The cost of an opinion
What is the cost of an opinion?
It could be a libel case with hundreds of thousands of pounds, or perhaps a smear campaign online trying to discredit you.
It could be nastier – you could be threatened with violence by your peers, your job could be threatened with a well placed and malicious complaint, or perhaps you will be told that someone knows where you live and will kill your family.
This is nothing new, people are often harassed for speaking out against the religions and belief-systems of others, or for doing or saying things that offend the traditions of other people. People have even been killed, imprisoned, harassed, stalked, beaten up, abused and more.
Yet atheists, secularists, non-believers, doubters, agnostics… they don’t go away. They don’t shut up. They don’t stop trying, they don’t stop speaking out, they never will.
Threaten to beat your school peers up, burn effigies, intimidate people by stopping their meetings, get books banned, try to rule other peoples lives through politics, but don’t ever expect those who doubt, who think, who speak out, to go away.
The cost of an opinion is high, it’s risky, but it’s never not worth it.
#atheistandproud
*I am aware that I live in an area where I wont be lynched for being atheist so it’s ‘easy’ for me to write, this, but I do so to show support for those currently being targeted by bigots.
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Well said!
P.S. I enjoyed your talk at Conway Hall!
Hi Hayley.
I just wanted to say thanks to you guys for using a post that I had written in to the Righteous Indignation website on the podcast. I didn’t get chance to write a meaningful reply back – not that I disagreed with your guys comments and kept putting it back.
Thanks for the surreal moment of hearing it chewed through though.
Since i’m posting here I’d better comment.
Does the fear and intimidation work? Sadly of course it does. I’m far more cautious of tackling Islam because of the risk to my family and because they (and my children) have little interest in atheism or critical thinking in politics and the secularism etc that it brings I can’t risk them.
Fundamentalists know they are outnumbers, but it doesn’t mean anything to them, other than to try harder. They understand just as much as we do that, especially in democracies, it is about tipping points. In the West, and especially here in Europe, the scales are currently tipped in our direction. This is a numbers game, which means that it is about children.
Fortunately the figures in the UK are positive. 60-70% of 18-24 years old’s professing no religion has to be a good thing, even if supernaturalism and ‘spirituality’ benefits slightly in an environment with a weakened apex predator. The reduced political activity of supernaturalism and spirituality reduces the ‘grouping’ and hence risk to us all. Then us lot are free to counter it with education. The die hard’s might never convert, but I think we have a greater influence on our families and friends and that matters much more – especially perhaps in the long run.
I guess the sense I am optimistic is the sense of this thought experiment. If you took a time machine back 500 years, or 1000 and asked what the world would look like in a major transition away from organised religions and their methods of indoctrination and control I think it would look much like our world. I.e. I think we are winning, have been doing for the past few hundred years, and are increasingly doing so.
There will always be funny ideas because not everyone understands the science behind refuting them and con-people will always con them and themselves. Our biology makes this a reality. We should just work against people who want to reach a tipping point and pull it all back in their direction.
But of course we are doing this. It is done with every podcast, every discussion with friends and family, every advert, and every letter to our MP’s in protest of a new religious slant on politics, new discrimination – or old, new religious demand etc etc
So long as we get/maintain equality our argument will win because their’s, no matter how well wrapped, is internally ridiculous and people, when not indoctrinated when young, are not stupid.
I agree with you – though the increased risk brings responsibilities to family and friends that need to be weighed. We will never go away. We will never be silenced. We will just up our game and be smarter.
Ben