WHY GRETA CHRISTINA IS ANGRY AT RELIGION
https://www.gretachristina.typepad.com
I'm angry that according to a recent Gallup poll, only 45 percent of Americans
would vote for an atheist for President.
I'm angry that atheist conventions have to have extra security, including
hand-held metal detectors and bag searches, because of fatwas and death threats.
I'm angry that atheist soldiers -- in the U.S. armed forces -- have had prayer
ceremonies pressured on them and atheist meetings broken up by Christian
superior officers, in direct violation of the First Amendment. I'm angry that
evangelical Christian groups are being given exclusive access to proselytize on
military bases -- again in the U.S. armed forces, again in direct violation of
the First Amendment. I'm angry that atheist soldiers who are complaining about
this are being harassed and are even getting death threats from Christian
soldiers and superior officers -- yet again, in the U.S. armed forces. And I'm
angry that Christians still say smug, sanctimonious things like, "there are no
atheists in foxholes." You know why you're not seeing atheists in foxholes?
Because believers are threatening to shoot them if they come out.
I'm angry that the 41st President of the United States, George Herbert Walker
Bush, said of atheists, in my lifetime, "No, I don't know that atheists should
be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one
nation under God." My President. No, I didn't vote for him, but he was still my
President, and he still said that my lack of religious belief meant that I
shouldn't be regarded as a citizen.
I'm angry that it took until 1961 for atheists to be guaranteed the right to
serve on juries, testify in court, or hold public office in every state in the
country.
I'm angry that almost half of Americans believe in creationism. And not a broad,
"God had a hand in evolution" creationism, but a strict, young-earth, "God
created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000
years" creationism.
And on that topic: I'm angry that school boards all across this country are
still -- 82 years after the Scopes trial -- having to spend time and money and
resources on the fight to have evolution taught in the schools. School boards
are not exactly loaded with time and money and resources, and any of the time/
money/ resources that they're spending fighting this stupid fight is time/
money/ resources that they're not spending, you know, teaching.
I'm angry that women are dying of AIDS in Africa and South America because the
Catholic Church has convinced them that using condoms makes baby Jesus cry.
I'm angry that women are having septic abortions -- or are being forced to have
unwanted children who they resent and mistreat -- because religious
organizations have gotten laws passed making abortion illegal or inaccessible.
I'm angry about what happened to Galileo. Still. And I'm angry that it took the
Catholic Church until 1992 to apologize for it.
I get angry when advice columnists tell their troubled letter-writers to talk to
their priest or minister or rabbi... when there is absolutely no legal
requirement that a religious leader have any sort of training in counseling or
therapy.
And I get angry when religious leaders offer counseling and advice to troubled
people -- sex advice, relationship advice, advice on depression and stress, etc.
-- not based on any evidence about what actually does and does not work in
people's brains and lives, but on the basis of what their religious doctrine
tells them God wants for us.
I'm angry at preachers who tell women in their flock to submit to their husbands
because it's the will of God, even when their husbands are beating them within
an inch of their lives.
I'm angry that so many believers treat prayer as a sort of cosmic shopping list
for God. I'm angry that believers pray to win sporting events, poker hands,
beauty pageants, and more. As if they were the center of the universe, as if God
gives a shit about who wins the NCAA Final Four -- and as if the other teams/
players/ contestants weren't praying just as hard.
I'm especially angry that so many believers treat prayer as a cosmic shopping
list when it comes to health and illness. I'm angry that this belief leads to
the revolting conclusion that God deliberately makes people sick so they’ll pray
to him to get better. And I'm angry that they foist this belief on sick and
dying children -- in essence teaching them that, if they don't get better, it's
their fault. That they didn't pray hard enough, or they didn't pray right, or
God just doesn't love them enough.
And I get angry when other believers insist that the cosmic shopping list isn't
what religion and prayer are really about; that their own sophisticated theology
is the true understanding of God. I get angry when believers insist that the
shopping list is a straw man, an outmoded form of religion and prayer that
nobody takes seriously, and it's absurd for atheists to criticize it.
I get angry when believers use terrible, grief-soaked tragedies as either
opportunities to toot their own horns and talk about how wonderful their God and
their religion are... or as opportunities to attack and demonize atheists and
secularism.
....
I'm angry that Mother Teresa took her personal suffering and despair at her lost
faith in God, and turned it into an obsession that led her to treat suffering as
a beautiful gift from Christ to humanity, a beautiful offering from humanity to
God, and a necessary part of spiritual salvation. And I'm angry that this
obsession apparently led her to offer grotesquely inadequate medical care and
pain relief at her hospitals and hospices, in essence taking her personal crisis
of faith out on millions of desperately poor and helpless people.
