Help! Help! I'm Being Repressed!

"I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time." -- Isaac Asimov, Free Inquiry, Spring 1982, vol.2 no.2, p. 9

The list of famous historical atheists always reassures me. Douglas Adams, Ben Franklin, Isaac Asimov, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Carl Sagan, Abraham Lincoln, George Carlin, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, James Madison...Smart guys. I'd much rather be on their team than George W. Bush's and Jerry Falwell's. Not even close.

But I can't say I'm surprised at the revelation that my fellow atheists and I comprise America's most distrusted minority. We only make up about 3% of total Americans, but there's apparently more ill-will and distrust out there for us than even Muslims and gays!

Now, I'm not saying you should all hate Muslims. I certainly don't hate Muslims. But isn't that incredible? I mean, when you think of ignorant, hate-filled Americans, they're usually reserving their venom for Muslims, right? Didn't Ann Coulter want to kill their leaders and convert them not all that long ago? We're at war with those guys, actively torturing them, several of them have flown planes into our buildings, and still Americans are more threatened by guys like me who find the whole "God" thing silly. What did I ever do to you?

American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

I don't know...Seems to me that, if you felt confident in your beliefs, you wouldn't feel so threatened by someone who merely posits that they might not be true. I mean, Christianity can obviously survive amidst dissent, right? It was conceived as a minority religion initially anyway.

So why can't Americans deal with the fact that some of us think it's kind of dumb? I try to keep that shit to myself, for the most part. I don't spend my weekends driving around the country interrupting baptisms and tainting holy water. And I've only openly laughed at the guys walking around with ash smeared all over their foreheads a few times. So why can't we all just get along?

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

Some atheists are formally organized. My cousin Michael's in an antheist's club of sorts, which holds events and meetings and even has a political-activism wing. I get the point, I guess, of opposing the insertion of religion into public life or whatever. But it's true that not believing in God doesn't really spur most of us to "get involved" at a local level. I mean, in a lot of ways, I can accept that my beliefs are the absence of belief. I don't so much get high off of atheism, so much as I find not having to be religious a real load off my mind. So just replacing vehement religiosity with vehement non-religiosity seems kind of equally pointless.

But that's just me. I understand a lot of people...just like having meetings.

Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has historically been religious,” says Edgell.

Well, I'd like to alert Ms. Edgell that Catholics and Jews and Communists all continue to play the same roles in modern American society. I mean, Jews? She doesn't think people mistrust Jews any more? Where you been, Penny? Did you miss out on that whole Passion of the Christ thing?

Also, I'm actually kind of surprised at how much a lot of people continue to hate Communists. It's kind of cute, really. All these neo-McCarthyites who got all upset at Good Night and Good Luck..."Hey, there really were dirty pinko Commies in the government, man! Tailgunner Joe was right all along!"

It's weird that China and Cuba are still Communists, but that we don't really care to villify them any more. What's changed, except that we've shifted our international hate-spewing priorities? If Communism itself was an absolute evil, isn't Communist China still totally evil? And, if so, why don't we still make cool action movies in which muscle-bound Americans kick Commie ass? My theory: all those Chinese guys know kung fu, and our large muscle-bound Americans are scared. Vin Diesel, I'm looking in your direction.

Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.

One thing I'd like to address here. This whole idea that religion is useful because it makes people behave morally? That's a ridiculous lie. I've yet to be convinced that religious people behave in any more moral a fashion than non-religious people. The only thing intense, loudly-proclaimed spirituality means, as far as I'm concerned, is that a person has a far-higher probability of being a hypocrite.

One need think only of the number of famous, religious people who have been publicly disgraced. Not to bring up what you can read about on any other blog, but just today everyone's talking about young Ben Domenech, hired and immediately let go from Washingtonpost.com for being a dirty plagiarist. Ben, before he was temporarily a real professional online journalist type, once wrote for the racist right-wing site RedState.org, where he published screeds against abortionists under the handle "Augustine."

And that whole time, he knew that he was a dirty plagiarist. And even when the truth came out, he hid and lied about it for 24 hours, and let his friends plead his case for him, until it became clear he wouldn't be able to weasel out. And that's a religious guy! Now, you can say that he didn't take his religious to heart, obviously choosing to ignore the parts about not lying and not stealing and not taking mean potshots at your political opponents after it has become clear that you're a stealing liar. But he certainly practiced the religion, and it didn't seem to alter his negative behavior.

So in Ben's case, religion didn't create a more morally sound person. It just magically turned an asshole into a hypocritical asshole. I'd suggest this is among its most common functions.

So don't give me this "atheists are inherently immoral" crap, America, cause it's not going to fly. As for materialism and cultural elitism...that's everybody.