Why do Americans still dislike atheists?

Washington Post ^ | 05/01/2011 | Gregory Pauland, Phil Zuckerman

[SeekAndFind]

Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can’t join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; in other words, nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.

Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens.

Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close.

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

Consider that at the societal level, murder rates are far lower in secularized nations such as Japan or Sweden than they are in the much more religious United States, which also has a much greater portion of its population in prison.

[Sacajaweau]

Atheists have become a pain in the butt...just like gays. It’s their problem. I’m sick of them infringing on MY life.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I think that atheists can generally be subdivided into different groups, each of which gets a different response from non-atheists.

1) The first group are those who have personally rejected religion, and are very bitter about it. For whatever reason, they are still filled with hate and hurt, and want to “get even” with religion.

2) The second group are those who lost interest in religion. They no longer can embrace it, intellectually or emotionally, and just want to leave it behind. Oddly enough, many of these are conservatives who have forsaken a “liberalized” church, equating it with religion as a whole.

3) The third group were raised in a non-religious family, who see religion as arcane and alien, something that people “different from us” do. No push or pull into religion.

4) Those who are philosophically atheist and anti-religious. Radical leftist fruitcakes. Plenty of them, unfortunately. “There is no God because Marx says so.”

[only1percent]

Atheism as a self-identification is always going to be unpopular, because most loud proclamations of atheism end up being more about religious people's supposed stupidity or naivete than about the atheist's personal conviction that God doesn't exist. However, for every one of them, there are a dozen people who have no belief but simply don't care enough about religion to make a point of it.

However, the social acceptance of irreligiousness is growing by leaps and bounds. Between people who have no religious affiliation, and those who find it convenient to claim whatever their ancestral religion happens to be in the rare cases where such affiliation is inquired about, but couldn't otherwise care less about it, it's a clear majority of people I encounter in every walk of life in New York and California ... and culture only moves in one direction (from New York and California to the rest of the country).

Time is also a huge factor. People who are brought up religious, but no longer practice or believe, will always have a certain affinity to religion (or a hatered towards that is just affinity turned inside out). Their children, will have only the vague connection to whatever it was their grandparents believed or practiced; maybe they were baptized but that's about it. Their children will regard Christianity as no different from Greek or Norse mythology. Not too many people in that third generation in the US, but there are lots in Europe. Part of European's inability to deal sensibly with radicalization among Muslim immigrant populations is third-generation irreligious people just being unable to understand at a gut level what they heck is up with such people.

[daniel1212]

There are many factors behind the crime rates, mainly poverty. But while atheist can overall be relatively moral, and even more so than some religious, it does not gain its moral reasoning out of thin air, but is influenced by religious morality.

Yet its objectively baseless moral reasoning can easily allow it to justify engaging in things which are equal to or worse than religion that looks to an authority higher than the Christian scriptures, as Mao, Pol Pot, etc,. evidenced. And such things as the Inquisitions or Utah war were the result of allegiance to an authority over the Bible.

And as man will always worship something, atheism fosters “political religion.”

Atheists today can justify removing children from Christian parents, equating the latter to engaging in child abuse by denying Godless evolution, or asserting that requiring reciting “one nation under God” is such. And the blind conclusions many militant atheists derive from the Bible impugns their rationality and objectively

Links
http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/Atheism1.html

Atheism’s Body Count - Ideology and Human Suffering - http://www.scholarscorner.com/apologia/deathtoll

http://www.epsociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=45&mode=detail (Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?)

http://www.existence-of-god.com/

http://www.atheistdelusion.net/

[pnh102]

Most doubt the existence of the Tooth Fairy but they don’t spill oceans of real and virtual ink writing to convince others of same.

Of course that's another argument that shoots down the idea that atheism isn't a religion. There'd be no such needs to "evangelize" if that were not the case.

[tbw2]

I agree. The animosity of Christians of atheists is the attempts to ban Christian symbols in public - "your town Christmas tree tradition of 100 years is now a violation of Church and State, take it down", "your Easter banners in the yard were fine for years but take it down because it's now offensive", "religious speech is now offensive, you shouldn't have first Amendment rights anymore", "your religious beliefs of 2000 years are no longer politically correct, stop preaching those non-PC parts or rewrite the 2K old document to fit Y2K morality.".

