I’m really tired of media depicting atheists as joyless, grouchy people whose lives are characterized by a lack of human connection, and a disdain for other people’s happiness.
Some of us laugh and are silly and enjoy being social.
Barry’s BlueSky- Untitled September 16, 2024Amber Thurman was only 28 when she died. A routine procedure - a D&C - would have saved her life, but Georgia has made performing a D&C a felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison. Pro-life kills women. https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-amber-thurman-death
- Untitled September 14, 2024A ridiculous lawsuit - the Death Game plotline is so common it's a genre unto itself. It's as if someone claimed Spider-Man is a Superman swipe because they're both about muclemen in tights who fight crime. Yes, they have a lot in common, but genre tropes shouldn't be copyrightable.
- Untitled September 13, 2024Today in D.C., "A Soldier's Journey" by Sabin Howard - part of the WWI memorial - was unveiled. And the 58 foot wide sculpture is comics! It has a single main character and tells a story sequentially from left to right. (Thread) @scottmccloud.bsky.social
- Untitled September 13, 2024I'm glad Bautista is feeling good, but what I'm mostly impressed by is his lunchbox collection. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
- Untitled September 13, 2024Good post by Noah, about the odd double-standard between how the media and party treated Biden (driven out after a disastrous debate performance) vs Trump (no one even suggests he should drop out after a disastrous debate). https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/everyone-knows-trump-is-less-fit
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- Untitled September 16, 2024
Not me! HELL nos!
Well, Cameron is also atheist.
At least they don’t present the theists super well, either? House might be unhappy but most of the time he’s the one being logical, and the one we’re supposed to end up agreeing with.
But yeah, if someone is openly atheist, they’re usually deeply unhappy and it’s so annoying.
i enjoy laughing at others. does that count?
Yeah, but that’s just a cover for our joylessness, grouchiness, lack of human connection, and disdain for other people’s happiness.
. . . and some of us atheists are introverts, who are doublely characterized as “joyless, grouchy people whose lives are characterized by a lack of human connection, and a disdain for other people’s happiness” as well as being characterized as the people who go on shooting sprees in schoolyards.
I say there’s nothing wrong with being an introverted atheist (although no one will believe me).
Um, how are you establishing an equation between “introverted” and “joyless, grochy, and disdaining other people?” That’s a really unfair thing to accuse me of having said.
As usual, the TV Tropes Wiki says it all.
Mandolin, I think that was more in respone to Jake Squid’s comment directly above marmalade’s
Doug S. beat me to it, but I’d like to add that the list does have a few exceptions to the trope.
The true root of the problem, I believe, is that stories have a profound and immutable difference from the real world. In the real world, things are not always fair, and nobody is making sure that the whole mess makes sense. In stories, there is an indisputably involved god watching over the characters, the universe is suffused with intention and purpose–it’s called “The Plot”, and it’s simply the instrument through which the Author-God interacts with their reality. Because of this, characters in the story are fools to doubt, and belief in such a higher power is something only someone driven mad with grief could fail to find.
The real problem, of course, is that the Hollywood Atheists are somehow seen as representatives of the rest of us out here in meatspace.
See Chris Mooney’s musings on the “skeptic conversion” narrative; in short, when you combine the nature of the world that skeptics in stories inhabit with a culture that doesn’t like them or care to understand them, you get the same stupid conversion meme, played out ad nauseum.
Hell, if you fiddle with the setting enough, you can justify anything. Warhammer 40K is a setting where the best hope for the survival of humanity is a theocratic dictatorship which will punish any deviation from orthodoxy with measures ranging from torture and execution up to sterilizing the whole planet. (It also has chainswords. Chainswords!) As Belle Waring put it, “if you let me put my thumb on the utilitarian scales, I can get you to agree that you have an affirmative moral duty to torture a three-year-old child to death.”