He allows me to be an atheist without bashing the faithful in some display of pain and payback. Morality is still needed, and Eugenics proved, that science cannot rule the moral sphere, alone. This is important to understand, from all sides.
I'm curious as to why you would think that you needed someone's permission to be atheist without "bashing the faithful." At least that's what it seems you're saying.
Personally, I believe, there has been at least 2,000 years of defining atheists as akin to Satan worshipers. Offer a moral alternative. Open a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, then, after the conversation has changed because people know good atheists in their lives, make the Ten Commandments banned from the courthouse a priority, when there is some will, outside of the community, to do so. By attacking religion, we feed the narrative we are driving people away from moral behavior. I refuse to believe that human morality and sacrifice is 2,000 years old, only.
The Ten Commandments have no place in a courthouse in countries that have separation of church and state in their constitutions. It shouldn't require opening an "atheist soup kitchen" to understand this.
- It's not atheist's responsibility to "offer a moral alternative" to anyone, since it's not a religion.
- Atheists already do open soup kitchens and homeless shelters and do many other charitable and altruistic things every day, just like everyone else.
- People already do know good atheists in their lives, but it's not incumbent on any group to "prove their goodness" to anyone else in order to receive basic dignity and respect from them in return. That should just be the default setting.
- The world is not an all or nothing zero sum game where you can only do one thing at a time and you can't start working on one thing until this other really difficult to overcome problem is solved first. That's how things don't get done, because there's always another obstacle someone will throw up and say we should solve first.
- Also, it's different people doing different things at different times, and not all working in concert with each other. Atheists are not a hive mind.
- Asking for religious representations to be removed from courthouses and other government facilities, or to be opened up to all belief systems and groups, is not "attacking religion" in any way. It's upholding the Constitution of this country. No atheists are taking away anyone's house of worship or telling them they can not practice their faith. There are religious people who wish to deny Muslims from opening houses of worship in certain areas or bar them from immigrating to this country, however. There is also discrimination in the fact that atheists are de facto barred from holding higher elected office because religious people refuse to vote for them because they are baselessly considered the least trusted group in America, largely because of unfortunate stereotypes like the ones in your well meaning but flawed post.
- The false narrative (not one you subscribe to, I know) that atheists are driving people away from moral behavior assumes that atheists don't have moral behavior themselves, when they have largely the same moral behavior as most other people in their region. Most atheists were raised by religious parents in religious families in religious neighborhoods in religious majority countries.
- Of course morality is more than 2,000 years old. The New Testament is derived from religious and moral teachings that proceeded it, and not just Judaism. The most fundamental morals are shared by and transcend religion and ideology. They're the basic building blocks of living in a functional civilization, and have existed before and would exist without organized religion, which is not to say religion has not contributed to the development and refinement of those morals over the centuries.
Excellent post, Locutus.
In the Western world this distrust of atheists is not universal. Australia, New Zealand and several other countries have had or do have atheist Prime Ministers or Presidents.
If I tell people I am an atheist most of them don't even raise an eyebrow.
That's something I'd like to see here. There have been Science/Environment Ministers in several provincial and federal cabinets who sincerely believe that Earth is only 6000 years old. These are people responsible for influencing provincial science curricula in schools, and decisions about the oil and gas industries.
Why shouldn't single LGBT people be allowed to be who they are openly and without shame? I don't accept your "spreading disease" label as if it's an inevitability with a non-monogamous lifestyle. You're saying people should alter behavior that makes them happy in order to receive the acceptance of the majority. Well, that's not accepting you for who you are. That's only accepting you for who they want you to be.
He didn't say that LBGT people need to change their behavior. He did say that perceptions have changed.
It's in a church because churches have followers that meet on a regular basis and organizations that have been built up over hundreds of years. Atheists are just individuals for the most part. There are some who like to meet up (I'm not one of them), but the vast majority do not, because once you start holding meetings, organizing events, writing down rules of conduct and shared non-beliefs in a book, holding charity functions, and recruiting new followers you might as well just be a religion.
