Why Be An Angry Atheist?

Seriously...I don't understand. Why does an acknowledgment that religion is kind of dumb necessarily carry with it a need to be so condescending and haughty? In the course of a single day, how many people will I interact with who agree with me about everything? Even everything important, as in moral codes or models for appropriate public behavior or views about humanity's place in the universe? Very few, if any. Everyone's different.

So why is it that my fellow atheists insist upon being so aggressive about challenging religion? I'm not saying that we shouldn't defend ourselves, or that we shouldn't feel free to express an opinion openly about other faiths or lack thereof. I enjoy this freedom all the time. But it's perfectly simple to let people know where you stand on the issue of religion without calling them stupid or belittling their beliefs. See, I don't like it when Christianists and wannabe theocrats try to exert their religious beliefs on me, but likewise I find it counter-productive to repeatedly insist on the rightness of my perspective.

To me, this impulse plays into the pervasive stereotypes about atheists: that we are angry or mean or bitter people, that we are simply contrarians by nature, that we don't admire humanity and reason so much as we loathe morality, God and family. None of these things are true, and yet their are reinforced by half-assed caustic anti-faith screeds...a-like a-this a-one:

Why Won't God Heal Amputees for some reason feels that humiliating and mocking the religious is the best way to get them to see things from another perspective. It clearly feels that its titular query - about God healing the wounded - definitively disproves the existence of God for all time, always.

Which is just dumb. I mean, I've never really believed seriously in God, and even I can argue my way out of that one.

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident.

Now create a prayer circle like the one created for Jeanna Giese. The job of this prayer circle is simple: pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. I do not mean to pray for a team of renowned surgeons to somehow graft the legs of a cadaver onto the soldier, nor for a team of renowned scientists to craft mechanical legs for him. Pray that God spontaneously and miraculously restores the soldier's legs overnight, in the same way that God spontaneously and miraculously cured Jeanna Giese and Marilyn Hickey's mother.

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.

What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once -- he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.

And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen.

Every religious person I have ever met would concede that God doesn't answer every human prayer. This argument is a complete strawman. Different religions would have different ways of answering this particular problem, but it's not like the schmendrick who runs this website was the first person to ever come up with this line of reasoning. Maybe God caused that person's legs to be amputated for some larger purpose, alright? So eventually, he'll get around to answering the person's prayers in a roundabout way without physically returning his or her legs. There. Done. I mean, we're talking about an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. If such a thing really did exist, we wouldn't necessarily expect It to obey all of our laws of fairness, consistency and timeliness.

Take a look at this 10 minute video, in which a nasally, ANGRY narrator informs you of 3 things:

(1) You're an idiot

(2) He's going to miraculously free you from your delusions

(3) But, seriously, you're a fucking idiot

How is this in any way helpful? The guy opens the video by making some extremely bold statements:

If you are a Christian, you are about to begin a fascinating journey.

I would never in one million years say this at the beginning of a presentation. Talk about setting yourself up for failure. This is what producer Joel Silver does before every film of his opens, and it usually doesn't work out that well. ("Swordfish is going to change the way you think about action movies, the Internet...and yourselves...")

Still, he gets away with it every once in a while, when the film turns out to be The Matrix or something and audiences flip for it. Regrettably, the folks at WWGHA do not have a blockbuster kind of argument.

It all boils down to this: because you don't believe in ALL the world's religions, and the faith of their adherents is just as strong as yours, you must concede that almost all of world's religious people are totally wrong, and therefore you are most likely wrong. After all, what reason do we have for believing that our holy books or writs are MORE CORRECT that those of other faiths and cultures, whose practicioners have passed them down and fervently practiced them for just as long as our people or longer?

This is certainly something that occurred to me as a child. I think being Jewish calls your attention in particular to this issue. The most popular religion in America is an explicit rejection of Judaism. Despite the unifying political rhetoric between Jew and Fundamentalist Christian, most Americans feel that the Jews believe in an outdated religion that has long-since been revitalized. So any believing Jew must make peace with the fact that they're going against the grain.

But this is not revolutionary thinking that's likely to alter the perception of someone religious, particularly because it's delivered in this hectoring tone that's just unpleasant. I mean...I agree with the narrator for the most part, and yet I still disliked him and found him unconvincing.

