I’ve Always Been Opposable

by Katie Kish on Jan.17, 2008, under Rantage

And I have an opposable thumb! (or two)

Never have I been particularly agreeable. In fact, I go out of my way to start arguments just to create discussion between people or significant others. I press people to keep fighting to make their point. With a lot of relationships, just when we are getting to a point of stability, I decide that we need to argue about something. (Not anything about the relationship - just something like what the age of consent in Canada should be or what drugs should be legal.)

I’ve always taken the devils advocate position in classes. And even though my profs are far more educated than I am (and probably ever will be) I find it necessary to argue with them in front of the whole class and attempt to prove them wrong. (The arguments usually end with the prof saying “Let’s discuss this in my office out of class.”) I ask people debatable questions and take the opposite side of whatever they answer.

In high school teachers hated me because I would sit there and yap to them about why they were wrong, or how they could be more right. I’ve transfered all of that now to talking to people in the work place and on things like Facebook. I think it’s fun to get people going on Facebook…. because it’s so damn easy.

Well this time I pissed off the wrong people, and voila, my account is pounded with angry messages, hate mail, jerks and assholes. To the point were *poof* the account is now closed. … Over the course of the next few days I’ll be posting about some of the things that came up during this facebook fiasco. Why the church needs to change, how I can still have meaning in my life while not having a god, why beauty pageants aren’t an effective way to backlash against religious sexism, that I can have morals without god and my favorite - atheism is not a religion.

The whole ordeal is sort of ridiculous, but then again… 20 - 30 year olds are pretty ridiculous in an of themselves. Stay tuned.

2 comments for this entry:

gordo
January 17th, 2008 on 7:38 pm
Cool! Looking forward to it!

But I do feel compelled to mention that when a person takes an opposing view just for the sake of taking an opposing view, it tends to reflect badly on the critic. So I’m forced to disagree with your apparent position, which is that it’s okey-dokey to argue for the sake of arguing. By discrediting the Devil’s advocate’s position, you wind up bolstering the arguments of your instructors, rather than injecting healthy skepticism into a debate.

Also, you make it so that nobody else wants to comment because they don’t want to come across as the kind of arrogant ass who would go on and on, pointlessly attacking an argument just because he likes to hear the sound of his own voice and see the sight of his own words being typed into the comments of a blog.

So there’ also that.
David Colquhoun
January 19th, 2008 on 1:34 am
I think I have a bit more sympathy for Katie than Gordo does. I’m very well aware of the danger of appearing pushy and opinionated, but the other side of the coin is that often nonsense is accepted merely because people who themselves think it is nonsense fail to speak up about it because of a feeling that one must never upset anybody. The only way not to upset anybody is to stay totally silent, and sometimes that is a greater evil than speaking up for what one believes.

Unless you take the Panglossian view that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (and who could believe that?) then surely it is rather important to try to improve things, even if a few people get upset in the process.

In the case of religion, religious people are apt to go on at length about how terribly offended they are by people who criticise their views. It never seems to occur to them that their views are just as offensive to atheists. The difference is that atheists don’t, on the whole, want to burn religious people at the stake, or even to take legal action to suppress religious views (well, only homicidal religious views). They just want to argue reasonably and hope that the sense of their arguments will have some effect. I don’t see that keeping quiet is a responsible action.