Vandals Tag South Carolina Church with Atheist Phrases… but We’re Going to Make Things Better

I don’t get why vandals do what they do on either side. Spray paint a billboard, it can be cleaned. Take a sign, it can be replaced. Graffiti a building, it can be washed. But what good does it do? There’s no way those are Atheists, because only someone mindless resorts to petty vandalism. 

Don’t invoke a “no true Scottsman.” You don’t know who the vandals are.

The only thing that matters is they were wrong and our community needs to show we don’t support things like this by stepping in to fix it.

I think it would naive to think that an atheist can do no wrong.  It’s very possible this was a atheist teenager full of angst who thought he/she was making a statement.  Of course, it’s possible it *wasn’t* an atheist, too, but we just can’t know without more evidence.  Either way, I think the idea to raise donations from this atheist community for that church’s community is a wonderful gesture.

Hey, I was just about to respond to Nathan that yeah, except when atheists do bad things, we don’t reclassify them automatically as not real atheists or “atheists” in quotation marks.  Thanks for proving me wrong.

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My guess on the identity of the vandals: atheist or at least non-religious teenagers dragged to that church by their parents.

I am okay with it – in the long run it say’s NO you are not sacred – you do not get special privilege – and we will not be silent .. imagine an oppressive regime like a concentration camp where they take out the members brains and turn them to cult like sheep… I say speak out in every form, encourage the ridicule of the ridiculous….
When dealing with people – respect the people – help the people – contribute time effort education – but when faced with centuries of oppressive, controlling, manipulative abuse rail, rant rave until it comes down.. until crimes are answered for and the system of systematic injustice is  destroyed… then help build an open freedom of expression of religion with equal rights and responsibilities…

I hate those “athiests”. Always thinking they are “athier” than everyone else, those morons.

Great idea, Hemant. I just donated and I’m asking my readers to do the same. Let’s turn this into something positive.

athier than thou 🙂

Your attitude makes me sad, Cutencrunchy. It wasn’t these people, or even this church, doing the oppressing. That is like advocating that all women are find to go up and punch random men because of sexism.
Even if the church is oppressive, there are peaceful, non-criminal, effective ways to communicate the desire for change.

Contributed to the fund. Not much, but what I could afford.

 I understand what you’re saying here and I appreciate the sentiment. I’d certainly like to see more of a discussion of how to make these issues, in some sense, less divisive. Many people that I have met seem to be unable to discuss differences of opinion in a calm and collected manner. And I certainly wouldn’t hold myself up as the epitome of that kind of virtue, and could surely be swatted down pretty hard if I did.

However, here are a few things to consider:

1) As atheists, it’s not our job to say who are really Christians and who aren’t. I realise that someone, as a Christian, might want to distance themselves from, say, the Westboro Baptists. But I don’t believe in any form of Christianity, whether it be mellow, liberal Christianity or the gay bashing non-sense spewed by some conservatives. Therefore, while one form is presently more pleasant in its effects than another, I think both are about equally as unlikely.

2) Consider that the more people are willing to *act* on their faith (in either good ways or bad) the stronger their faith must be. Seriously, the terrorists on 9/11 must have had the strongest faith of any of the people who died that day. And the fact that the less people are willing to stick to the letter of their holy books, the less severe they are in their religious sentiments, the more we seem to like them — that doesn’t speak too tremendously well of religion. After all, the Bible *does* have condemnations against male homosexual sex (amongst other things.) If a Christian says that they are not against gay people, it is only by specifically rejecting a part of their own religion’s traditional doctrine. And, again, if the only way to be ethical is to reject certain parts of one’s religion, that doesn’t speak very well of that religion.

 There are some mindless atheists out there. S.E. Cupp for example.

I always wonder when I see atheist spelled Athiest, who really is the most atheist, ie. the Athiest atheist.

Given that “Atheism” is spelled wrong, I’d say it’s more likely the vandals were Christians.

I think more likely they used some sort of phone app to come up with the message.

My hyperbole meter flew through the roof when the sheriff referred to this as a “heinous” crime.  Sure, this wasn’t very nice, but heinous? 

I chipped in because I liked how the pastor continued to take the high road in the video.  I hope you two can find a nice, secular cause.

They can’t even spell “athiesm [sic]”. Sad.

 Ha!  Not sure that she’s even an atheist.  She is a rare concoction of the Murdoch History-and-Reason-Assault-Machine, of that, I am sure.

