Nonsense: we’ve been brainwashed to make nice with idiot religionists who wear crosses and stars of David as God bling.

If I wore any in-your-face T-shirt proclaiming garbage like “Jesus is Lord” in bold nobody would criticize it and I’d get others who would praise me with a friendly Amen.

What I won’t get will be criticism from anyone in the US telling me to stop being a pushy Jesus propagandist, threatening me, or trying to harm me.

However, I guarantee that publicly wearing “Bored with Jesus” or “Atheists have more Sex” or “God is dead” on a Tee with get stares, yells, threats, and physical intimidation. I’m free to wear only if I dare.

Not wearning an anti-xian shirt — it’s not being polite; it’s being careful. After all we atheists are the most hated minority in Ameristan, our xian Taliban dominated America. [For solid evidence from well run surveys visit the Pew Memorial Foundation http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_category.aspx?id=318

There should be equal time for disbelief in a secular society — insist on it, but only anonymously in print. Because we don’t live in a land which permits “freedom of conscience” to non-believing minorities.

Which is why I protect myself from the great American thug by signing myself:

the anti_supernaturalist

Now if we were talking about gnostic atheism, and the claim god doesn’t exist, that might be true, but the sign doesn’t say that.

Saying I’m an atheist is very much just like saying I’m white. Taking offense to that is absolutely ludicrous. Again, atheism doesn’t say your god doesn’t exist, it’s a personal revelation.

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However, religion, like Christianity, likes to declare god exists, in this certain way, and everyone else is wrong. The actual truth is, that organized religion “offends” everyone else. Because they are making a claim that everyone else is wrong.

In any case on any way you want to argue it, any form of religion that claims that natively offends hundreds of times greater than just the lack of belief in god.

My apologies if the link comes up slow.

Babies are not atheists because atheism is a positive assertion or belief.

Here we go again. Not thinking X does not necessitate thinking non-X instead. Not thinking X does not necessitate thinking Y instead.

For a few atheists, their atheism is a positive assertion or belief. For many more, it’s just the absence of assertive beliefs in gods, and nothing more.

Whence comes this compulsion of so many people to try to lump all atheists and all atheism into one narrow definition, the one that is actually the hardest to find in the real world?

You seem to contradict yourself in your very next sentence:

You might as well say that a baby’s ignorance of evolution theory means the baby is creationist.

Yes, exactly. You’re right, if you are saying that it’s ridiculous to contend that a baby’s or even an adult’s simple lack of belief in gods, whether from never having heard the proposition, or from being left unconvinced by inadequate evidence of that proposition, is by necessity an assertive belief in the opposite, the non-existence of gods. No, it ain’t necessary at all.

Of course the baby’s and the adult’s atheism are from different causal processes, but their simple lack of belief in gods is very similar. There’s just no belief there. There does not have to be an assertive contrary belief in its absence.

It really is possible to be empty and free of such beliefs and counter-beliefs. I wish more people would try it. The quietude inside is very nice.

As for the so-called “new atheists,” I haven’t yet read or heard the shrill, horrifyingly malicious bile that some theists wail about. Maybe you could direct me to some outrageous examples that I’ve missed. What I see are some very spoiled, thin-skinned theists who have had a cushy time in their privileged status, protected for centuries by an absurd social convention that forbids anyone from ever critically challenging or even questioning their beliefs even in the most gentle, polite ways possible, simply because they are religious beliefs.

I can understand that from the point of view of such people, who have had their ideas and opinions so pampered and sheltered, even the most well-mannered and tender questioning or disagreeing with their precious beliefs would seem “rude,” “hateful,” “vicious,” and all the other hysterical hyperbole that they cry.

I don’t think they are, but rude or not, rabid or not, the tone of the “new atheists’” arguments does not take away anything from the strength of their arguments. All that complaining about their ill manners is just ad hominem whimpering.

The era of the “hands off” rule for religious ideas is over. In the marketplace of ideas, everything is subject to challenge, as it should be. The only people complaining are the ones who are used to getting a free ride.

Likewise, it is a false generalization to claim that all religious are invested in their religiosity only emotionally. I know more atheists which are far more emotional than any of the religious I personally know (I don’t know any evangelicals, maybe that’s why!). And in the public sphere, it’s enough to point to the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism (Dawkins et al) to see exactly what I mean: a rabid, emotionally-charged hatred of religion, and the religious, that saturates every statement they make. To question their atheism is blasphemy deserving of the highest derision and public humiliation possible. The irrationality emanating from such closed minds is either scary, awkward or laughable, behavior worthy of a French absurdist play. I get nauseous just from watching them getting chummy with the audience while taking shots at some sophistic characterization of anything remotely religious. It seems petty and alienated from the real problematic of atheism.

My point is that fanaticism is not limited to religion, and to predicate the value of atheism on the belief that there are no radical atheists because atheism does not permit fanaticism is building a castle on sand. The only science atheists object to is theology (hence the “a” in “a-theism”). It should not be built on the flimsy, self-satisfactory defining principle of the New Atheism which is the hatred of religion. If religion were to vanish, then the parasitic New Atheism would lose its founding dogma and collapse.

Whatever is true about how atheists offend theists seems no longer to interest you. My agreement with part of Jesse’s original post, however, seems to have set you off. Your comments have been nothing but men of straw; things I didn’t say, conclusions I did not reach and claims I did not make.

You appear to base your disagreement with my position on Jesse’s post on your belief that either I cannot make, or that cannot be aware of a particular conscious decision. You base this belief on the mere possibility that there is even one non conscious element in every decision. Again, I must risk the charge of ad hominem by pointing out the similarities between the anti-evolution fallacy and the one you are using.

Your argument that the possibility of one non conscious element in my decision renders it totally non conscious is not a cogent one. The argument particularly falls when taken in the context of my argument, which was that there are more conscious elements in being an atheist that in being male or female. Since there are no conscious elements in my being male or female, all I would need would be the possibility of one conscious element in atheism for my claim to be true.

I hope I have not bored the other readers of this thread, all of whom are sure to have understood my point days ago and have agreed or disagreed with it based on whether they believe atheism is subject to conscious choice.

Regardless, the reaction is their emotion, their creation, their responsibility.

I suspect that non-theists don’t “offend” monotheists so much as “threaten” them. (Their response may look much the same.)

Not ever having been religious, I can’t quite connect the dots, but perhaps we threaten their belief in the afterlife, or their carefully maintained conviction that they’re going to heaven. Do they think our lack of belief is contagious? That we’ll drag them down with us, kicking and screaming, into the bowels of Hell? I’m not sure (and, of course, not every monotheist reacts this way).

On a separate note, as Brian Macker said recently, and others said earlier, there are some of us who don’t feel our lack of belief is a choice. I’m a died-in-the-wool lifelong rational skeptic who started investigating Christianity around age 8 or 9 (because other kids went to church & we didn’t, so I wondered what it was about) and quickly decided it was chock full of contradictions, was basically punitive, and it offered no basis for rational belief. This tiger can’t change its stripes.