No Belief

From Reason.com's Ronald Bailey...

"The banquet stemwinder was by Tufts University philosopher and one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism Daniel Dennett. His talk was entitled, "Who Isn’t an Atheist: Don’t Ask, Do Tell." Dennett began by suggesting that hostility toward atheists is the result of fear. “When we see hostility, then we know that they are more afraid of us than we are of them,” said Dennett. He added that when folks are experiencing deep visceral fear “there is no way to talk calmly and reasonably to people who are that scared.” So why are they so scared?
Dennett likened the situation to one in which aliens land on our planet and the young folks begin adopting their culture and mores. From the point of view of the adults the aliens are leading the kids around like Pied Pipers; they abandon their churches, universities, tell the folks that evolution is cool, etc. In fact, more and more Americans are loosening their attachments to religion. From the point of view of faithful parents, “it’s as if we [atheists] came from outer space,” said Dennett. The reason for the fear, according to Dennett, is the speed of culturally disorienting change over the past 20 to 30 years. Religion has changed more in the 20th century than it did in the preceding two millennia. Explaining what he meant by “don’t ask,” Dennett equated religionists asked by secularists to justify their beliefs to frightened raccoons trapped in a barn. His advice, don’t block the barn door.
Dennett then explored what people might mean when they claim they are believers. He opened by suggesting that talking about religious belief raises the problem of radical translation. Imagine an anthropologist landing among a new group of people and she must learn their language—there will be many confusions along the way—and how can the anthropologist really know that she understands what the native speaker means? Dennett cited philosopher W.V.O Quine’s ideas about the web of belief in which the meaning of assertions depends upon deeply embedded background assumptions. If an observer doesn’t grok the assumptions, he will have a hard time discerning the meaning of some statements. Religious statements are much like that. A Catholic believer is required to profess certain doctrines, but how well does each believer understand their meaning?
Dennett puckishly asked: Is the Pope an atheist? Dennett suggested that the Pope doesn’t really know himself; that he is no more an authority on what he believes about God than anyone else. What does Dennett mean by “do tell?” Dennett cited the recent ruckus in Canada where an education official in Alberta asserted that homeschoolers could not teach their children that homosexuality is a sin because that would violate Canadian non-discrimination laws. This is confronting a trapped raccoon. Instead of confrontation, Dennett advised when silly claims made by religionists come up, that secularists gently expose people, especially children, to mountains of fact that undermine certain assertions. The world was created 6,000 years ago? Mention that scientists have discovered that dinosaur fossils are millions of years old.
Dennett suggested that religion is much like the Santa Claus myth. It’s mutual knowledge among adults that Santa Claus doesn’t exist; everybody knows that everybody knows that it’s a myth, but they go along with it for the sake of entertaining young children."