Despite our brief presence in the online atheist realm, we’re elated to be getting response from the Internets. We also quickly learned that not all (in fact, A LOT) of the feedback is negative; we expected as much. But one criticism that has been pervasive, and been lobbed at us since our very first episode, is that we’ve been derided for being too much like the Atheist Experience.
This too is a critique which we anticipated, but in our discussions last year we mulled over this fact and determined that it wasn’t enough to stop us. We talked with members of AETV and made them aware of our intentions and we received nothing but encouragement. In fact, we prize our unique Northwest perspective: coming from a very liberal, “tolerant” locale, where we think the worst kind of naive theism thrives and lends cover to extremism. We also thought that since a few very large entities, like the Mars Hill Church and the Discovery Institute, lie right on our doorstep that we’d be uniquely positioned to mount a rebuttal. In short, we’ve got game that they don’t… and we’d also have the advantage as the “scrappy upstarts” to quote Pete Campbell.
All that aside, our viewers do act as a sort of barometer for our performance, which is why we take them seriously. We already have our token ALL CAPS TYPING THEISTMILITANT ATHEIST AVENGER(Edit: Sorry, Garry, we now know who you are), and plenty of other nearly incomprehensible rants slung at us. But given the amount of introspection we try to do to measure if we’re “doin’ it rite” (as Libbie would say), I get a great deal of heart when we receive things like this in correspondence:
And, also, thank you for your show. Yes, I’m an AETV fan. But, you’ve demonstrated something that they could never do on their own – you’ve demonstrated that the snowball of reason isn’t just getting bigger, it’s actually moving. Thanks again.
May that snowball become an abominable snowman of Godzillaesque proportions.
