Why Not Use Ridicule?

Should we use ridicule as a tool of persuasion? Atheist John
Loftus says yes.

Christopher Hitchens famously used to ask Christians to “name
one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a
nonbeliever.” One of the problems with answering Hitchens’s challenge (see a
more detailed discussion here)
is that a person who has a naturalistic worldview is unlikely to have exactly
the same understanding of right and wrong as that of a Christian. Of course an
atheist can act within his moral framework and do what he considers to be good,
but if his ideas about what is moral are incorrect, then his actions will
follow. And there are too many questions about who we are as human beings, the
purpose of life, the diagnosis of what’s gone wrong and the prescription for
fixing it, etc., etc. that we answer differently for us to come to the exact
same conclusions about what is right and what is wrong.

For this reason, Hitchens’s charge is logically
unanswerable. It’s simply the case that if there truly exists something moral a
believer can do that a nonbeliever can’t, it’s because the believer sees it as
moral because he’s a believer while
the nonbeliever fails to see it as moral because
he’s a nonbeliever (worshiping God would be one example of this). And if the
atheist fails to see that action as moral, he won’t accept it as an example of
a moral action he can’t (or won’t) perform. Therefore, no answer will ever
satisfy him, even if it’s true.

So I don’t expect atheists to see this
post as a challenge to their morality either. They reject the idea that
we’re made in the image of God, so they reject the morality that flows from
that idea. That’s to be expected. Proving to atheists that their morality
is faulty is not my purpose in writing this (though I’d be happy for their
moral intuition to be stirred). Instead, what I hope this will do is shed some
light on how our different worldviews affect our understanding of what is
moral. We live in a society that’s been soaked in the Christian worldview for
centuries, and we’ve come to think that what we believe to be moral is just
“obvious.” People haven’t thought about how their understanding of morality has
been shaped
by Christianity, nor have they considered the consequences
of stripping it away (though a look through past cultures would reveal that not
everything is obvious).

Atheists don’t need to believe in God to do good—that
is, they can follow moral precepts, informed by their moral intuition, which is capable of apprehending real moral truths. But what
happens when their moral precepts (and malleable
consciences) are wrongly shaped by their idea that
there is no God?

Consider how John Loftus of Debunking
Christianity reasons to the conclusion that one ought
to use ridicule as a method of persuasion:

The use of ridicule can be
justified pragmatically. It works well under the right circumstances, depending
on the issue and the potential effectiveness of using it. It is best used when
the arguments are there to back it up, and when more people agree against the
ideas that are being ridiculed…. That is, because we know Christianity is a
delusion, and since deluded people cannot usually be argued out of their faith
because they were never argued into it in the first place, the use of
persuasion techniques like ridicule are rationally justifiable. So satire,
ridicule and mockery are weapons that should be in our arsenal in this
important cultural war of ideas.

He explains how ridicule works:

These people cannot be convinced by
satire, so satire is not written to change their minds. It's written to
marginalize them by laughing at them. It persuades people who don't yet have a
settled opinion on the issue, in part by using social pressure. No one wants to
be a laughingstock. No one wants to be the butt of a joke. If people are
laughing at a particular view it pressures the undecided to distance themselves
from it. It draws a line in the sand, so to speak. It can also silence people
who think otherwise, for they won't want to speak up in a class on behalf of
something most others will laugh at….

When something cannot
be taken seriously it deserves our laughter…. It's a way to "come out of
the closet," so to speak, to let others know they will be laughed at if
they espouse certain ideas with a straight face. There is power in social
pressure. There is power in numbers.

Ridicule is an effective tool, so why not use it? Why not use power to
move people over to your side, if it “works”? There’s only one reason, and it’s
a reason from the Christian worldview: human dignity.

For Loftus and others who do not
believe in the sacred intrinsic value of every individual, the greater goal
outweighs the damage to individual human persons—the simple moral precept of
maintaining another’s dignity crumbles before a lofty cause. The morality of
Christianity, on the other hand, offers no such exemption, as Jordan Ballor explains
in his excellent post “The
Mundane Morality of Les Misérables.” In Christianity, because of who God is and who we
are as human beings under God, no one is excused from the everyday morality of
treating people well, regardless of his goal, or his power, or whether or not doing
otherwise would “work”:

We find that the
obligations of the moral order fall equally upon all human beings; we are all,
regardless of our wealth, power, or fame, moral agents responsible for our
actions before God and toward others….

It is tempting to
think sometimes that the basic rules of morality do not apply to us, that we
are somehow above or beyond the law. But the reality is that there is no
special morality for those who exercise greater responsibilities, whether in
familial, economic, ecclesiastical, or political contexts. It is true that
there is often in such cases greater moral complexity, but there is no
dispensation for those in places of authority [or influence] from mundane moral
obligations.

One of those mundane moral obligations
is the obligation to respect the dignity of human beings because they are made
in the image of God. God values individuals, not movements, so our actions had
better reflect that. We’re commanded to reflect God—His undeserved grace and
love—through the means of our
persuasion as well as the ends (as I wrote about here).

Why does Loftus reach such a different
conclusion about how to treat his ideological enemies? Why is his determining
question, “What works to achieve the desired goal?” rather than, “What would be
in keeping with the dignity of human persons?” In an article titled “Why I Raise My
Children Without God,” another atheist gives us a clue:

When we raise kids
without God, we tell them the truth—we are no more special than the next
creature. We are just a very, very small part of a big, big machine….

And Loftus’s approach is the result of
that “truth.”