Free Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless by Greta Christina

And I’m shocked at how many times I’ve gotten the answer, “No, not really.” It leaves me baffled, practically speechless. (Hey, I said “practically.”) I mean, even leaving out the pragmatic failure and the moral and philosophical bankruptcy of prioritizing pleasantry over reality… isn’t it disrespectful to the god you supposedly believe in? If you genuinely loved God, wouldn’t you want to understand him as best you can? When faced with different ideas about God, wouldn’t you want to ask some questions, and look at the supporting evidence for the different views, and try to figure out which one is probably true? Doesn’t it seem insulting to God to treat that question as if it didn’t matter?
    There are profound differences between religions. They are not trivial. And the different religions cannot all be right. (Although, as atheists like to point out, they can all be wrong.) Jesus cannot both be and not be the son of God. God cannot be both an intentional, sentient being and a diffuse supernatural force animating all life. God cannot be both a personal intervening force in our daily lives and a vague metaphorical abstraction of the concepts of love and existence. Dead people cannot both go to Heaven and be reincarnated. Etc. Etc. Etc.
    When faced with these different ideas, are you seriously going to shrug your shoulders, and say “My, how fascinating, look at all these different ideas, isn’t it amazing how many ways people have of seeing God, what a magnificent tapestry of faith humanity has created”?
    Do you really not care which of these ideas is, you know, true?
    A part of me can see where the ecumenicalists are coming from. I think they look at a history filled with religious war and hatred, bigotry and violence… and they recoil in horror and revulsion. And they should. I recoil from that stuff, too. It’s not why I’m an atheist — I’m an atheist because I think the religion hypothesis is implausible and unsupported by any good evidence — but it’s a big part of why I’m an atheist activist. Heck — it’s the main reason I wrote this book.
    But the ecumenicalists seem to think there are only two options for dealing with religious differences: (a) intolerant evangelism and theocracy, in which people with different religious views are shunned at best and outlawed or brutalized at worst… or (b) uncritical interfaith ecumenicalism, in which differences between religious views are ignored whenever possible, and handled with kid gloves when some sort of handling is necessary. Ecumenicalists eagerly embrace the second option, largely in horrified response to the first… and they tend to treat any criticism of any religion as if it were automatically part of that ugly, bigoted, violent history.
    They don’t see that there’s a third option.
    They don’t see that there’s an option of respecting the important freedom of religious belief… while retaining the right to criticize those beliefs, and to treat them just like we’d treat any other idea we think is mistaken. They don’t see the option of being passionate about the right to religious freedom, of fully supporting the right to come to our own conclusions about religion as one of our fundamental human rights… while at the same time seeing the right to criticize ideas we don’t agree with as an equally fundamental right. They don’t see the option of debating and disagreeing without resorting to hatred and violence. They don’t see the option of disagreeing with what people say, while defending to the death their right to say it.
    You know. The option advocated by most atheist activists.
    I will say this: If the only religious believers in the world were progressive and moderate ecumenical ones, most atheists wouldn’t care very much. We’d still disagree with religion; we’d still think it was implausible at best and ridiculous at worst. But it wouldn’t get up our noses that much. We’d see it about the same way