Tide goes, in tide goes out, never a miscommunication.
You can't explain that. You can't explain
why the tide goes in? (Tide goes in, tide goes out?) See, the water, the tide, comes in, and it goes out Mr. Silverman.
Always comes in, and goes out. (Uh, maybe it's Thor on top of Mount Olympus who's making the tides go in and out.)
Good morning everybody. My name is Alex, and on Monday I was having a drink
with Mr. David Silverman, president of American Atheists, in a pub after a talk that he gave in London.
When I was finally able to ask him personally, as I'd wanted to do for a while,
about his infamously particularly fierce methodology of firebrand atheism.
Now we disagreed on a few things, and we debated subjects that I'd talked about a lot, such as the usefulness of the word agnostic,
and the religious views of Thomas Jefferson.
And whilst I still submit that I was right on the latter point, since our encounter
I must say I've been turning
repeatedly over in my mind his position on labels,
and I've actually been largely unable to fault it.
In effect, Dave had made it very clear to me that he felt
It was a bad idea for one to refer to oneself as an agnostic when asked about their religious affiliation .
Now, I proceeded to
excitedly inform him of a distinction that I first heard from Matt Dillahunty that
Agnosticism is a claim to knowledge, whereas
atheism is a claim to belief, and so both are perfectly valid, and I was pretty chuffed at the prospect of
enlightening one of America's most famous and prominent atheists,
right before he told me that he and Matt are actually good friends,
that he was already very aware of the distinction, and that I'd missed the point.
And damn it the man wasn't wrong.
And so I was promptly inspired to make this video
explaining Dave's point and advocating for it, as well as recommending his book, Fighting God,
the first chapter of which has a title so compelling that I stole it to use as this video's title, too.
Now of course this isn't a paid promotion or anything (The link to this book can be found in the description down below.),
but it's just that it's really not very often that my mind is changed on an issue so quickly,
so I thought that maybe this could have an effect on some of you, too.
The point here, and this is what got me, is that it's not that agnosticism is a nonsense concept.
That's not the point.
I still 100% stand by everything I've said hitherto, I still certainly am an agnostic.
I've just come to realize that there are a multitude of benefits in a non-believer deciding to call themselves an atheist instead,
and this is what I'll be doing henceforth.
The thing is, though, that whilst I am now convinced of Dave's advice,
I think that I have a unique opinion on the conclusion.
Which is what I really want to share with you here.
As far as I can tell, Dave wants people to begin using the word atheist to describe themselves
in order to create a louder voice for a group of active secular campaigners,
which is something that I agree with, don't get me wrong, but furthermore,
I also think that by doing so enough, by calling ourselves atheists loudly enough,
we will eventually be able to remove the need for the label of atheism altogether.
Now this does sound counterintuitive, I know, but stick with me, okay,
I want to address all atheists who publicly define themselves and their beliefs as
agnostic, or as humanist, or as a free thinker, and offer you a friendly word of advice.
Call yourself an atheist.
Why? Well, it's all about letting people know that we're here.
if we ever want to hold any weight in philosophical and more importantly, political discussions,
then we need to become a recognized demographic.
If you've ever seen Bill Maher's hilarious documentary Religulous,
which I hope that you all have, you'll likely remember his mentioning of the fact that atheists constitute
one of the largest minority groups in the United States.
There are more of us than there are gay people, or Jewish people, or even African Americans,
and yet all of these groups are largely recognized as deserving of representation and fair consideration,
but for some reason, atheists, a larger minority, are left in the dust.
Now I think that one of the main reasons for this is that a lot of people simply
don't understand that our numbers are so strong.
It's quite difficult currently to gather reliable statistics on how many atheists there are among us
chiefly due to the fact that a lot of people are more comfortable with more fragmented labels such as agnostic.
The problem, however, is that people simply will not understand you if you decide to adopt one.
Okay, statistics quoted by David Silverman in his book and in his talks from 2014
indicate that whilst almost 90 percent of Americans understand the word atheist,
that understanding drops to 50% if you decide to call yourself an agnostic.
And it only gets worse from here.
12 percent, 12 percent, of Americans
understand what a free thinker is.
And I'm sure that a lot of people think that they understand what a free thinker is, but don't really.
And even less people understand what a humanist is.
Okay, if you want people to understand that you don't believe in God,
you're not doing anybody any favors by calling yourself a humanist,
except of course the religious fanatics who want to make it seem as though there aren't very many of us.
