Spiritual care for the hurting or seeking atheist

Atheist stickers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Please.

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?

Book Recommendation: "Half the Sky" by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn

I only recently ran across this book and I quickly took it all in.  If you have ever wanted to get an honest assessment of some of the major problems facing our world and an accompanying set of solutions that should appeal to people of virtually all political backgrounds, this book is a great place to start.  The authors do not shy away from hard questions nor do they settle for easy answers.  Half the Sky focuses on the plight of women in peripheral (i.e. "third world") countries and attempts to make the case why improving the health, education and the influence of women is both a moral issue and is also vital to improving the welfare of the societies that make such investments as well.  In particular they emphasize that both in presentation and in practice such efforts should not be labeled "women's issues", both because of open and hidden misogynistic tendencies to dismiss women and because it doesn't fully capture the impact these issues have on all areas of life (they ask, for example, whether the Atlantic slave trade should have been considered a "black" issue).   It is now out in paperback and is available in electronic format (Kindle, Nook, etc) and might have made its way into your local library system, so check it out.