Village Atheism VS Chapel Mormonism

[_EAllusion]

Ending the story with the brave Christian perishing for affirming her faith simply provided for greater pathos than what really happened,

It's more than that. Martyr stories require a martyr. It feeds into a persecution fantasy that informs the subtext. Even if the basic details of the story were correct, it's also known that the Columbine killers were killing rather aimlessly. What's important for the story is the belief that an affirmative answer would be met with a bullet. Yes or no, it probably wouldn't have mattered either way. Of course, the people in the moment wouldn't necessarily know that, but they also wouldn't know if yes, no, or no response would be the best route to go. The whole artifice of proclaiming your faith in Christ even when you know you'll be fed to the proverbial lions falls apart. That's not what happened. If anything happened, a person's life was sparred because of it. And that story isn't as appealing because it goes against the grain of the persecution fantasy.

The upshot here is I guess we can agree this kind of narrative belies the idea that theists are necessarily going go along with the sentiment at the top of this thread.

[_EAllusion]

Come to think of it:

Suppose I'm in a McDonald's and a gunman bursts on to the scene and starts killing everyone. I try to hide, but get caught. He asks me if I believe in God. What would I do? I probably would say, "No" because I wouldn't have the slightest idea which answer, if any, would improve my chances of surviving so my instinct would be to tell the truth. That wouldn't be born of bravery so much as confusion and fear.

[_MrStakhanovite]

I take this attitude as akin to your putting Ann Coulter on the same plane of ignorance and annoyance as Rachel Maddow.

I don’t know about that, but the above was a mistake on my part.

Village atheists types have problems, but your striking an above it all pose while equating them with conservative religious counterparts glosses over some significant differences in the degree of their failings.

I do think their failings are largely comparable, if not equal.

Are you sure that this wasn't originally the result of some theists trying to make Russell look bad by pinning this possibly phoney quote on him?

That is a possibility, but I’m more disturbed how quickly the quote was embraced as something legitimate from Bertrand Russell

The statement ascribed to Russell in the OP precisely describes my own attitude, so far as the simple affirmation or denial of propositions are concerned.

With a gun to my head, I would be quite happy to stay alive at the cost of stating:

"Yes! There is a greatest prime number" or "No! Men are definitely not endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights!" and so on.

If on the other hand the demand was "Tell us where your wife and children are hiding", I hope the answer would be 'Shan't."

But propositions just aren’t restricted to abstract and removed topics, refusing to reveal the location of your wife and children can be seen as you refusing to deny the truth of the proposition “ My wife and kids are worth dying for”

Going by the fake quote, you would reject that proposition because you might just be wrong about the truth vale of your wife and children are worth dying for.

You lost me here. I take it that Bertrand wasn't willing to do that with the Kaiser, but was prepared to do that with Hitler. Am I missing something?

Just before WWI broke out, Russell had calculated that surrendering to the Kaiser would be less damaging to England and Europe than fighting in a world war, even if surrender was distasteful. The second time around, the morals and ideology of the Nazis were so disgusting to him, that he decided that England must fight beause the cost of submitting to the Nazis was unthinkable.

This is an interesting idea, but could you list the uncritical methods as they relate to "village atheism" and "TBMism" to further the discussion along?

In this specific case, it is the uncritical acceptance of something that was presented by a fellow atheist, without much reflection. While I think the idea expressed in the quote is terrible, it doesn’t bother me much that people were agreeing with

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

This is an interesting idea, but could you list the uncritical methods as they relate to "village atheism" and "TBMism" to further the discussion along?

In this specific case, it is the uncritical acceptance of something that was presented by a fellow atheist, without much reflection. While I think the idea expressed in the quote is terrible, it doesn’t bother me much that people were agreeing with

I guess what I'm getting at is your expression "village atheism" vis a vis "TBMism".

TBMism can be pretty much summed up as essentially a temple recommend holding, church going, non-coffee drinking, folksy, uncritical thinker who holds church callings, and is a tithe-paying practitioner of the Mormon faith.

I've never heard the term "village atheist" before, so I was wondering where the similarities fall in line with TBMism.

I suppose if uncritical thinking is the nexus, then that's that... BUT, if that's that, then the OP overstates itself.

- VRDRC