Atheist or creationist? Still human, it turns out.

I read a piece online the other day written by a guy about losing his faith and becoming an atheist. The blog, to me, seemed a little bittersweet - I felt there was grief over the loss of the comfort of blind certainty that usually comes with a faith, and along with it the person he used to be, but it also had the feel of a man who was happy to have woken from a lifelong delusion and is able to see clearly for the first time. He now uses Twitter (@ZachsMind) to debate with people over their beliefs. Overall, he's usually pleasant and respectful towards the faithful and doesn't tend to criticise them personally, but he can get pretty disrespectful over their faith. I do share in his disdain for all religions, but where I occassionally disagree is where he sometimes insults people directly, particularly their (in his view) lack of intelligence. I don't feel that @ZachsMind does this to be malicious, but rather out of frustration when the set-in-their-ways creationists won't debate with him properly. But I do think a small number of Twitter atheists can be dicks. (If you're a Twitter atheist and are reading this: if I follow you, I'm not referring to you - I don't follow the dicks.)

Creationists (and all those of any faith), I can't deny, do believe in what I consider to be superstition and nonsense. As @ZachsMind likes to point out; if god does exist the sheer volume of unnecessary suffering and general shit in the world would prove beyond doubt that he is a dick and not worthy of worship. And yes, all those shitty religions are responsible in large part for many of the hateful attitudes in the world today - America's greed? That's because the bible told them to subdue the Earth. Violent Middle-Easterners? That's down to them being ridiculously caught up in the 'my god's better than your god...so I'm going to kill you' game. Homophobia? That's because god hated the gays. Obviously I'm simplifying a complex issue, and there are many, many people of every faith that don't completely misinterpret the message of their religion and try to live as decent folk. Like my christian mother or buddhist in-laws. And these people are not stupid. They usually have their faith because it's been ingrained upon them from a young age, and they cannot believe otherwise. It's not that believers are stupid, it's that it's human nature to take comfort from easy answers instead of really questioning the whole idea of a conscious, imaginary force providing your reward for you when you die. It's because the fear of death can become so palpable that telling yourself there is an everlasting existence for you in the beyond, or that you get to come back as something or someone else stops this fear from crushing you. Even the homophobic, Earth-subduing suicide bombers aren't really stupid, they're just conditioned from youth to think and to see the world in a certain way. When a person is conditioned in that way, it is almost impossible to break that conditioning later in life (making @ZachsMind's story a rarity, I think). At least, that's how I see it, although I base that entirely upon my own perception and not on anything actually researched, so I'm probably wrong.

So yeah, religion winds me up quite a bit. But it's not the individuals themselves. It's the pope making excuses for serial child-rapists. It's the educational systems that despite the fact that the answer to how we got here was answered completely and absolutely irrefutably by Charles Darwin over 200 years ago, won't teach evolution as the accepted scientific fact it is. It's the continued insistence of some faiths that women are somehow subhuman. It's a thousand other things that continue to hinder the development of a society based on free thinking, reason and true equality. You shouldn't behave like a decent human being because of some supposed god and his promise of an eternity of torture when you die if you don't, you should act like a decent human being because that's what decent human beings do.

However, atheists don't get off scot free either. Many atheists consider themselves superior because of their rejection of religion and have a nasty habit of personally insulting people of faith simply because they think differently. This is a typically human attitude, which is especially disappointing given their supposed rejection of unenlightened superstition and the acceptance of logic and reason. Insulting people of faith won't change them, it will them more stubborn and less open-minded. (Besides, the trend, as far as my limited research indicates, shows a general moving away from faith and towards atheism in the U.S. despite (or perhaps because of?) the idiotic Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and their retarded take on christianity taking centre stage so often, so they might not need to worry about it for long. Oh, and by the way, purveyors of the special Beck 'n' Palin brand of christianity, opposing the ground zero mosque on the grounds that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by islamic extremists is a bit like saying the religion itself is to blame. Which is a bit like saying all muslims are terrorists. Which is a bit like saying all catholics are paedophiles. Which, in direct contradiction to my earlier point (hey, like the bible!), is fucking stupid.)

It's not really surprising that whatever the faith or lack thereof, there are people who are cool and there are people who are dicks. Because, regardless of belief/non-belief, people are still people.