By the way, of course, I'm obviously not trying to forcibly out people as atheist here.
That's, that's not what I'm trying to do, more on that shortly,
but just as a side note, you have to admit that there's a particular oddness about a label such as humanism
Okay, atheism and agnosticism
are things that you are not. You lack a belief. You lack knowledge.
But humanism is something that you are: a humanistic person.
Here's another point from David Silverman that stays with me.
If somebody asks you about your beliefs and you don't have any,
it makes no sense to answer that question by describing what you are rather than by what you are not.
Okay, he used the analogy of veganism. If you're a vegan and somebody asks you,
"what kind of meat do you eat?" the correct answer is not salad.
The correct answer is none and likewise if somebody asks you what your religious affiliation is and you don't have one,
the correct answer is not humanism. That's describing something that you are. It's evasive.
The correct answer again is none. Just make sure that they don't think you mean N-U-N
Similarly to how Catholics, Baptists, and Anglicans are all more than happy to be referred to by their master category of Christianity,
humanists, free thinkers, and agnostic non-believers should all be equally happy to be referred to by their own master category: atheism.
We want people to know that we exist, and we're not just a tiny minority, we're... well, okay,
we're still a minority, but we're a big one and most of the time we just want to be left alone.
And so I'm here today, ladies and gentlemen, to make the case to you that by using the label of atheist in full force,
we can, in doing so, not only fulfill my and Mr. Silverman's desire
to create a stronger atheist presence in the political and intellectual arena,
but also, like I say, destroy the label altogether.
Seriously, just bear with me.
Let's get some context.
So here's something you're likely to hear only very seldomly, if at all.
I would love to be out of a job.
Seriously, the reason being that I will never ever stop campaigning for political and educational secularism,
which is my thing, unless one of two things happens.
either a) I am proven wrong about the existence of God,
or b) it becomes a non-issue.
So we have full representation in Parliament, and extremism is basically non-existent, something like that.
Now I would wager on the second being much more likely, and I would be absolutely thrilled if this happened
and eliminated my need to work. After all, I spend all of my waking days
campaigning for the normalization of atheism and the denormalization of religious fanaticism.
And so if my ultimate career goal was ever achieved, it would see the end of said career in the process.
Now some people, such as Sam Harris, have suggested that the word atheism shouldn't exist at all.
Atheism is, after all, a disbelief in something by definition,
and we don't have a word for disbelief in anything else.
Many claim that this is one of the main problems,
and that we should just get people to stop using the word atheism altogether.
I disagree. I don't think that the word should not exist
I think that the concept should not exist. You see, it's not just that there isn't a word for people who don't golf, say.
It's that there's no such concept as a non-golfing participant.
so the real question, then:
Why does the concept of atheism exist? Well that's easy. it's because of historic religious supremacy
Put it this way. I don't golf, and I certainly don't identify with my non-golfing nature
But let's say that we lived in a world where if a presidential candidate didn't play golf,
They would be automatically dismissed by the electorate.
Let's say that we live in the world where parents regularly excommunicated their own children
and made them homeless because they didn't take up the sport or didn't find it interesting.
Let's say that we lived in a world where golfers who constitute the majority, say,
marginalize the minority of non-golfers in this way,
and, well, do you see what's just happened? I just used the term non-golfer
in a perfectly natural, pretty unnoticeable manner.
The concept has been created by means of discrimination.
You see, in the context of a marginalized minority,
the term and by extension the concept of a non-golfer arrives naturally to the consciousness.
This is why atheism is a thing.
If it wasn't for the religious attitude towards and history of persecution against atheists,
then the concept wouldn't exist at all. But it does, and so we have to work with it.
It's evidently clear that language cannot be changed by force.
It has to change naturally, and so if we wish to see the word atheism removed from the general vocabulary,
which is my personal target aside from David Silverman's,
then we have to highlight and popularize the concept that underlies it.
Now like I say I think that Dave and I have slightly different targets in this respect,
but this idea of popularization, at least, is something that he stresses well in his book and also in his speech.
One of the most vivid memories that I have from his talk is his description of a concept called the Overton window,
which is well described in a quote that he uses, and in the book can be found on page 82.
"The Overton window designates the range of points on the spectrum
that are considered part of a sensible conversation within public opinion and all traditional mass media.
The most important thing about the Overton window, however, is that it can be shifted to the left or the right,
with the once merely "acceptable" becoming "popular" or even imminent policy,
and formerly "unthinkable" positions becoming the open position of a partisan base.