I'm angry at the trustee of the local Presbyterian church who told his teenage
daughter that he didn't actually believe in God or religion, but that it was
important to keep up his work because without religion there would be no
morality in the world.
I'm angry that so many parents and religious leaders terrorize children -- who
(a) have brains that are hard-wired to trust adults and believe what they're
told, and (b) are very literal-minded -- with vivid, traumatizing stories of
eternal burning and torture to ensure that they'll be too frightened to even
question religion.
I'm angrier when religious leaders explicitly tell children – and adults, for
that matter -- that the very questioning of religion and the existence of hell
is a dreadful sin, one that will guarantee them that hell is where they'll end
up.
I'm angry that children get taught by religion to hate and fear their bodies and
their sexuality. And I'm especially angry that female children get taught by
religion to hate and fear their femaleness, and that queer children get taught
by religion to hate and fear their queerness.
...
I'm angry that huge swaths of public policy in this country -- not just on
same-sex marriage, but on abortion and stem-cell research and sex education in
schools -- are being based, not on evidence of which policies do and don't work
and what is and isn't true about the world, but on religious texts written
hundreds or thousands of years ago, and on their own personal feelings about how
those texts should be interpreted, with no supporting evidence whatsoever -- and
no apparent concept of why any evidence should be needed.
I get angry when believers trumpet every good thing that's ever been done in the
name of religion as a reason why religion is a force for good... and then, when
confronted with the horrible evils done in religion's name, say that those evils
weren't done because of religion, were done because of politics of greed or fear
or whatever, would have been done anyway even without religion, and shouldn't be
counted as religion's fault. (Of course, to be fair, I also get angry when
atheists do the opposite: chalk up every evil thing done in the name of religion
as a black mark on religion's record, but then insist that the good things were
done for other reasons and would have been done anyway, etc. Neither side gets
to have it both ways.)
I'm angry at the believers who put decals on their cars with a Faith fish eating
a Darwin fish... and who think that's clever, who think that religious faith
really should triumph over science and evidence. I'm angry at believers who have
so little respect for the physical world their God supposedly created that they
feel perfectly content to ignore the mountains of physical evidence piling up
around them about that real world; perfectly content to see that world as
somehow less real and true than their personal opinions about God.
(Note: The litany of specific grievances is now more than halfway over. Analysis
of why anger is necessary and valuable is coming up soon. Promise.)
I get angry when religious leaders opportunistically use religion, and people's
trust and faith in religion, to steal, cheat, lie, manipulate the political
process, take sexual advantage of their followers, and generally behave like the
scum of the earth. I get angry when it happens over and over and over again. And
I get angry when people see this happening and still say that atheism is bad
because, without religion, people would have no basis for morality or ethics,
and no reason not to just do whatever they wanted.
I get angry when religious believers make arguments against atheism -- and make
accusations against atheists -- without having bothered to talk to any atheists
or read any atheist writing. I get angry when they trot out the same old
"Atheism is a nihilistic philosophy, with no joy or meaning to life and no basis
for morality or ethics"... when if they spent ten minutes in the atheist
blogosphere, they would discover countless atheists who experience great joy and
meaning in their lives, and are intensely concerned about right and wrong.
I get angry when believers use the phrase "atheist fundamentalist" without
apparently knowing what the word "fundamentalist" means. Call people pig-headed,
call them stubborn, call them snarky, call them intolerant even. But unless you
can point to the text to which these "fundamentalist" atheists literally and
strictly adhere without question, then please shut the hell up about us being
fundamentalist.
I get angry when religious believers base their entire philosophy of life on
what is, at best, a hunch; when they ignore or reject or rationalize any
evidence that contradicts that hunch or calls it into question... and then
accuse atheists of being close-minded and ignoring the obvious truth.
And I get angry when believers glorify religious faith without evidence as a
positive virtue, a character trait that makes people good and noble... and then
continue to accuse atheists of being close-minded and ignoring the obvious
truth.
I get angry when believers say that they can know the truth -- the greatest
truth of all about the nature of the universe, namely the source of all
existence -- simply by sitting quietly and listening to their heart... and then
accuse atheists of being arrogant. (This isn't just arrogant towards atheists
and naturalists, either. It's arrogant towards people of other religions who
have sat just as quietly, listened to their hearts with just as much sincerity,
and come to completely opposite conclusions about God and the soul and the
universe.)
