You’ve got to love atheists

So I’ve been hanging out at a few atheist blogs to see how the other half lives.  It’s not pretty.  More on that later.  I have some comments to get back to and address, and I have some cleaning up to do regarding the whole chilling experience.  But in the process, I have to say, atheism is all its cracked up to be.  Are more people losing their religion today?  Sure, skepticism and secularism are the default positions of choice in our popular culture, our education system, and because of pressure, in most major workplaces.  Our courts have helped that trend. 

Another big sell is that most atheism promotes hedonistic narcissism at its finest.  Several of the blogs I’ve read enjoy boasting that more and more, young people are abandoning their religious faith.  That’s not hard to imagine, since most atheist blogs promote their lower moral denominators as one of the benefits of an atheistic lifestyle.  Tell young kids that if you abandon belief in God, and you can have endless amounts of video games, candy, pizza, and never do any chores or homework, and you won’t have a hard time with mass conversions.

Still, every now and then, you get an atheist blog post that attempts to raise the bar somewhat.  Over at the ironically title ‘Friendly Atheist’, after days and days ridiculing religion and pining for a day when religious belief is shoved in the closet (or in the ghettos or catacombs), one of the contributors jumps on the bandwagon and does the decent thing – condemning Hustler magazine for the flagrantly sexist attack on conservative (and that’s atheist conservative) commentator S.E. Cupp.  Of course, like most things done by Flint, it represents the odious levels of human swill to which a world devoid of morals can sink.  In most cases, Left and Right, this has been condemned.  Because it is so flagrantly sexist, even the most radical feminist of groups have condemned it. 

And yet, read the comments.  I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.  When you teach that all life is biological, and everything else is an illusion we invent to make sense of the process of passing on our DNA, don’t expect much in the realm of common decency.  Even when the most tepid response is given from the atheist blog (‘come on guys, you have to admit, there is something ‘ick’ about the whole thing’), the commenters will have none of it.  I love it.  I also, because of my common sense and experience as a former agnostic and as one who sees what has and hasn’t changed in the world of non-religious thought, fear it.