When I was an atheist
...I really didn’t care what religious people thought about life, the universe, and everything, and I didn’t understand why so many of my fellow atheists were obsessed with the matter. I would go to the homes of my atheist friends and see them sitting in front of the tv glaring at some religious spokesperson like Tammy Faye Bakker or Sister Angelica, or see them pouring through newspapers reading articles about the Pope’s latest pronouncement, or fizzing in fury about some ruling some church group laid on its members (like the Southern Baptists and the dust-up about making husbands the “heads of the household”—remember that? I think a bunch of gay groups decided to demonstrate against some Southern Baptist meeting in Orlando one year because of that, and no I don’t know why gay groups would be so upset over what the Southern Baptist Conference was telling its heterosexual married members to do), and I would be puzzled, because to me being an atheist meant not having to worry about what religious groups did amongst themselves. I kept a wary eye out for what they wanted to do to non-members, of course, but otherwise I couldn’t care less about what the Pope was doing.
You probably have noted that I haven’t mentioned any religion but Christianity. That’s because as far as my circle at that time was concerned, that was the only religion making any trouble. Buddhists were cute and exotic and you could pretend it was a “philosophy” instead of a religion. Judaism was taken for granted, at least in Miami where I lived then, as an ethnic group—people who converted to Judaism were considered weird by Jews and non-Jews alike. And most Jews in Miami thought the Hasidic Jews (i.e., the religious ones) were weird. I knew a lot of Jews who ate bacon and pork. As for Islam, we knew about crazy fanatic Muslims and wanted nothing to do with them but we only felt physically threatened by them, not mentally or emotionally. Only Christians were the real deal—monsters! Stay away! Like vampires to the cross we were to the… cross. Well, not me so much—and by the time the years went by and I began to see that my atheist friends were in a rut about the issue of religious people. I wanted to move on, to more interesting things than whether Mother Theresa was evil or whatever was up their butt that week, but my friends were still fuming because some Bible thumper somewhere said something about this being a Christian country as if saying so made it so and meant we’d all be rounded up by soldiers and forced to go to Sunday school. I just got bored with the paranoia and complaints. And that’s how I became an ex-atheist.
(Via Five Feet of Fury.)
I liked what Diogenes wrote recently, about a really over-the-top rant by Richard Dawkins…
”...When a seventh-grade boy brings up three times in twenty minutes his detestation of a particular seventh-grade girl, we can be pretty sure he has a crush on her…”
Posted by John Weidner on 10/30 at 10:14 PMDiogenes is right—the degree to which a person claiming to be an atheist truly is, is proportional to his or her tolerance of belief in others.
Self-proclaimed atheists who want to stamp out belief are displaying everything they claim to hate about religion.
Posted by McGehee on 10/31 at 09:59 AMNo one expects the Atheist Inquisition?
Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 10/31 at 11:54 AMWhy I am an agnostic, not an atheist—I’m aware of my own ignorance and the bounds of knowledge.
Dedicated “strong” atheism requires faith as strong as any pulpit-thumping Baptist fundamentalism.
Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 10/31 at 04:12 PMThere are the athiests who don’t believe, and the loud athiests who believe in God but say they don’t to spite him. That’s why they have a very specific idea of the God they don’t believe in - usually the Christian one.
Its the religious equivalent of the rich teenager who goes out with bums that her father wouldn’t approve of. Her image of the appropriate man is the same as her dad’s - she just picks the wrong one to annoy him.
Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 10/31 at 04:46 PMI’m agnostic. I don’t know and I have grown comfortable with not knowing. Religious people do annoy me - all religious people, including religious atheists, religious environmentalists… pretty much anyone who’s “religious” about whatever their into. Well, except for music, science fiction and football. It’s okay to be religious about those three things.
Posted by Lynn on 10/31 at 10:33 PMDAMMIT! I did it again! Someone whack my fingers with a ruler.
Posted by Lynn on 10/31 at 10:35 PM
Next entry: Site Move Update
Previous entry: US interference in Latin American politics