Atheists: Coming to Get You
A recently released report from The American Religious Identification Survey revealed that those who claim to practice "no religion" are the only demographic group to have grown in all 50 of these United States since 1990. You know what that means! Abortions for all and guns for none and the end of morality as we know it! The New York Times, liberal rag, published the results on the front page (hilariously sending noted yellowbelly Sean Hannity over the edge)! We must be doing something right!
And nutritious!
It's hard for me to look at those numbers and not feel an inner swelling of pride.
"Godless" is lazy shorthand for immoral, and it gets thrown around a lot. Atheists are less trustworthy to the general American population than any other group. It's common knowledge and it's exhausting.
Though coming out as an atheist is sometimes likened to coming out as a gay person, it's not a wholly accurate comparison. While both gay people and atheists know that their coming out will lead to outbursts of willful ignorance from "well-meaning" strangers, gay people are born gay. Atheists are made.
It's ridiculous that this even has to be said, but no baby is born with an innate sense of religion. The only thing that turns a Baptist into a Baptist is the environment. Same with atheists. We're born all over the world, raised in different belief systems (or none at all) and realize, after sincere self-reflection that more people should practice, that we don't believe. Why is that so scary? Is it the self-reflection part?
I suspect most prominent and outspoken atheist advocates of the past several years, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, have been both a blessing and a curse. Hitchens is a war-mongering misogynist and Dawkins has a serious problem with toning down his condescending rhetoric, but at least they are recognizable names who are most widely known for at attempting, in an occasionally ham-fisted way, to educate people that yes, atheists exist and no, there's nothing wrong with that.
I know this is, for whatever reason, a contentious topic that won't be solved on a blog read mostly by Tennesseans (our state, unsurprisingly, was one of the 50 with the smallest percentage of change). But listen up, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Scientologists, and Shintos and whatthefuckever - we're here, we're growing, and we're not going away. Be afraid!
(Photo H/T: Friendly Atheist)
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