Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
This claim is actually false in an important way: A lot of believers think that a world without gods would behave in a particular way and that particular way does not match reality.
This mismatch of course arises from a misunderstanding of what how a godless world would work, but that a different failing than being a believer despite godlessness being a more parsimonious explanation.
Dan, that does not make this meme false, it simply means that other people will not understand it. A subtle but very important difference.
Well, it makes it wrong for certain values of “you” in her phrase “as you would expect”, if you actually try spreading this as a meme.
If on the other hand you’re already talking to somebody who thinks the natural world is sufficient, you’re not really using the meme as a way to spread understanding, which is exactly what Greta suggests in her prologue to these memes.
My point was that as true as this meme is, its expression needs to be modified in the cases where it might do the most good.
Well, like I always say in the Memes: Pass this on; or don’t; or make up your own. I usually encourage people to edit the Memes if they want before passing them on as well (I suppose you could argue that it would be more accurate to say “The world behaves exactly as one would expect it would”) … but since this is a quotation, that doesn’t seem right. But if you don’t like it, don’t pass it on. We don’t all have to agree with all of these.
Heretic. 🙂