When a group goes out of its way to offend Christians on their major holidays and to ban them from the public sphere, you'll make people hate you.

[captbarney]

let’s name a few “peaceful” atheists- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro

[susannah59]

My son has a friend of several years who professes to be an atheist.

My son says "He believes what he believes, I believe what I believe." They don't discuss those beliefs. They spend their time together talking about the things they do have in common. If either spent time trying to "convert" the other, their friendship would have lasted about 5 minutes.

[Minn]

On basic questions of morality and human decency ? issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights

So atheists tend to be leftists that equate coddling Muslim terrorists, sparing the lives of murderous monsters, homosexuality, and bslieving global warming BS with morality. Big surprise. And any notion that athiests demonstrate less anti-Semitism is highly suspect.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Because they are evangelical fundamentalists who try to force everybody else to think like them.

[achilles2000]

How quaint. The authors failed to mention the vrey different demographics of, say, Vermont and Mississippi. Compare Detroit andMississippi and the results would probably be quite different.

[pnh102]

let’s name a few “peaceful” atheists- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro

I usually leave out Hitler in such lists as he did espouse some sort of faith. He called it Christianity but of course he was no Christian. Instead of Hitler, use Stalin, who was most definitely a card-carrying atheist.

As for morals, these atheists seem to like to borrow those which come from a Judeo-Christian worldview. Applied consistently, they will make someone successful (though I've seen numerous personal examples with all the atheists I know which can shoot down every point listed in the article about how atheists are supposedly "better" than those of faith).

The problem is though, that for atheism, by definition all morals are relative to the person. One atheist might think that behaving towards others in Judeo-Christian way is right and good, and another, such as the ones you listed, would think that being a murderous tyrant towards others is also right and good.

To put it another way, if I was an atheist, and I saw someone who had something I wanted, why would it be wrong in a moral (not legal) sense for me to kill that person and steal that item? From a Christian perspective, I could say that God commands me not to do that, and He will execute judgement on me if I do it.

[Allegra]

I don't dislike atheists.

I do pray for them that they see the light before it's too late.

I do dislike the way so many of them fight any display of Christianity (freedom of religion does include us, too) and try to force their lack of belief upon is.

I equate a lot of atheists to vegetarians in that they seem to want so badly to call attention to themselves.

"Look at meeee.....I'm an atheist! Isn't that cool?"

[Big Bronson]

Why do Americans hate atheists? Because the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, right on down to Timmy McVeigh...are informed in their behavior by atheism.

Once you buy into the fiction that you are nothing more than a tube of meat, it's easy to rationalize exterminating all the other meattubes with whom you disagree. There's no difference between a human and a cockroach once you've surrendered your soul to Godlessness.

The irony is that atheism is itself a metaphysical belief. Even the most revered scientific theories are, at their core, based on some metaphysical belief.

[LaineyDee]

that whole patronizing ‘oh you still believe in that imaginary man in the sky?’....

That's okay... they will too someday.. :)

[Notary Sojac]

There are lots of atheists who are conservative.

There are plenty more devout fundamentalist Christians (my state of West Virginia is full of them) who vote the Democrat, pro-government cheese ticket every chance they get.

[RatRipper]

On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

Imagine that. When they measure atheists against humanist concepts of morality, they turn out to be fine and upright people. Hello . . . Perfect example of liberals "ever seeing but never perceiving". Libtards, man does not establish standards of right & wrong, good & evil . . . God does. You guys have some catching up to do, all the way back to the Garden of Eden.

[Renderofveils]

let’s name a few “peaceful” atheists- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro

Alongside Isaac Asimov, Johannes Brahms, Gautama Buddha, George Orwell (who incidentally was a fierce critic of moral relativism,) Ayn Rand, and Leonard Susskind... I think it's safe to say that atheists are like any other group of people. A few good ones, a few evil ones, and quite a few in the middle there somewhere.

[freekitty]

They miss the mark when they say God doesn’t exist because they can’t see God. They need to open their eyes. God is all around. He is about faith in your heart and soul. He is not an intellectual discussion which is the biggest excuse so many people who want to avoid give.

[freekitty]

God is not an intellectual discussion.