The red “A” with a circle around it is the symbol for anarchism, not atheism. A lot of the teens in my area paint this around town. If this person was an atheist (and I kind of doubt it), he/she is not too bright.

Be on the lookout for Jethro Bodine, aka “ATHIEST” agent extraordinaire!  Cunning super agent with book learnin’ all the way to the sixth grade level!  Unintentionally hilarious because the MORAN who tried to perpetrate this frame job couldn’t spell.  You know it is just some hillbilly teenagers pissed off at the church and acting out their weird “ATHIEST” fantasies.  The reference to Richard Dawkins is a DEAD GIVE AWAY that this is an “inside” job of creationist lunatics.  (God Delusion ref).  The only people in South Carolina that have EVER heard of Richard Dawkins books are lunatic fundamentalists who vilify him to their kids as an Anti-Christ because of his “belief” that evolution is real and God is not.  This kind of obviously “fake” agitprop graffiti is what happens when fundamentalist South Carolina teens mix their paint huffing sessions with their religious indoctrination classes.  Enjoy.

Thanks for the donation! I did receive it and I updated the ChipIn settings to make sure it says Friendly Atheist instead of SSA 🙂

I am an atheist from South Carolina.

I think I like this idea. I did a little poking around about Irmo, and I have a tentative suggestion for a donation destination: the Irmo Okra Strut Festival. It’s at the end of September, and the website (www.irmookrastrut.com) says that “money raised by the festival is put back into the community through civic and school organizations, scholarships and improvements of public areas.” That sounds really nice. Apparently, the town got their first library financed through this festival!

Besides that, my default charity suggestion is always “food bank.” Their local-est one looks to be Harvest Hope Food Bank in Columbia, which is about 10 miles away. It has four stars on Charity Navigator, too.

I agree to an extent that endorsing an organization endorses the act itself, but only if the organization does not repudiate the act of one of it’s members. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, in fact if those priests had followed what the Church taught on sexual morality and virtue (particularly on lying here and sins of omission) the issue would fail to exist. You said: “But atheism is not a homogeneous collective under idealistic banners approved by Secular Writ – my wearing of the label is not an endorsement of atrocious acts, so I feel no need to distance myself from the label – just the acts and the actors themselves.” but in the case of Catholicism neither is it a “homogeneous collective” nor does the Church proper condone, endorse, or accept the actions you have laid out. Rather, the Church proper condemns them as mortal sins and immoral acts. Does that make sense?

I see a mixed message in the response of the Catholic Church.  Publicly they condemn the actions of the rapist priests yet at the same time it is the church themselves (itself?) that hides these rapists, prevents secular investigation and criminal charges from being filed and scurries the known rapists off to new Parishes complete with an unaware pool of fresh victims.  This has happened often enough that it is the rule rather than the exception.    IMHO it is a prime example of actions speaking louder than words.

Tria,

I see what your saying but individuals in the church are different from the church itself.

What you say here: “it is the church themselves (itself?) that hides these rapists, prevents secular investigation and criminal charges from being filed and scurries the known rapists off to new Parishes complete with an unaware pool of fresh victims. This has happened often enough that it is the rule rather than the exception”

seems a common enough complaint and rightfful but the people doing the cover up are people within the church not the church (even if they are Bishops they are not the church) and in fact in their actions that have implicitly condoned or allowed the immorality of abuse. As I said before if these Bishops/church people had merely done what the church called them to, namely live a life of virtue, these things would have have happened.

I am also not sure this was the rule rather than the exception. Also on another note you should check the stats on child sexual abuse across society…the problem is great from schools, to churches, to well just about everywhere. The number of cases in the Catholic church is not any sort of anamoly…in fact there are many that report it as lower than society at large, not just as a result of a lack of reporting either but maybe you have better info?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/04/07/mean-men.html

Cary

Whoa there Cary, slow down a bit. THE VATICAN, that means those that run it, those in charge, hide and shuffle known pedophile priests among  its many churches, especially those poor ones where every one is too afraid to raise a finger against a powerful church. It shows they care more about their “reputation” than the children they are suppose to protect. They also rush to quiet down the victims with intimidation. They also get in the way of investigations to this effect. This happens over and over again. So, the writing is on the wall man. But, there is also the matter of a horrible book that you guys “follow” (like a soldier follows a map through a mine field) that speaks of genocide, racism, sexism and other horrible acts, but with your rose colored blinds are able to ignore all that. This blinding exercise repeated since childhood is what prevents you later on as an adult from seeing Reality, and allows you to write today incredible feats of blindness that you actually believe the Vatican has repudiated these acts despite the overwhelming evidence.

