allahpundit:

I apologize for posting this video of a quiet, civil conversation about religion which you’re not obliged to watch. [...] I’m not offending anyone for sport. You’re imputing that motive to me just because it fits your stereotype of an atheist and makes us a tad easier to demonize.

doriangrey:

As well you should [apologize], this is no quite civil conversation, its a very calculated intentional insult to those of faith. It is every bit as poignant as those of the Christian faith sitting around having a quite civil conversation discussing how atheists will spend eternity burning in hell.

Allahpundit:

Saying “I don’t believe this is true” is tantamount to fantasizing about infidels being tortured? If you say so. In any case, I’m not offended by talk like that. You’re welcome to it in this very thread if you like. You won’t be banned.

I suppose that for an athiest, the thought of Heaven and Hell must be trivialized as “fantasizing”. All the better to “demonize” the faithful.

The way you put it, four Christians, sitting around and quietly discussing Heaven and Hell might as well be torturing athiests.

At the very least, your (mis)characterization would suggest that these Christians, by virtue of their devout faith, muat find personal satisfaction, even pleasure, in grabbing the nearest athiest into their clutches to punish him for his disbelief.

But that’s not how such a discussion would go, as surely you must know. I mean, you would give your Christian readers more credit than that, would you not?

If four Christians (of comparable learning and firmness in their convictions as are the four “horsemen” in theirs, in the video you posted) were to quietly discuss that subject, they’d be sincere in their compassion, charity, and in their self-deprecation. They would not stand as judges in the afterlife, much less as torturers in your neighborhood today.

That you could so breezily make such a mistacharacterization is just an example of how athiests tend to provoke out of sloppy rhetoric and even sloppier thinking about faith. You presented a stereotype of the uncouth unbeliever who thinks he knows more about the faith of others than they do.

Your protoyptical Christians would not not “fantasize” about seizing an athiest to inflict pain and misery on him. Such a bloodthirst, or such a crime, would damn them. I doubt that you could doubt that.

You might call Hell a fantasy, but the faithful do not place faith and reason at odds.

You might call it a fantasy about torturing you but their contemplation of the consequences of a life of studious disbelief is not a trivial matter that they’d decide for you.

On the other hand, meditation on the subject of the Hell can, and does, restrain the tragic human tendency toward unjust violence — a tendency to which all of us (of faith and of disbelief) are not immune.

Now, is this is the sort of discussion you sought to provoke by posting that video?

Is there anything in that video that the various athiests who have come here to comment would disagree with?

F. Rottles on December 26, 2007 at 6:32 AM