Ok, enough. I've been reading these atheism diaries with a great deal of interest, but I'm getting increasingly annoyed here.
I love talking about different ways of understanding the world. I was a biology major in college and completely devoured the whole E.O. Wilson "it's all evolution" school of evolutionary psychology, but I've probably spent as much time on Beliefnet as Daily Kos. Part of the reason I'm a Democrat is because this is the only party that has evidenced any real commitment to maintaining religious pluralism in this country. So I usually love this type of discussion. But the tone and content of the latest atheist diaries is really starting to disturb me.
First, let me point out that I really respect both of the posters I'm about to cite. I've been huge fans of their past work, and both have had a major influence on the way I think about politics. So I'm particularly disappointed in the way that they've chosen to discuss their ideas on people of faith.
Yes, it would be nice if there was a magic invisible sky wizard who took care of us when we die and redress injustices committed against you while alive by others. It would be nice if your kid or your mom or your loved one who was cruelly cut down by painful lingering cancer was still 'out there' somewhere. It would be nice if there was a Santa Claus, and I don't mean that to sound flippant; Who wouldn't want there to be a Santa Claus? For that matter who wouldn't like to be able to think themselves into the air and fly like a bird at will? Well, it doesn't matter how nice the idea of Santa is, there isn't a real Santa, and you can concentrate for all your worth and flap your arms for days, you will not fly.
It doesn't make sense, there is no evidence for it, and I'm an adult. I deal in reality as it is, not as I wish it would be, so that I can perhaps change that reality. And that's important. Because if I could be said to 'believe in' anything, it's that I believe in the human potential for progress, problem solving, and flexibility. That's how we've managed to solve problems in the past.
-From
Darksyde's"Why I'm an Atheist"
Religion and spirituality belong to the private sphere. If someone finds solace, peace, fulfillment in his/her beliefs and religious practice, that's great. If you find an anchor for your personal values and morality in religious doctrine, that's also a good thing. But religion is NOT THE ONLY SOURCE OF VALUES AND MORALITY.
- From
Jerome a Paris' "God- you Americans are crazy"
Pretty ridiculous, huh? A world gone bonkers, populated and completely run by a majority of people who are frankly clinically insane, dangerously immature, often violent, historically monstrous, completely irrational, closed to any internal questioning, convinced you're either stupid, evil, or dangerous, and hoping for all they're worth to infect you with the same mimetic virus. Can you even imagine how whacked it would be to have to deal with that kind of shit? To have to go through life walking on eggshells on the subject of Santa lest you offend a believer and they blow their stack at you, target you for persecution for political purposes, and/or question your worth, your job, your very life?
Well, if you can imagine all that, you know for just a few moments how it feels everyday to be a grown adult surrounded by wishful childish thinkers clinging to nonsensical myths as if they were real and insisting, in fact force feeding, that mythology to you; people who sometimes turn quite violent, get downright nasty if you express the slightest disagreement with their specific version of the Jolly Old Guy; people who happen to wield incredibly powerful arsenals of WMDs and massive traditional military might as well as running everything from the local police department to the IRS; people who are now are reopening torture chambers and gulags with armies of pundits cackling with delight at the very thought of returning to the good ole torture days.
-- from
Darksyde's"What it's Like to be an Atheist"
I have been posting at this site since the 2002 midterm elections. That's 3 years of online debate, namecalling, troll-fighting, internal division, and thought-provoking debate. I've seen virtually every division that plagues the party in reality be repeated in microcosm on this site. However, one of the things that has been kept to a bare minimum here has been the tedious tendency to assert the superiority of one interest group or another. This is a problem that I've encountered in virtually every group of liberals, and I'm proud that we've mostly avoided it.
But I fear that statements like those above have crossed the line of late. Let me put it this way. In all my time here, I have NEVER seen anyone attack atheism as a way of understanding the world. I have NEVER seen a poster demand an atheist accept his or her belief system. I have NEVER seen a call to bring everyone into line under a given set of religious values. If anything, I've only seen people of faith meekly defending themselves. And I can generalize that. I've never heard a Democrat on the national scene discuss any sort of hatred for unbelievers-- and that included Evangelical Christians like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. I've never heard either Reverend Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton condemn atheists. I don't recall the Catholic John Kerry being particularly offended by secularism. This is not a political site that is hostile to people who think there's nothing out there.
And yet, people of faith on DKos continue to be subjected to lecture after lecture about the terrible costs of faith. We continue to be cast as weak-minded and stupid. We're cast as childish morons at best, and violent fundies at worst. The assumption here seems to be that if you don't accept the thought process of atheism, you have to be one step away from Pat Robertson. This is not what I call pluralism. This is not the way you build a diverse and accepting society.
As I see it, religion is simply a way to transmit moral philosophy across a society. It's a way to discuss how things should be for people who haven't invested enough time pondering Kierkegaard in coffeehouses. It's a way to prescribe modes of behavior in a manner that makes people want to follow them-- whether due to fear of punishment or desire for a reward. It's philosophy bolstered with the power of myth. Now you can choose whether or not to accept the mythologies associated with various faiths. I would say that most people on Daily Kos, and on the left, have chosen to seek their own interpretation of their faiths' myths. But choosing not to take mythology literally is different from choosing to reject the underlying philosophy. Most of us have chosen not to do that-- to maintain the values of our faith traditions without trying to prescribe those values for everyone else. I'd argue that the Republicans have done the opposite, and stripped all the philosophical weight out of Christianity in order to use it as nothing but a blunt cudgel.
I'm a person who was raised Hindu, went to a public school basically run by Evangelicals in the Bible Belt, followed it with a Catholic university in a major city (with one of the biggest college LGBT organizations in the city), and I now attend a Buddhist temple (although I still consider myself Hindu). It's not so fucking easy to write us all off, or to enclose us all in the same box. There are lots of people who follow the big three Abrahamic faiths here-- Christians, Jews, Muslims-- and there's tons of diversity between them. But there's also a whole hell of a lot of agnostics, Universalists, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and other people of faith here. Many of us-- in fact I'd say most of us-- face a great deal of ridicule, intolerance, and conversion pressure. In fact, I'd venture that the Sikh with his turban, the Muslim with his head covering, and the Hasidim with her mandated style of dress has faced a lot more open religious intolerance than any given upper-middle class white bread atheist. I will guarantee you that NOBODY on this site, regardless of faith, strongly supports the values and agenda of the Religious Right. Nobody is going to call for you to convert "or else". But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the same respect in turn.