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On Twitter, war waged over 'No God, no peace'
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The Fail Whale
There's a fascinating little development on Twitter this afternoon. Earlier today, it seems a group of Christians were retweeting the phrase "No God, no peace. Know God, know peace." But because of the quirks of the inner workings of the Twitter gods, on the right hand side of the Twitter homepage, it listed as the number one trending topic, "No God."
This of course got a bunch of us atheists pretty excited. Lots of nonbelievers began spoofing and mocking the phrase, trying to keep "No God" trending on its own. I thought it might be fun to try and push other tweet memes, and had only marginal success in trying to get "No Unicorns" and "No Thor" to catch on. Alas.
But things, of course, got heated. Theist and nontheist attacked and tweet-shouted at each other, called each other names, and hurled insults. (My favorite was "FUCK YOU ATHEIST!!!") And as you can imagine, all the rapid and furious activity eventually spurred the emergence of the Fail Whale. Several times.
It's still going on, and it's still kind of fun. My own barbs and snark were called out by blogger Freddie deBoer (of the Ordinary Gents, a really good blog), who lamented the coarsened and disrespectful discourse that I was abetting (see his recent post on a- versus anti-theism). I wanted to argue back and insist that I wasn't the problem here, but maybe I was.
I certainly wasn't being respectful, but I suppose that I don't think "being respectful" is always necessary. The original assertion of the Christians' tweets was that without "knowing" God (I assume not in the biblical sense), there can be no "peace" (inner peace? as opposed to war?). That, frankly, is a stupid notion. Belief in God has been the driving force for both war and peace, both personal serenity and agony, inclusion and marginalization. So I don't "respect" the idea behind the phrase being tweeted about. And, also frankly, I don't have much respect for the overall belief in God in the first place.
I respect people. I don't respect dumb ideas. "No God, no peace. Know God, know peace" is a dumb notion that is empirically wrong (if taken as a generality--of course many people claim to find peace in theism, so that's why it can be true for some). The point is that it's an idea, and it doesn't deserve respect in and of itself. The people who have and espouse that idea? They get my prima facia respect, because they're people, unless of course they prove themselves unworthy of respect by their actions.
So I suppose the question is whether or not it's disrespectful (or simply too disrespectful) to mock the idea on Twitter. I tend to think not, since it's a public forum in which I think it's understood that anything one posts is at the mercy of the tweetosphere. Perhaps it's also a good idea not to assume stupidity on the part of those who do believe in the phrase. I know it's possible to be too mean, and I'm sure that line was crossed on both sides severally. But "No God, no peace" is a pretty big bomb to drop as though it were an obvious truth, and the idea probably deserves whatever criticism and praise it gets.
As for my "no unicorns" stuff? Hilarious.
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