People who find out that I'm an atheist are very
often shocked. I associate with religious people -- very often the
person making this "terrible discovery" is religious -- and it just
doesn't enter into his/her mind beforehand that a religious person
can find friendship and camaraderie among believers.
People are people. Seems I read somewhere that this country (not
the one the Christian Reconstructionists think they live in, but the
United States of America) was founded on the idea that people who had
differing views on religion, or politics, or choice of neck attire,
could live within the same time zone without killing one another.
And I let people be people. I don't go pushing my reasons for not
believing in God on people -- in fact, the only reason you're reading
this page is because you chose to -- and in return all I ask is that
people not constantly try to change my mind.
If I weren't willing to be friends with Christians, I would have
very few friends -- I live in the Bible Belt! And so long as the
Christian in question is not a jerk, I can put aside my difference of
belief with them as easily as I can with my friends who are pagans
(although, there, the difference is less extreme... I just look at
nature-as-divine in a different way than they might. Although I've
never broached the subject with them. I suspect the answer to the
question "Is it a real God and Goddess, or merely symbolic
ones, would differ depending on which pagan I asked).
I've recently been engaged in heckling some Christian bozo who's
been spamming the Guestbook at Iconoclastes' Athenaeum
with multiple, inane e-mails consisting of him simply typing in the
whole friggin' Bible a few verses (or a lot of verses) at a time. And
I'll be the first to attack an idiot like that, hold him up to the
light of ridicule (and you know it's gotta be a man -- women,
even very fundamentalist women, generally find better uses for their
time) -- but I'm not really inclined to, say, go picket the Pope or
something.
Herein lies the heart of why I probably will never join the
esteemed American Atheists,
although I do consider them civil rights pioneers -- because
I don't automatically assume that all religion is bad. And, furthermore,
I believe in being civil towards those who hold different views from
my own (unless, like the hump who's been spamming Iconoclaste's
guestbook, s/he is just asking for it by sheer virtue of uncommon
rudeness, stupidity, or both).
Yeah, I do believe the ideas that God created the world in seven
days, that Jesus was somehow God, that he rose from the dead, that
one day soon there'll be an unfolding of the events in Revelations,
etc., are all erroneous assumptions. In fact, one could even say I
have faith that Yahweh is no more real than Zeus, or Thor, or
L. Ron Hubbard's exploding spaceships for that matter. But I don't
believe I have the right to go looking to shatter the worlds of those
who find comfort in these ideas (at least unprovoked. I'll debate,
and pull no punches, if one starts the debate. And unless s/he is a
complete buffoon unwilling to listen to the other side, I'll win)
with no provocation.
I find zealots and evangelists to be exceedingly obnoxious, very
much in love with themselves. And to my mind, the Atheist With a
Cause can be every bit as much a waste of oxygen as Jerry Falwell or
Pat Robertson or any of those morons.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair accomplished a lot of good, did a lot of
much-needed work, but I would not have wanted to get stuck in an
elevator with her. I certainly wouldn't want to emulate her. A
person that crabby, that abrasive, puts a bad face to the word
"Atheist." Her public persona was exactly what the fundamentalist
Christians try to say all Atheists are -- mean-spirited, rude, and
unpleasant.
To my mind, Dan Barker and his wife Laurie Anne Gaylor present a
much more positive face. Yeah, there are plenty of unbelievers every
bit as bitter as Madalyn, but there are (one hopes) more like these
two, happy people with a family, radiating good cheer in every photo
one sees of them.
So that's part of why I probably will never join up with American
Atheists (though I do want to send Solstice cards next year).
Here's the other: it seems to me that one cannot in totally honesty
call oneself a freethinker if one just automatically closes the doors
of one's mind the minute someone professes to be religious. Because
every once in a while, a religious thinker, or even the common
parishoner, will say or do something that's impressive, even to a
heretic like me.
When I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, my friend Stepen and I
were both sponsored by the same man. Stephen and I started calling
each other "godbrother" after that, and still do. Stephen assists an
Episcopal campus minister over in Middle Tennessee. And though I can
no longer profess to believe in his God, I am constantly impressed
with the good works that faith leads him to perform. His friendship
with an AIDS patient, for instance.
Yeah, he could do it all without the religion. That's not the
point. The point is, he does it. The same with the Episcopal Bishop
of Newark, James Spong, fighting for same-sex marriages... actually
permitting the performance of them in his diocese. Same with Ghandi's
nonviolent overthrow of the British colonial government in India,
same with Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent fight against the ghost
of Jim Crow, same with any Christian working in a soup kitchen or any
Muslim working to keep inner-city kids off drugs.
These people don't just talk it -- they walk it. And even if the
"it" in question is something I don't agree with, the results of it I
wholeheartedly applaud. People of faith can sometimes have something
to say that is worth our hearing -- the premises may be something I
can barely stomach (the whole ideas of the death on the cross and of
communion, now strike me as crude and barbaric), but the final
conclusion, that of social action, is something I can pretty much go
along with.
Freethought should be just that -- free thought. That means not
shutting yourself off to anything just for the sake of its being
different than one's own reality. Atheists who categorically write
off the ideas of every single religious person are as idiotic
as whoever coined the idea that one religion could be the only one,
and that whoever didn't belong to it was damned. Because you miss out
on a lot of chances for growth.
Listen to the other side. At least long enough to conclude for
certain that there's nothing worth hearing. Then move on to someone
else. As they say in South America, "If you disagree with me, you
have a gift to share with me" -- that other opinion, and the chance
to weigh one's own ideas against it, to keep it or throw it away, is
one of the greatest gifts one human can offer another.
Don't throw away free stuff. At least not until you see if there
is a dollar bill tucked inside.