Still, any damage to property that it’s not yours is WRONG. I would have preferred that local Atheists would have gotten together with church members and help clean up the graffiti supporting the idea of construction and respect of ideas instead of destruction and silence.

I’m with you with the point of women not beating men at random because sexism exist (in the past and now), and being at first a good analogy for not beating all churches because Religion oppression existed and exists. In deed not all do the heavy oppression. STILL, something was bothering me. It’s not quite a good matching analogy in the end. You see, ALL Christian churches, moderate or extremist, believe in a book that believes in oppression and in really despicable, hateful acts, they also believe in ignoring evidence as a “virtuous” practice, and relying instead on the wisdom and beliefs of 3000 year old desert nomads and taking their writings on Faith alone, again as a “virtue”. Now, whether some try to abide or ignore some of these beliefs is not the point. The point is that they don’t have a ruler or criteria to discriminate good from bad beliefs; it’s a mixed bag of old and new testaments, with some poor contradictory reasoning, poor science, and superstition. However, there are NO such analogous clubs or congregations for ALL Men, good or bad, who all must attend or are members of just for being men, where they celebrate womanhood under one hand but also believe in a sacred book at the same time which values women somewhere between a donkey and two sheep.  ALL churches do however, even the “good” ones. I have a hard time rubber stamping these “good” churches because they just happen to ignore or surf over some of the serious oppressing views with crap like: “we don’t hate homosexuals, we hate the act” horseshit.

 In what way are the Christians “hating the sin and not the sinner” when they block the lgbt community from being equally protected under the law and from having equal marriage rights?

It needn’t be a conspiracy to be a frame-up, though I think even “frame-up” is probably too strong a word. Anyway, all it takes is one or two dumb, and probably drunk, kids who thought it would be funny to paint this stuff on a church. They may or may not have been atheists, but this is just what trolling looks like in real life. Somewhere a couple of stoners are laughing their idiotic asses off at both us and the church. And if they’re actually atheists, then they’re even bigger idiots.

I find it extremely disturbing that you would equate homosexuality to involuntary manslaughter in your analogy.  I would like to think that such an equivocation is not meant to be offensive, but indeed it is.  As a former roman catholic, I can get the gist of what you’re saying and how you are rationalizing it.  However, I would point out to you that just because the bible or mother church says something is wrong religiously, does not mean it is wrong morally or ethically.  Saying that homosexuality is wrong based on biblical precepts or church doctrine is no different than saying eating meat on Fridays/eating pork/not wearing a burka is wrong and has about the same value to someone not of your faith as saying homosexuality is wrong.  As long as its between consenting adults – we see it as just fine and dandy.

This is always the response from Catholic rape apologists. Nobody is saying abuse happens only in the Catholic church. We all know the stats.

The difference is the cover ups. Anyone who covers up systematic abuse of children should be skewered, figuratively speaking.
See PENN STATE for how to deal with those that enable abusers.

Maybe I read a different article to you. I didn’t see the Pastor demanding anything.

 All atheists are this way.

That’s as foolish as me saying all Christians are that way.

No, but just like everything, a “bullet-proof” argument isn’t needed.  There isn’t any reason to believe an atheist did it, any more/less than there is no reason to believe Martians did it.  The fact that the word “atheist” (albeit misspelled) was used signifies nothing but the intent to inflame emotions.  Nothing more.  So there is no need for a defense of  “I don’t believe” in this case any more than there is a need for a defense of “I don’t believe in God” or “I don’t believe in Santa Claus” or “I don’t believe in Zeus.”

You say that the burden of proof is on believers (rightly so, as it’s a logical argument), but then say “no true atheist” – as if (a) the No True Scotsman fallacy hadn’t already been mentioned in the post, and (b) “Atheism” has some sort of code/creed/doctrine.  Atheism is the simple admission of a lack of a belief in a deity, due to a lack of convincing evidence for a deity’s existence (which you alluded to).

This *could* have been an atheist.  Or it could have not been.  The point of all this is: it was wrong, it was criminal, and that action can – and should – be opposed by everyone.