{"id":928,"date":"2013-10-25T10:00:08","date_gmt":"2013-10-25T15:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/?p=928"},"modified":"2013-10-29T16:31:31","modified_gmt":"2013-10-29T21:31:31","slug":"when-aunicornists-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/2013\/10\/when-aunicornists-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"When a-unicornists attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A few days ago, James Maxie<\/strong> attacked pastor Norman Hayes<\/strong><\/a> when the latter suggested Maxie, who happens to be an atheist, was dangerous to his girlfriend:<\/p>\n

A self-described militant Atheist with a criminal past faces multiple charges after an attack on a pastor who, after his sermon, had asked the man’s girlfriend if she felt safe<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What\u00a0Maxie did was wrong and is inexcusable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But I want to focus on what the media is doing<\/a>: they resorted to a mischaracterization of atheists<\/strong> (that Christians have happily contributed to spread) while covering the story\u00a0– which is quite bigoted, by the way.<\/p>\n

You can only stem behaviors from belief systems. Atheism is the lack of belief, therefore, you can’t trace back any misbehavior, neither a crime to it.<\/p>\n

This is one of the many perks of atheism: it doesn’t entail a belief system<\/strong>, so no-one can pin a crime on it… unlike Christianity or any other positive-belief system.<\/p>\n

I guess Mr. Maxie doesn’t believe in unicorns<\/strong>, either, but we will not be seeing anything like this in the near future: “A self-described militant aunicornist with a criminal past faces multiple charges after an attack on a pastor who, after his sermon, had asked the man’s girlfriend if she felt safe<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

We need the media to understand this basic notion about atheism<\/strong>, so they will start treating it adequately instead of lumping it together with actual, harmful, belief systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, James Maxie attacked pastor Norman Hayes when the latter suggested Maxie, who happens to be an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[382,115,31],"class_list":["post-928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-atheism","tag-mass-media","tag-new-atheism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}