From the post-bicameral mind:
Strike up a conversation with a religious person, and claim to be a member of any religion other than the one of your subject. Usually this will result in a nod, or maybe a weird look, or maybe some questions.
Now, strike up another conversation with a religious person, and this time, say you are an atheist. Whole other ball of wax, huh? Popular reactions include:
- “You’re Stupid”
- “You’re going to hell”
- “I’ll pray for you”
- “You think you have all the answers, huh?”
- “You’re the reason the world is all fucked up!”
Lesson learned:
Generally speaking, religious people do not care where you get your morality from, as long as you don’t get it from yourself. In fact, the idea that a person is capable of not worshipping a god and figuring out for themselves what is “good” and “bad” is so unthinkable to most religious people, that they often endlessly drone on about how we somehow “worship” things like science and material “stuff”, as if that’s even possible.This is because religion is based on external authority, and that external authority says that in order to survive, you must listen to– you guessed it– external authority. Big surprise there.
Indeed, this may help explain why most theists despise atheists, while they tolerate theists of other faiths.
It’s like a slave who tolerates slaves with different masters, but hates a free man. He’s spent his entire life convincing himself that slavery is inevitable, and is actually a good thing… but the existence of a free man (who is actually happier, too) is a threat to his world view.
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A good post for a post-bicameral consciousness. Aye, Julian Jeynes knew what it was to hear voices. Today we call them thoughts, where once they were the voice of deity.
Of course, thinking for oneself is anathema to someone who believes in toeing the line and towing the weight of their ancestor’s superstitions.
Hail the sky fairy!
How true! It reminds me of how my wife and I finally figured out a way to shut up the Jehovah’s Witnesses that inevitably accosted us. Once we converted to Buddhism we found that when they came up to us we just responded, “No thank you, we’re Buddhist.” The look on their faces was golden. They had answers for everything else apparently, but not that. They usually mumbled something and left.
[quote post="158"]Strike up a conversation with a religious person, and claim to be a member of any religion other than the one of your subject. Usually this will result in a nod, or maybe a weird look, or maybe some questions.
Now, strike up another conversation with a religious person, and this time, say you are an atheist. Whole other ball of wax, huh? Popular reactions include:
* “You’re Stupid”
* “You’re going to hell”
* “I’ll pray for you”
* “You think you have all the answers, huh?”
* “You’re the reason the world is all fucked up!”[/quote]
Pedro, if you actually had these experiences… WOW. You must be from an extremely STRUCTURED religious society.
I myself came from a small town, and moved to a large city. Neither of which have I seen such a reaction from the GENERAL religious people, to atheism. Sure some people are just judgemental. But not because they are religious… because they are judgemental.
The other four are harsh, but I must ask, what’s wrong with “I’ll pray for you.”?
Even thinking that prayer won’t make a difference at all, it at least means that the person speaking will think to wish you well.
Kren: that part - as the different color, the quotes before it, and the fact that I said which site I quoted it from should suggest - wasn’t mine. I was quoting, and commenting on, a post in a different blog.
I live in Europe, and we’re actually pretty secular over here. Most people here are agnostics - there are also many atheists, but atheism is a “strong position”, which requires a bit of thinking, and most people are too apathetic to have “strong positions”. So I am not usually attacked for my atheism… unless I go online.
Still, replies like the ones I quoted are common. Look at the “hate mail against the FSM” section at the FSM site, and you’ll see a lot of those - I don’t mean just a couple, but dozens, perhaps hundreds, on a site that is relatively new. Read some other atheist sites. For some reason, mine has been relatively spared from those comments, but I see them all the time in others. “You’re going to hell if you don’t accept Jesus”, “I’ll be laughing from heaven while you burn”, and so on.
Or see the article mentioned here for examples of what many people in America think about atheists and atheism.
In many places, atheists are seen as the scum of the earth, as the devil incarnate, as amoral monsters. This is not my invention.
These days, you can’t discriminate against blacks. You can discriminate against gays, if you say you’re doing it because of God or the Bible. But atheists… not only can you discriminate, it’s actually fashionable to do so.