Often times I will open up my e-mail in the morning and see some incoherent rant from some anonymous religious believer. One of the more comment rants I get informs me that as a “materialistic atheist” I must believe X. The author then goes on to show that X is immoral, ridiculous, or faith-based.
Category Religion
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who are like me and those who are different from me. Those who are different from me can’t be reasoned with because they are different than me on a fundamental level. I believe in inclusion but those that are different from me categorize people into two groups of people. Because they are different from me, they deserve to be belittled and attacked. We need to drive them out of our community and make them social pariahs.
I recently had a Christian message me to tell me that one of my articles offended him. He was apparently offended by my use of facts. I have known many other Christians who also seem to be offended by facts. They feel that the facts are attacking them and well they should because they are.
Last night, I was a guest lecturer at a community college sociology class. The subject was atheism and secular humanism. I started out talking about the beginnings of religion and at one point outlined how the Old Testament came together. One fundamentalist Christian in the class questioned my account and well she should have because it is pretty damning to her fundamentalist beliefs and because I think it is important to question everything.
Awhile back, a Christian Tweeted an interesting question to atheists. The question was this: “Why would you risk your soul? #atheism” Now, I know the Christian wasn’t actually expecting an answer, but I would like to answer this question anyway.
Many Christians love to tell their stories of how they got saved. I think it is also valuable for atheists to tell our stories of how we became damned to eternal torture… I mean how we de-converted from religion to atheism. The thing is that I think atheists and Christians have very different processes for how we came to our present position on the existence of deities. I don’t really want to know how someone got saved, but I would like to know what convinced them of their beliefs. That is not necessarily the same thing.
Earlier this month, the National Atheism Party held their annual convention and Dusty Smith of the Cult of Dusty YouTube channel gave a great speech. Today, I would like to highlight some of my favorite parts of the speech because I think they are extremely important and every atheist should think about it.
I used to tell some of my Christian friends that I don’t have faith in deities, but that I do have faith in people. This was and still is often my opening line in many conversations with religious believers.
Dave Silverman was on Fox News yesterday and he made an interesting argument. He said that “bigotry against gays is not a precept of Christianity.” He continued to claim that there are a lot of bigots who use Christianity as a shield against criticism for their bigotry. I disagree with Silverman on this one.
A lot of times when atheists argue with or debate with religious believers, we actually take their beliefs seriously and try to refute their claims with logic and reason. This is great and we should definitely keep doing that, but… The hard truth about religion is that almost all of them are flat out ridiculous and we can’t lose sight of that either.