And I get angry when believers say that the entire unimaginable enormity of the
universe was made solely and specifically for the human race -- when atheists,
by contrast, say that humanity is a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, an
infinitesimal eyeblink in the vastness of time and space -- and yet again,
believers accuse atheists of being arrogant.
I get angry when believers say things like, "Yes, of course, the human mind
isn't perfect, we see what we expect to see, we see faces and patterns and
intention when they aren't necessarily there... but that couldn't be happening
with me. The patterns I see in my life... they couldn't possibly be coincidence
or confirmation bias. I'm definitely seeing the hand of God." (And then, once
again, those same believers accuse atheists of being close-minded and only
seeing what we want to see.)
....
I get angry when believers say at the beginning of an argument that their belief
is based on reason and evidence, and at the end of the argument say things like,
"It just seems that way to me," or, "I feel it in my heart"... as if that were a
clincher. I mean, couldn't they have said that at the beginning of the argument,
and not wasted my f***ing time? My time is valuable and increasingly limited,
and I have better things to do with it than debating with people who pretend to
care about evidence and reason but ultimately don't.
I'm angry that I have to know more about their f***ing religion than the
believers do. I get angry when believers say things about the tenets and texts
of their religion that are flatly untrue, and I have to correct them on it.
I get angry when believers treat any criticism of their religion -- i.e.,
pointing out that their religion is a hypothesis about the world and a
philosophy of it, and asking it to stand up on its own in the marketplace of
ideas -- as insulting and intolerant. I get angry when believers accuse atheists
of being intolerant for saying things like, "I don't agree with you," "I think
you're mistaken about that," "That doesn't make any sense," "I think that
position is morally indefensible," and "What evidence do you have to support
that?"
And on that point: I get angry when Christians in the United States -- members
of the single most powerful and influential religious group in the country, in
the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world -- act like beleaguered
victims, martyrs being thrown to the lions all over again, whenever anyone
criticizes them or they don't get their way.
I get angry when believers respond to some or all of these offenses by saying,
"Well, that's not the true faith. Hating queers/ rejecting science/ stifling
questions and dissent... that's not the true faith. People who do that aren't
real (Christians/ Jews/ Muslims/ Hindus/ etc.)." As if they had a f***ing
pipeline to God. As if they had any reason at all to think that they know for
sure what God wants, and that the billions of others who disagree with them just
obviously have it wrong. (Besides -- I'm an atheist. The "They just aren't doing
religion right" argument is not going to cut it with me. I don't think any of
you have it right. To me, it all looks like something that people just made up.)
On that topic: I get angry when religious believers insist that their
interpretation of their religion and religious text is the right one, and that
fellow believers with an opposite interpretation clearly have it wrong. I get
angry when believers insist that the parts about Jesus's prompt return and all
prayers being answered are obviously not meant literally... but the parts about
hell and damnation and gay sex being an abomination, that's real. And I get
angry when believers insist that the parts about hell and damnation and gay sex
being an abomination aren't meant literally, but the parts about caring for the
poor are really what God meant. How the hell do they know which parts of the
Bible/ Torah/ Koran/ Bhagavad-Gita/ whatever God really meant, and which parts
he didn't? And if they don't know, if they're just basing it on their own moral
instincts and their own perceptions of the world, then on what basis are they
thinking that God and their sacred texts have anything to do with it at all?
What right do they have to act as if their opinion is the same as God's and he's
totally backing them up on it?
And I get angry when believers act as if these offenses aren't important,
because "Not all believers act like that. I don't act like that." As if that
f***ing matters. This stuff is a major way that religion plays out in our world,
and it makes me furious to hear religious believers try to minimize it because
it's not how it happens to play out for them. It's like a white person
responding to an African-American describing their experience of racism by
saying, "But I'm not a racist." If you're not a racist, then can you shut the
hell up for ten seconds and listen to the black people talk? And if you’re not
bigoted against atheists and are sympathetic to us, then can you shut the hell
up for ten seconds and let us tell you about what the world is like for us,
without getting all defensive about how it's not your fault? When did this
international conversation about atheism and religious oppression become all
about you and your hurt feelings?
---
So when you tell an atheist (or for that matter, a woman or a queer or a person
of color or whatever) not to be so angry, you are, in essence, telling us to
disempower ourselves. You're telling us to lay down one of the single most
powerful tools we have at our disposal. You're telling us to lay down a tool
that no social change movement has ever been able to do without. You're telling
us to be polite and diplomatic, when history shows that polite diplomacy in a
social change movement works far, far better when it's coupled with passionate
anger. In a battle between David and Goliath, you're telling David to put down
his slingshot and just... I don't know. Gnaw Goliath on the ankles or something.