So any group of people that holds meetings, organizes events, writes down rules of conduct, shares non-belief in a book, holds charity functions, and recruits new followers is the same as a religion?
I had no idea that when I started the local Star Trek club here in the late 1980s that I was starting a religion. Most of the meetings were held in my home, and an activity we often did was watching my TNG videos. Since that could be considered a kind of customary "service" provided to the "congregation" I guess I should have registered as a church. Would have saved my family a hell of a lot of money in property taxes, since churches are exempt from that in Canada.
Same with the local branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism. I didn't start that, but I was active for 12 years. Funny how we did everything on that list (since nobody in the group was Muslim, you could say we shared a non-belief in the Koran), and yet the SCA, by its own rules at that time, was required to be
religion-neutral. People dressed as monks? Fine. Crosses as jewelry or heraldic devices? Fine. Public prayer services? Not fine. Any prayer services were to be held privately. The board of directors tried to ban public weddings as well, but our group decided that a bunch of people in California weren't going to dictate whether or not we could hold SCA weddings here in Canada, so we did a James Kirk: "The word is 'no.' We are therefore doing it anyway."
If you don't want to go to a church, don't go to a church. There are tons of other charities out there.
Sometimes people don't have the option to avoid entering a church. Take the way Canadian elections are held. Many polling stations are set up in churches or Catholic school gyms. There are religious posters and symbols all over the place. Some candidates seem to think they need to plaster their church credentials all over their campaign material (campaign material isn't allowed in the polling station, but for those candidates, they get that extra nudge from the church/Catholic school setting).
This is not exactly separating church and state. Polling stations should be in neutral places, not places favoring one candidate's religious views. It would be one thing if all candidates were able to separate their religion from their politics, but some are completely
incapable of that.
As far as "atheists having an agenda" I think it's mostly the wish to diminish the influence religious people (and sometimes organized religion) are trying to have on other people's lives.
That is definitely where a lot of anti-clericalism in Italy is coming from and if I lived in America I would be even more worried about it.
It's not clear to me what you're hypothetically more worried about. Is it atheists having an agenda, or atheists trying to diminish the influence that religious/organized religion tries to have on other people's lives? Could you clarify this, please?
Doom Shepherd, "Evengelical Atheist" is a very good description of some of hardliners who are constantly harping on about their non-belief. I've been calling them "born again atheists" but they can go further than that because some do try and convince you without regard to time and place. For example, vilifying believers at a Christening or funeral within the walls of a church. If they were respectful they would wait until they were outside the church. It's rather like insulting a host in their own home.
It's not right to vilify believers outside the church, either.
If you must vilify them (said with sarcasm on), wait until both of you are on neutral ground. Of course, if they come to your home and start vilifying atheism, respond as you see fit.
Interesting articles. A&E ran a 2-night program 15 years ago, not long before the turn of the century. It was a countdown of the 100 most influential people of the previous millennium. Shakespeare was #5. The #1 spot went to Johann Gutenberg.
For someone who lived in the "Dark Ages" the influence of his invention spread rapidly and changed the world.
I think one of the problem is the tendency for many people to treat atheists as a united block. No-one says theists should be held responsible for the wrongs of all religions.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I've had Stalin/Hitler/any other murderous tyrant thrown in my face. I could pay a significant chunk of my rent.
It's tiresome, being blamed for things that happened on the other side of the world in countries where I've never been, in a time before even my mother was born.
To use Richard Dawkins' misogyny to belittle my beliefs is as wrong as me blaming the Hindu religion for something that a Muslim does wrong. Except for his knowledge on evolutionary biology I have little time for Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins has said some extraordinarily clueless things about women. I will agree with that. However, there's a person with whom I regularly cross paths who periodically trots out that Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss are immoral because of their previous marriages ending, and somehow... that makes them bad scientists? Unless they murdered their previous wives and somehow avoided going to prison for it, I don't care what happened in their marriages. That's their business, and has no bearing on whether or not Dawkins is a competent evolutionary biologist or Krauss is a competent astrophysicist.
