There seems to be a growing schism in the atheist community regarding how we should behave. There are those who are adamant that we should be non-aggressive, respectful and tolerant of those who hold religious beliefs. That we should not be outspoken, but integrate, assimilate and ingratiate ourselves into the melting pot of our cultures, as varied as they are. Then, there are the rest of us. There are those of us who just cannot adopt the “live and let live” philosophy because the favor is not returned. The religious exercise their rights to promote themselves, their symbols and their ideologies with reckless abandon, but even in spite of all the utterly horrendous things that have been done in the name of religion and/or propositional ideologies, atheists remain one of the least-trusted groups of people in our societies.
Religion masks itself as the great benefactor, but in reality, the doctrines of the two largest religions on the planet demand the destruction of life in the name of their gods, and bully their way into power and authority by use of deadly force. The daily body counts of both the martyrs and their victims continue to rise and images of destroyed buildings, billowing smoke and death continue to inundate our senses. All this death and destruction and the inevitable slavery of sometimes entire nations is not only approved, but sanctified by their gods. Yes, the Abrahamic religions may have peaceful attributes, but at their core, they are far from peaceful and a quick search of the Koran or the Bible is very clear in their commands to kill all those who do not follow Yahweh/Allah, including women and children.
There are many atheists who have decided that we’ve pretty much had enough of the bullshit. We’ve had enough of the wholesale destruction of science and reason. We’ve had enough of mothers killing their children because they think god has told them to. We’ve had enough of the bombings, of which there have been enough of to fill a thousand lifetimes. We’ve had enough of the insistence that we abandon reality for delusion. We’ve had enough. Period. End of story. We must no longer tolerate being accused us of all kinds of acts of evil and violence. We must not allow ourselves to continue to be discriminated against in almost every area of life.
Our goal should not be tolerance and acceptance of religion, but the relegation of religious belief and faith in supernatural gods to where they belong, on the library shelves next to the Greek and Roman mythologies that have long since been abandoned by their followers. We should vigorously promote a secular world view, based on logic and reason. We should be adamantly insistent that our public schools uphold science as the means and method of discovery and insight. There have been close to a billion people murdered in this world in our history in the name of one god or another and has to stop. We can no longer afford to be tolerant because those who adhere to both Christianity and Islam are becoming more and more batshit crazy every day, and I cannot state it enough times that we can not sit by and allow these people to do whatever the fuck they want because they believe that their invisible friend told them to.
People, let us not go quietly into that good night…
