if almost everybody I interact with is an atheist, and therefore I don’t feel the need to convince them of atheism, does that mean that I believe atheism is unproductive?
I note an important distinction between “don’t feel the need to preach to the choir” and “don’t feel the need to hold people accountable for X”. It’s one thing if I’m operating in a high trust environment where people almost never steal from each other, and so policies that reduce the risk of theft or agitating against theft seem like a waste of time, and it’s another thing if I should shrug off thefts when I witness them because thefts are pretty rare, all things considered.
By analogy, it seems pretty important if theism is in the same category as ‘food preferences’ (where I would hassle Alice if Alice hassled Bob over Bob liking the taste of seaweed) or as ‘theft’ (where I would hassle Alice over not hassling Bob over Bob stealing things). (Tolerate tolerance, coordinate meanness, etc.)
[Edit: to be clear, I don’t think theism is obviously in the same category as stealing, but I think it is clearly an intellectual mistake and have a difficult time trusting the thinking of someone who is theist for reasons that aren’t explicitly social, and when deciding how much to tolerate theism one of the considerations is something like “what level of toleration leads to the lowest number of theists in the long-run, or flips my view on atheism?”.]
I note an important distinction between “don’t feel the need to preach to the choir” and “don’t feel the need to hold people accountable for X”. It’s one thing if I’m operating in a high trust environment where people almost never steal from each other, and so policies that reduce the risk of theft or agitating against theft seem like a waste of time, and it’s another thing if I should shrug off thefts when I witness them because thefts are pretty rare, all things considered.
By analogy, it seems pretty important if theism is in the same category as ‘food preferences’ (where I would hassle Alice if Alice hassled Bob over Bob liking the taste of seaweed) or as ‘theft’ (where I would hassle Alice over not hassling Bob over Bob stealing things). (Tolerate tolerance, coordinate meanness, etc.)
[Edit: to be clear, I don’t think theism is obviously in the same category as stealing, but I think it is clearly an intellectual mistake and have a difficult time trusting the thinking of someone who is theist for reasons that aren’t explicitly social, and when deciding how much to tolerate theism one of the considerations is something like “what level of toleration leads to the lowest number of theists in the long-run, or flips my view on atheism?”.]
Beware punishing nonpunishers!