Anything that could not be verified could be (and was) claimed to be “meaningless”. What can’t be verified? Ab-so-lu-tely anything. Eg:

1. Ethics. “Torturing babies to death for fun is wrong” is meaningless. The only observation statement that results from that is hearing someone say that torturing babies to death for fun is wrong. There’s no real wrong about it, just people’s attitude to it. And so the emotive theory of ethics, also called the “Yay/boo theory of ethics” all any ethical statement means is “Yay! Being nice!” and “Boo to torturing babies for fun!”. This is a real theory promoted by Logical Positivists (see Ayer “Language Truth and Logic”) with the added twist that rival theories weren’t wrong, they were not even meaningful.

2. Atoms I kid you not: the idea of the existence of non-directly perceivable entities was held, at best, to be a useful fiction in science, at worst as something you shouldn’t even speak about. There were times when they worried about whether “the far side of the moon” was a meaningful concept.

3. Universal scientific laws (This isn’t Popper talking: this is the Logical Positivists.) No number of finite observations will verify a universal law, thus no universal law is meaningful. Boyle’s law? Not even wrong.

4. Correspondence theory of truth What’s this “reality” you’re corresponding to? All you’ve verified is a coherence of statements.

5. Look it’s the fucking sun, ok? No mate, you and I have different procedures for verifying the sun, so the sun means different things to both of us, so it’s a different sun.

Logical Positivism was a HUUUUUGE thing and it’s collapse was hugely liberating.

Not that Logical Positivism was all bad, in fact a lot of it was very, very, good. (I hate it when people say “here, read this” but do consider reading Passmore’s classic (and short) piece on the movement here: http://www.igs.net/~pballan/logicalpos(Passmore).htm )

Refute every single silly thing the apologists say, and when you’re done they’ll have more silly arguments waiting for you

Yes, but the process allows people who are still on the fence to notice that pattern.

Because if you ask the average person “why is marriage good for you individually?” of course physical love is important, but the real “win” of marriage is about “we make eachother better people, we challenge each other, we grow together, we have someone to share our hopes and triumphs and help each other thru the bad times and smile with them during the good, etc…” Nowhere in the real benefits that most would say does “they have opposite genitals than me!!” come in.

Get your minds out of the gutter religious!!

For me personally there are other avenues which strike me as a more effective, efficient use of my time. Of course, what works best for me may not work best for you.

And, in a way, it is an answer to the apologists when one says that their arguments are absurd, they’re barely arguments, and it’s not worth one’s time to go into them in any greater length than that.

We’re both on the same side here, both pulling in the same direction. In any organized effort involving many people, division of labor can lead to greater efficiency.

Another factor here may be the fact that I am autistic. If the percentage of activist atheists who are autistic is comparable to that in the general population, that would mean that less than 1% of us are autistic. And within the atheist movement as in life in general, the fact the we autistics have brains which function differently than the majority may often mean that we are suited to different tasks.

You wrote:

“I’m convinced that most “believers” don’t really believe as much as even they think they do. They mistake the warm fuzzies they receive in fellowship with others for belief.”

In some cases they probably consciously don’t believe, but don’t want to rock the boat, or risk losing some comforts and/or perks that come with church attendance. In his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Robert Musil made a remark about this sort of thing. The novel is set in pre-World War I Vienna, near the very end of the Habsburg monarchy, a time and place where high social positions were very much bound up with the Catholic church. I didn’t make a note of what page this remark is on and I’ve been trying to find it again forever and it’s been driving me nuts. Anyway. Musil compared religion to a moving ski-lift, and a person’s social rank to how high the lift was, and renouncing religion to stepping out of the lift — harder to do the higher up you were.

I hope I got that mostly right. I sure wish I could find that passage again. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, including the Nachlass, is over 2000 pages long, in very small print. I could always just read the whole thing again, it’s a terrific novel…

In any case, that passage reminded me of some upper-crusty Americans who go to church but probably don’t believe, and of politicians who act like they’re religious and don’t dare end a speech other than with the words “[...]and God bless the United states of America!” and who knows what they really believe.

I think “two” could be altered to “two or more” if we could work out some of the legal complexities that arise from three-party marriages, but that’s for the future.

Are there any landmines in this definition I’m missing?

And, strictly speaking, modern Judaism allows for polygamy and concubinage: the Torah is very clear on this, and there is much commentary in the Talmud outlawing the procedures and applications. However, in the 1100s rabbis began to quietly reinterpret halakha (the Jewish version of sharia) to discourage concubinage and promote monogamy… in other words, to redefine Biblical marriage. This was done largely because the practices inflamed the envy of the Christian majority and added fuel to the anti-Semitism of the day. Nonetheless, there is a significant movement in Israel among the Orthodox to allow for the return of polygamy and concubinage as a matter of civil law.

So like I said, if marriage equality changes your definition of marriage, you’re using a bad definition.

I think it goes deeper – conservatives, and more specifically authoritarians, already use a bad definition of “definition”. For them, defining words is not about making your vocabulary reflect a complex reality, it is about making a complex reality comply to a simplistic worldview. In their minds, the abstract definition is the reality, whatever takes place in real life is just the perversion of it.

You will find this pattern extends to every issue on which they voice off – they don’t see categories as a tool to structure reality to make it mentally manageable, they see them as the mould, derived from higher authority, which reality has to follow.

This is, for example, why they don’t accept the existence of intersexed people as evidence that their gender binary is wrong – they’ll simply say that reality got it wrong and that intersexed people will just have to find some way to fit into the binary, and that’s their problem.

This is also why they have no problem with torture, as long as the U.S. is doing it – in their mind, the U.S. are the good guys by definition, and no falling short of that ideal in reality will change that fact. It doesn’t matter, because the definition takes primacy over the reality.

It’s such a convenient way of thinking, it’s terribly hard to wean people of it. And while it lends itself naturally to be shrouded in religiosity, some people manage to pull it off without it just as well.

And it is also part of the reason why “redefining marriage” is such a big deal for these people. The simple, common-sense argument “But it doesn’t affect your marriage” doesn’t apply in their minds, because by changing the legal definition you do indeed change the reality of the institution they partake in.