In the next ten minutes it will become clear to you that your belief in God is delusional.

The problem is that your delusion, combined with the delusion of billions of other religious people like you, is hurting us as a species. It does not matter if you are a fundamentalist Christian, a moderate Christian or a casual Christian. Your delusion is hurting us.

Again, this leap in logic has never fully been made clear to me. Yes, most people are religious. Yes, most people are also violent. Sometimes (not all the time!), people excuse their violent behavior with religion. This does not, DOES NOT, necessarily indicate that religion incites people to violence!

I mean, that's just silly. Look at the issue of, say, spousal abuse. I'm sure many men who are arrested for spousal abuse (not that all spousal abusers are men...just the overwhelming majority...) have lame excuses for why they needed to hit their wives. But we don't accept these excuses at face value! Of course we don't! There's no one saying, "If we could only keep women pregnant and in the kitchen and stop their constant backtalking, we could end spousal abuse in this country!"

Because the real reasons guys hit their wives are alcoholism or drug abuse or that they're just a dumb violent asshole, and we all know it. And the reason there's so much violence in the world is that people are angry, violent, greedy fucks. And we all know it. And it has nothing to do with God, Ganesha, Mohammad, Jesus, the Prophet Elijah or anyone else. Being an atheist is just recognizing that those are either fictional or historical characters; it doesn't say anything about believing that they are responsible for the downfall of humanity or the horrors of the the 20th or 21st Centuries.

Yet this guy just brashly states it outwardly in a video that's meant to appeal to Christians. Guys...That's not gonna work. At all. In order to be convinced by your rhetoric, a subject must find you sufficiently trustworthy and charismatic. A good first step would be to convince them that you think very much like them but for one or two crucial, correctable differences. Not to call them delusional and say that they're hurting our species, and then move into your arguments.

Okay, moving away from the WWGHA crowd, let's take a look at this blog post, about the divide between "mean atheists" and "good atheists."

What it really comes down to is this: There are two types of atheists, which (for simplicity) I'll call the "nice atheists" and the "mean atheists." As P. Z. Myers points out, it's absurd to call atheists "militant" since it's not as if they're burning down churches -- they're just criticizing religion. However, it's not unreasonable to suggest that some atheists are not very nice.

The difference between the mean atheists and the nice atheists is that the mean atheists think that religion is ninety-nine parts pure stupidity mixed with one part lying, opportunistic con artists. And they want to tell that to religious people whenever they're asked to "respect" someone's faith.

This is just stupid. The divide has nothing to do with being "nice" or "mean." It's about goals. The atheists blogger C.L. Hanson refers to as "mean" want to eradicate religion from the public sphere entirely, or even eliminate its very existence. The atheists that are called "nice" aren't any friendly as people; they just don't give a shit what people say or believe, as long as they personally don't have to believe it.

I'm not religious because I think it's silly and I don't want to waste my time with it. I think we'd all be better off accepting such a philosophy, of course - if I thought such a belief made people worse off, I wouldn't believe it myself - but when it comes right down to it, I'd rather not get involved in what everyone else does. Their business, you know? Just like I don't care what home computers other people use, or their favorite late-night snack, or their masturbatory practices. I have my own preferences, and they have theirs, and that's how it ought to be.

I think all atheists believe religion is just about equally stupid. The notion that there's 1% of me that thinks religion should be handled with respect is very strange; where did Hanson even come up with this stuff? If you don't believe in Islam or Christianity or Mormonism or Scientology, it seems ridiculous from the outside. That has absolutely nothing to do with ones approach to dealing with religion. Can't we interface at all with ideas we dislike?

I mean, I'm not a libertarian, but am I not capable of discussing their ideas with them? Should my goal instead be the eradication of that entire system of thought? I think these sort of notions fuel a lot of our political and social discourse any more. Politics is no longer about ensuring your perspective is represented in some kind of larger Grand Compromise. It's about the utter and complete defeat of any and all opposition to your unitary, uncompromised will.

Like I said, I just don't get it. To me, so-called "mean" atheism reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. I mean, it's great you guys figured out God's not at the center of the universe, but that doesn't mean you're there either.