The “Christian" article that follows is not very nice but apparently it was written in response to a not very nice critique by a certain Boghossian that stated than "only brain damage people, can’t be atheist".  This hurts… Ouch. This mean that religious people are brain-damaged. Ouch.

 

But in this righteous riposte, we, atheists, are subtly compared to village idiots… Excellent. I did a few annotations as we peruse thought this shit-job.

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"Boghossian asserts that any theist who fails to respond favorably to an atheist's explanation of their beliefs must be brain damaged. Apparently only a brain damaged person could fail to see that atheism is true.”
read more:
https://www.christianpost.com/voice/the-problem-of-village-atheism.html

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Peter Gregory Boghossian is a young American philosopher with the subtlety of a jackhammer on the loose. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University. His primary research areas are critical thinking, philosophy of education, and moral reasoning. Boghossian is a speaker for the Center for Inquiry, the Richard Dawkins (we love him) Foundation for Reason and Science, and the Secular Student Alliance. He has been nominated as a member of the Global Secular Council. Boghossian is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, from which the brain damaged quote comes from. 

Old Gus has explained over and over the non-existence of god on this site, and if you still believe in god, that’s okay with me, AS LONG AS YOU DO NOT INTERFERE WITH THE PROCESSES OF GOVERNMENT AND SOCIAL ACTIVITIES. Whether you are Blue Cods, Christian, Muslim or Red Voodooist, leave the thingsters alone. 

But of course, you want to interfere anyhow. So we, the village idiots with no god in our pockets, have no choice but to tell you about theological myths, the multiplicity of gods and the doggie-gods the dogs believe in. 


Here we have to look at more of what the good professor of teleothingimagining, Randal Rauser — Professor of Historical Theology at Taylor Seminary in Edmonton, Alberta — tells us:

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So what exactly is a village atheist? As I define it, this individual is characterized by several traits including the following:

 

The proliferation of binary oppositions: Perhaps the most common (and troubling) hallmark is the simplistic categorization of people into two groups: the irrational, delusional religious "faith-heads" and the rational, irreligious skeptic. Boghossian's book is a disturbing example of this opposition.

Gus: There are a lot of people in between. It’s not a binary opposition, except on the battlefield between atheists and religious nuts, such as the “creationists” who refuse point blank to know anything about proper scientific procedures. When they start to mention the “Grand Canyon”, one idiot can only scream at them for being beyond stupid. At this stage there is no point claiming brain damage: they have no brains to damage. And the existence of god is only a point of view, there no truth or reality in it more than an ant being as big as an elephant. 

 

A claim of righteous indignation: Village atheists frequently claim the moral high ground. They are angry at biblical atrocities, the problem of evil, God, intelligent design, the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, Muslims, hijabs, the Crusades, etc. Unfortunately, this alleged righteous indignation often provides a cover for them being overly emotional, rude, xenophobic, and moralizing.

Gus: Who’s talking? Who’s moralising? Who’s overtly emotional? Not the atheists, not even the idiots of the village. We simply don’t like your assumptions of “evil”, of “intelligent design” — that  clockmaker would have made a lot of “mistakes” and killed them off: the trilobites, the dinosaurs, the list is longer than that of presently living species — of "twists and turns in genesis”, of anyone with a godly belief that is not reconcilable with reality and scientific proof, including the Muslims. Can't we just say like Jerome Cardano (1501-1576) that we don’t believe in the virgin birth? Or like Isaac Newton that the Trinity is a fallacy? That the concept of an original sin is totally ludicrous? That the evolution of the human species condition can be proven? That we find the death of a Jew on a cross in Palestine to redeem “our” “original sin” performed by a couple of idiots in paradise is a bit far fetched? As mentioned before should these paradisiac idiots, Eve and Adam —the story of whom has been expunged of old contradictory texts — would not sin, we, humans, their descendants, would not exist? 
There is no moralising being proposed by Atheists, especially those idiots in the village. They just want to have a good time on this planet without hurting anyone nor burning the planet down. The only people who constantly “moralise” are the religious mobs, whichever they are...

 

Lack of prior theoretical reflection: Village atheists frequently make bold assertions without a theoretical framework to back-up those assertions. For example, they will claim "Belief in God is irrational" without a defensible theory of rationality to justify the assertion. Or they will claim "You're a Christian because you were born in Kentucky" without a defensible theory of why social location defeats one class of belief (e.g. "religious") but not another (e.g. "non-religious").

Gus: I’ve never been to Kentucky… so there. I come from a place in Europe where the ferocious vicious deathly battles between the Protestants and the Catholics were more bloody than the incoming World War Three… You can still see the hatred in the bullet holes on the buildings. Luther hated the jews and the Muslims. The Catholics rolled in gold… The Crusades were more an economic event, in robbing other nations who already had robbed other nations… Still continuing today with the US empire.

 

Short attention span: This becomes especially evident when you challenge the village atheist to provide a theoretical framework to back-up their various incendiary assertions. Instead, if any response is forthcoming, it is typically the invocation of some new red herring or rabbit trail.

Gus: That is Rubbish… I have all the time in the world when talking to my friendly Jehovah Witnesses… It’s them who after having tried to ram their beliefs down my throat who give up after I explain my point of view, in calm and reasoned fashion with my own bible in hand — which is much bigger than theirs since mine is a church-sized catalogue of biblical proportion.

 

Unresponsiveness to criticism: You can spend the afternoon arguing with a village atheist, carefully deconstructing some point they've made, only to have them repeat the very same point (perhaps in slightly amended form). This is indicative of doxastic closure.

Gus: Unresponsive to criticism?… What is there to criticise the atheist village idiot like me with? nothing. I am a nice person. A “doxastic closure" relies on a modal operator which forms propositions from propositions. In general, a modal operator has the "formal" property of being non-truth-functional, and is "intuitively" characterised by expressing a modal attitude (such as necessity, possibility, belief, or knowledge) about the proposition to which the operator is applied. A doxastic closure is like a linear sophism: Ipso facto — god does not exist. Simple.

 

Caricaturing the opinions of others: Village atheists tend to caricature the views of other people, setting up and knocking down strawmen. (See for example, how Boghossian defines "faith".)

Gus: Guilty. Except I do not believe in guilt but in making mistakes against my best judgement. And my best judgement is to make cartoons about it… And to tell the truth, my truth, I hate Sharia Law and its precursor in the Christian faith, the Inquisition, which for all intent and purposes are and were shit-jobs in order to create more of their faithful kinds and prevent loosing them to proper thinking.

 

The proliferation of tribalism: Village atheists tend to look askance on internal criticism (i.e. one atheist critiquing another), instead insisting that efforts must be focused on attacking Christians and other "religious" people (i.e. the out-groups).

Gus: Tribalism?… Wow-wow… Tribalism exists also and mostly in the faiths, not just Atheists… who, we, us, really don’t care about what you believe in as long as you do not interfere in governments and all the trimming of society. 

 

As I already noted, there are also many village Christians who exhibit similar traits. (But the way, it should not surprise us that when village Christians leave the church, they typically become village atheist.) 

Gus: Good for them to leave your horrid deluded beliefs... and join us, the village idiots. We welcome them with open arms.
Note: picture at top by Gus, from one of the buildings in the former (huge) Rozelle Mental Asylum compound, Sydney — now openly being used for the rehabilitation of people with various problems, and also a wonderful space for an artists college and a writers' residence, as well.