Note: I have been really sick this week–I’m exhausted, I’m cranky, I’m stuffy, I’m achy, and I’ve not had a good night’s sleep literally in a week. You’ve been warned.
Here’s the thing, atheists. You and me, we share something kind of big in common–we’re atheists. We don’t have any religious belief whatsoever. We will disagree from time to time about what we like to be called–just like so-called “agnostics” that we know are really atheists, amiright?–but, basically, we are not religious people, not even one itty bitty tiny bit. That’s what makes us atheists.
Right?
So please, for the love of Stephen Hawking, stop getting into pointless semantics arguments with me on Twitter.
I know it’s not “cool” for atheists to use the word “belief” these days. I take a lot of flak for it at times. I gotta tell you, though, brothers and sisters–that word has been around a hell of a lot longer than you’ve been around to refute it, and no matter what meaning you may ascribe to the word, it still has its own meaning independent of what you want to try to make it mean. You and I don’t get to decide what words mean except to ourselves. When I use the word “belief,” and I’m not ascribing it to you, and I’m making a point that you overall agree with but don’t like my use of the word but you understand my use of the word, DO NOT FUCKING NITPICK ME TO DEATH when you’re not the person I was originally arguing with in the first place. This accomplishes absolutely nothing, since you have no power to decide what words do and don’t mean for the rest of humanity, but it does have some unpleasant side-effects:
- You will annoy the hell out of me. I think this is self-explanatory–and also self-evident for the people reading this blog right now.
- You will make the theists laugh at us. IF I am having an argument, and not just a discussion, on Twitter about belief, I’m probably having that argument with a theist–or a theist is involved somewhere. If you go blustering in while I’m making an argument–and in order to MAKE the argument, I’m PROBABLY using words that they would often use in their own belief system in order to more strongly make a point–and shit all over it because you don’t like a word that I used, you’re making yourself and all of the rest of us look bad. We look like we don’t have our shit together when you do that. Stop doing that. If you’re going to argue something, argue someone’s logic. Only argue terminology when it’s based on fact, not just your opinion (i.e., it’s explicitly written in the dictionary that the wrong word is clearly being used, rather than just a word that you prefer to use).
- I will argue you into the ground because that’s what I do. I have Asperger’s, which makes me 1) tenacious, 2) not extremely emotionally involved in arguments such as these and, therefore, a logic machine, and 3) not concerned about people liking me. You’re probably used to people backing down when you make your stupid little semantics arguments because they don’t want to get into a fight. Guess what? I don’t run away from conflict.
All of this stems from some jerk who ruined my Sunday morning by horning in on a conversation that HE wasn’t involved in in the first place. I had tweeted a theist who had challenged an atheist friend that we don’t have the burden of proof as atheists. ”You claim, we disbelieve,” I said at the end. Reasonable statement, I think? Even if you have finicky-ness about the word “belief” as an atheist, MOST atheists have reservations about atheism being termed a “belief,” not about saying we disbelieve.
So I get this tweet back from someone I don’t even know: ”I don’t disbelieve, I discredit.”
According to dictionary.com, disbelieve and discredit are synonyms–but looking at examples of use, they aren’t quite the same connotatively (you would discredit a source, for example, which would involve not only not believing or trusting the source but bringing to light why this source is untrustworthy). So I replied back, “You don’t disbelieve–what are you, then, a theist?”
Blah blah blah, yelling at me that I took his words out of their five-word context. The whole argument was really long and really pointless, and resulted in me blocking this guy because, honestly, he picked a bad week to get on my bad side. I’m a cranky bitch when I haven’t been sleeping. I don’t think his original tweet was a good point at all for the original discussion, though; do you? If you treat the words as exact synonyms, there’s no reason to argue the use of one over another. If you treat them as having different connotations, I feel that one needs to disbelieve before one can discredit (or why would you discredit?). Either way, there’s absolutely no reason, in this particular case, for him to have undermined my use of the word “disbelieve,” and thus, make us look bad in front of the theists.
Arguing semantics is counterproductive. Moreover, you’re not arguing anything that you really have any control over, since society and groups as a whole shape meanings of words, not individuals. What I think I hate most, though, is that arguing semantics prevents one from getting to the truth of a matter; it’s shadowboxing, it’s not connecting with anything. If we have to ride the word train in circles, we’ll never get around to discussing ideas. Language, after all, is a tool–it’s an artist’s palette or a scientist’s microscope. A good tool should be used to solve problems and create clarity, not create problems.
I think it’s time for a nap. Sorry if I got incoherent there toward . . . well, at any point.
