DangerousTalk

This weekend, I was driving down the road when something behind me caught my eye. I looked in my rear-view mirror and there were three college aged guys in the car behind me laughing and flailing their arms around erratically. At first, I just thought they were frat being silly, but then one of the guys opened his window, stuck his head out, and yelled, “Fuck atheists!”

I have to say that I never had such a reaction to my bumper sticker before. The funny thing is that there guys didn’t even seem all that religious. I am usually pretty good at spotting fundamentalist Christians and I really don’t think these guys were hard core believers. I could of course be wrong on that. I have driven through much more religious places before and much more religious people have seen my bumper sticker, but yet these three college kids felt the need to shout, “Fuck atheists!”

That is really the thing about atheism. While it is true that atheists face all kinds of discrimination, threats of violence, and hate from various fundamentalist Christians, we also sometimes get similar reactions from people who aren’t fundamentalists or even some Christians who don’t even really think about their religion very much at all.

This is why I think it is so vitally important for atheists to be vocal about their lack of belief. The general public needs to know that we are out here and they need to understand that we aren’t going away. In fact, as time and modernity ticks by, more and more people are starting to think critically about religion. More and more people are starting to doubt the stories that have been indoctrinated into them since before they could speak. As a result of time and modernity, Christian apologists have had to re-interpret their timeless holy books to fit better with science and secular society.

The more I think about it, the happier I am at the reaction that my bumper sticker causes with those guys. I know that later that night at least one of them (and probably all three of them) will think about their behavior. They might even joke about it with each other at first and laugh about evil atheists. But all that is part of the process. I think is it common for people to resort of base insults when they feel insecure with themselves on particular issues. This is also why many homophobic people are later exposed as being closeted gays or as the Reverend Ted Haggard put it, “heterosexual but with homosexual attachments.”

I find that most Christians who lash out with base insults and childish behavior toward non-god-believers are in reality struggling with their own faith behind closed doors. They are afraid of their own thoughts and desperate to prove to others and even to themselves that they still believe. They still usually want to believe, but the fortunate fact is that they are slowly realizing that their belief just doesn’t make sense. They are atheists with Christian attachments.

P.B. (Post Blog)
Since everyone wants to know, here is the bumper sticker on my car

Filed under: Decline of Religion, Religion