Tuesday, 18 January 2011

• Why can't you leave us alone?

  This comes courtesy of The Thinking Atheist, and it's perfect.

  The protests come every day from the religious, and they go something like this:

  "Why spend your time disproving God?"

  "Why not just let people believe what they want to believe?"

  "Why can't you leave religion alone?"

  As one YouTube commenter said recently,  "No one can explain to me why it is so important to convince theists to abandon their beliefs."

  The answer is simple.  Pages like this one exist because religion exists.

  Religion permeates our culture, shows up on our doorsteps with literature, scriptures and threats of eternal damnation, influences our science books, contaminates our political systems, indoctrinates our children and postulates that its doctrine must be followed, lest we be destroyed in body, in soul, or both.

  Non-believers are simply responding to the avalanche of religious messages that bears down upon us daily.

  Religion gets carte blanche to be as vocal as it wants, to knock on our doors and accost us in our homes, in our places of work, in our personal and professional lives.   Believers are charged with a life mission to preach, teach, disciple, shout it from the mountaintops and to "go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature."  Religion...is everywhere.

  Ask yourself.  When's the last time an atheist rang your doorbell with the Good News of Humanism?  How often do you find Richard Dawkins books in the dresser drawers of your hotel rooms?  When was the last atheist temple erected in your neighborhood?  Have you ever attended an atheist revival?  Has atheism demanded 10% of your household income?  How many dedicated atheist television channels come through your satellite dish?  How many atheist verses were you instructed to memorize as a child?  When's the last time someone thanked a FARMER (or even the cook) at the dinner table instead of God?

  On a more radical front, what's the name of the last atheist who sawed the head off of an "infidel?"  Or sentenced a shrouded woman to death for displeasing an oppressive husband?  Or strapped explosives to his belt in order to kill hundreds in a public square?  Or publicly hung a gay person for his choice of lifestyle?

  It's everywhere.  Religion is a pounding drum that has gone mostly unanswered for a long, long time.  And religion is not satisfied with merely existing quietly in the homes and hearts of the faithful.  Its very nature compels the believer to proselytize, preach, promote, convince, convert and prevail.  If you play on the team of the religious, your game plan is to stay, always, on offense.

  Throughout our history, those who raise a simple hand of protest against these advances have been portrayed as the real problem.  Religion has attempted to marginalize and defeat legitimate questions and concerns by indignantly portraying any resistors as misguided, immoral, rudderless, angry, miserable, lost and alone.

  And when skepticism challenges wildly improbable (or impossible) stories found in the bible, the Qur'an and other holy books, the religious wail, "Why can't you just leave us alone?"

  The irony is thick.

  And religion impedes curiosity and inhibits learning, as the much-maligned Creation Museum proves.  It stymies critical thinking.  It stretches us to believe the unbelievable.  And it poisons the foundational teachings we are using to train up the generations of tomorrow.

  Pages like mine exist as a response... a counter-argument  to ensure that the cacophony of superstition does not go unchallenged.  And if your belief system is so undeniable, so factual, so provable, so real and so true, certainly it can withstand the opposing viewpoints presented here and elsewhere.  Certainly, it can survive the acid tests.

  Just remember.  Religion began the argument.  It amplifies itself before the world.  And it threatens all mankind with punishment upon its rejection.

  We are atheists.  We are moral.  We are reasonable.  We are thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate, happy, fulfilled and well-informed.

  And as long as religion insists on fixing human beings who are not broken, we will respond with the evidence that we are not the problem.

  I say we take it a step further and truly identify the problem: irrationality.  It promotes stupidity and is the greatest force working against humanity - and religion tells us we need it.

   

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