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."
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