The challenge for activists and advocates is to move the window in the direction of their preferred outcomes,
so their desired outcome moves closer and closer to common sense"
And so this is why we need to talk about atheism even though we wish the concept didn't exist.
This is why we need to call ourselves atheists even though we wish that doing such a thing was entirely redundant
because by doing so, we shift the Overton window and bring light to what atheism really is.
And suddenly once the concept has been popularized enough for everybody to take a long hard look at it,
they are all granted the capacity to logically conclude, through analysis,
exactly what we've been trying to say all along: that this concept that's just been normalized for everybody to see
should probably just be thrown out altogether.
This is why we need to call ourselves atheists, folks.
Now don't get me wrong, the literal word atheist will probably never fully go away.
I understand that, but it certainly can become a much more esoteric term that only finds use in specific circumstances
I personally hope that one day the word atheist will be used in a similar way to how we use the word meat-eater today
Okay
Imagine that you meet somebody for the first time and you ask them to describe themselves to you and they say that they're an atheist
You probably wouldn't bat an eye, but imagine they said, "Oh yeah, hi, I'm Karen, nice to meet you. I'm a guitarist,
I work in accounting, and I'm a meat-eater."
You'd probably give them a strange look. Why?
Well, because whilst Karen may be a meat-eater,
It's very bizarre of her to define herself by it.
This is how atheism should be.
We still use the term meat-eater when discussing the specific topic of meat-eating and vegetarianism,
just as I'm sure that we'll still use the word atheist when discussing the specific topic of theological philosophy.
But people don't generally use the word meat-eater to label people,
and people certainly don't use it to label themselves.
I mean atheism is even more suited to this fate because whilst meat eating is something that you do,
Atheism is literally something that you don't. Okay, atheism as a word will never fully go away,
but if we start using it and doing so loudly and proudly,
then we can start a conversation whose end will hopefully see the end of the general usage of the term on the whole.
So let's shift that damn Overton window.
And so, fellow atheists,
you're a humanist? Cool so am I. You're an agnostic?
Great!
Secularist? Well, hey, that's, like, my thing. Free thinker? Fine.
But you're also an atheist.
And if people ask you what you believe, not what you know, not what you think politically about religion,
then you should be bloody well unafraid to tell them so.
Now don't get me wrong. If you personally are uncomfortable with the idea
of publicizing your views to the world, then you don't have to. That's not what I'm saying.
This is what I alluded to earlier.
All that I am saying is that if you are willing to let it be known, then let it be known.
And also, it goes without saying that politically
I'm still a secularist before I'm an atheist.
Okay, secularism is still the underlying driving motive and goal behind everything that I do.
I've just come to realize that the best way of achieving this goal is by first removing the stigma
surrounding atheism and atheists because atheism and secularism will always be linked in the eyes of the public.
Okay, nobody is shocked or challenged when I introduce myself as a secularist.
Atheist is the word that really gets people thinking.
And so I'm still going to introduce myself as a secularist when asked about my views
on political religion, but since I've started my secular campaigning,
secularist has always been the word that I've used to introduce myself into other conversations as well.
And the philosophical atheism side of things kind of got shoved under the rug.
As of my meeting with Mr. Silverman, that's going to change.
I honestly do hate that the word exists just as much as you do,
but let's make it so widely heard that we get our fair representation in Parliament, that we get
educational secularism, that we get atheist presidents to admit that they are atheists,
that we get parents to stop giving a damn about the religious views of their children
Then the word loses all of its meaning and drops, unmissed, from the conversational Zeitgeist altogether.
In other words, call yourself an atheist today
so you won't have to tomorrow.
I've been Alex O'Connor or Cosmic Skeptic.
You can find me on social media here. If you want to purchase David Silverman's book Fighting God,
which I couldn't recommend more, a link will be available
in the description, and before I go I did promise my friends over on the YouTube channel
Swish that I would mention at the end of my next video that they recently put out a diss track against me.
Yes, you heard that correctly
"Your not an intellectual 'cause Hemant started your essential buzz"
Do cut them some slack they could probably just do with putting me in their tags again or something,
but if you do wish for some reason to see some pretty
hard-hitting insults thrown my way in the form of a musical ensemble to a hip-hop beat,
that will also be available, but in the meantime
I will thank you for watching as always.
Don't forget to subscribe and also hit post notifications if you feel so inclined and I will see you in the next one.