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.
Tag 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 made a comment on the Huffington Post Religion’s Facebook page the other day that I didn’t believe Jesus actually existed. Now one can debate whether my belief is valid or not, but that isn’t what one Christian chose to do. No, one particular Christian decided to lash out in hate toward me instead.
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.
We’ve all heard that the internet is where religions go to die and it’s true. Recently, VJack over at Atheist Revolution published a great post about his struggle to find information on atheism before the internet. It got me thinking about my own struggles in the early days of they called “The World Wide Web.”
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.
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.
One of the reasons why I fight so hard against the ideas of religion is because I see religion as detrimental to human progress. Religious thinking divides people, focuses people on ancient mythologies, and gets in the way of our global vision.
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.