This article from (conservative website) The American Thinker follows the standard “atheism-is-evil” formula: The author “Jenn Q. Public” suggests that atheists are arrogant (“Make no mistake: Atheists think they’re smarter than you”), suggests that atheists have “idols” of our own (like “patron saint” Bill Maher), and makes blanket statements about atheists while at the same time deriding atheists for supposedly doing the same thing to Christians (“You see, for liberal Atheists, the only thing worse than religion is the Religious Right, a term they use to encompass all Christian conservatives”).
You can read it for yourself, but let’s address some specific portions of the piece:
I grew up learning from my father that Atheism is rational, and therefore, religious belief is irrational; Atheism is defined by logic, religious faith by fantasy; and science is real while religion is make believe. Faith, I was taught, requires a willful stifling of reason.
The Torah, the Gospels, the Qur’an? All woefully inaccurate, laughably inconsistent fictions used to encourage belief in an illusion for the purpose of social control.
Religious beliefs do often fly in the face of logic and reason. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to say that simple coincidences are “miracles” from a god.
But I understand why people would want to be religious. It gives them hope, it gives them a sense of security, it gives them a sense of community. Those things are not irrational at all. I just don’t think they’re realistic.
That’s why religious people shouldn’t automatically be accused of stupidity. I don’t think many of them have thought through things like the literal truth of their holy book or the alternative explanations for why things happen in life. Many people just don’t care.
But Atheists aren’t content to leave religion as a mere object of ridicule. They want it cleansed from public life. And enlightened as they are, they’ve come up with quite the pretense for justifying the righteousness of their bigotry: they are defending the vision of our Founding Fathers from a dominionist conspiracy to establish Christianity as the state religion.
Most atheists (and national atheistic organizations) have no desire to “cleanse” religion from public life. Rather, we just don’t want faith getting any sort of special privilege from the government.
You want to have religious services? Fine. We won’t stop you.
You want to tell us why we should be religious? Fine, but we’ll answer back.
You want to push your Biblical beliefs into secular classrooms? Now, we have a fight on our hands.
There’s a reason the atheists that are in the public eye right now are more “aggressive” about their atheism — possibly more than they actually are in real life. Never before have atheists received this much attention and it’s long overdue. So they might as well make the most of it and try to jilt people out of the comfort of their faith — get them to consider another possibility.
Once atheism becomes more mainstream than it currently is, you won’t be hearing the same kind of voices.
You see, for liberal Atheists, the only thing worse than religion is the Religious Right, a term they use to encompass all Christian conservatives. And what better way to siphon fuel from the Religious Right than to convince Americans that the government is perpetually on the verge of becoming a theocracy?
Not every atheist is a liberal and not every Christian is part of the Religious Right. That group, however, is powerful and they do want to see several elements of their faith encoded in the law. Thankfully, there are many Christians who oppose that. I’m sure there are some conservative or fundamentalist Christians who don’t want to see that, but I have yet to meet one.
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The article is disturbing enough to read… but if you want to go for the full scare, try reading the comments.
