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| Atheist stickers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Just please.
I am not going to advocate proselyting to atheists. Nor am I going to attack, insult, belittle, or cast blanket aspersions against people who identify as atheist. I have a great deal in common with and much sympathy for those who do not profess a belief in God. I have commented before on the decline of manners and increased intellectual lassitude or ineptitude among some minority of people identifying as atheists on message forums and blogs. The ones who at times turn to the same over-generalizing, trivializing of others, lazy or dishonest quote mining, and other tactics often employed by hard-core proselytizing religious fundamentalists.
What is the point of behaving like the very religious people who love to mock and ridicule the philosophy, ideas, and lives of atheists?, I wondered. I asked if this was a real trend and if so what might be behind it.
Some people like to use terms such as "atheist fundamentalist" or "new atheist" to loosely refer to such people. For reasons that should become clear, I think a more apt term is shallow atheist.
Now I've lectured on deviance and one of those lectures was on atheism, and we came to a sympathetic understanding of why those who feel stigmatized and persecuted might try to neutralize this feeling by reversing it. By over-generalizing about, demeaning, and belittling religion and religious people. By questioning their morals, their certainty, and even their sanity in order to establish the atheists' own. No, WE are the decent people. The ones who have logic and knowledge and facts on our side. We are the ones who are free of delusion.
Now, sometimes this is because someone is still shaking from having left a form of fundamentalist religion or is constantly being harassed because they live in a community that doesn't trust or tolerate those of a different or of no religion. That doesn't justify bad behavior, but it can explain a good bit of it.
But what about those who never continue to heal and get stuck in the mentality that all religion is the same and its all one very narrow thing? Who never move on and instead continue to need to feel better about themselves through crude and offensive slights and put-downs of anything remotely associated in their minds with religion?
Or those who may or may not have never really felt persecuted (even if they may have felt slightly awkward on occasion) over their atheism and who see it as a hip, misunderstood social identity for smart people and iconoclasts? The ones who are too cool in their own minds to ever have anything to do with those backward and outdated fools who are remotely connected to whatever might be associated with religion or spirituality?
