Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless (18 page)

Seeing the harm done by religion.

Seeing the bad consequences of believing in absolute right and wrong.

Seeing bad things happening, which isn’t consistent with a belief in a good god.

Seeing that morality is possible without God or religion.

Seeing religion as no different from other superstitions or gullible beliefs.

Not seeing religion as necessary.

Not seeing any reason to treat God as any more likely than any other implausible hypothesis: the invisible pink unicorn, Russell’s teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.

The insufficiency of religion to offer comfort or other things it promises.

Realizing that they were cherry-picking: picking the tenets of their faith that they liked and rejecting the ones they didn’t, purely on the basis of their own feelings, with no evidence about what God wanted.

Failed prophecies.

The factual and scientific impossibility, implausibility, and inconsistency of religious claims and texts.

Learning that Jesus might be a mythical figure, and that the historical Jesus might not be real.

Seeing religion as being just like other fraud or trickery.

Seeing how cognitive biases generate and support religion.

Seeing better evidence for evolution than creationism.

Seeing God as an unnecessary hypothesis.

Seeing that if one part of their religious text is inaccurate, there’s no reason to believe any of it.

Seeing the internal inconsistency of their religion.

Seeing the inconsistency of their religion with human reality.

Seeing that atheism is potentially falsifiable, but most religions aren’t.

Seeing how human behavior is like the behavior of other animals.

Seeing religion as no fun.

The “god of the gaps”: the tendency of religion to say that any unexplained phenomenon must be explained by God, and the readiness of religion to jump to the next unexplained phenomenon when the previous one gets a natural, scientific explanation.

Realizing that religion didn’t make people moral or special.

Realizing that “you don’t choose your beliefs” — that beliefs need to be based on what you genuinely think is true and not what you want to be true.

Realizing that believers disbelieve in a lot of gods, too, and atheists just disbelieve in one more.

Realizing that intuition or feeling is not a good argument.

Realizing that the argument from popularity is a bad argument, and that the fact that lots of people believe something doesn’t make it true.

Realizing that many religious apologetics are outright lies.

Seeing religion’s unreasonable demands for unquestioning loyalty.

Seeing the importance of supporting your ideas with good, carefully gathered evidence.

Beginning to think independently in other ways, and questioning religion as part of that process.

Seeing religion mocked, blasphemed, made fun of, or made to seem silly.

Seeing terms such as “atheist” or “agnostic” accurately defined: realizing that it’s possible to be both atheist and agnostic, and that atheism doesn’t mean absolute certainty.

Leaving their church or other religious group, and realizing that their life got better or didn’t get worse.

Encountering atheism or other non-belief and realizing, “Yes, that’s me.”

Emotional support from atheists.

And there are more that I don’t have space to get into here.

All this may seem daunting. That’s a lot of arguments to master. But the point is exactly the opposite. The point is that there’s no magic bullet, no one argument that’s going to convince everybody — so you get to make the arguments you know, the ones that resonate with you, the ones you’re comfortable with.

So what’s our game plan? If we’re going to try to persuade religious believers out of religion — how, precisely, do we go about it?

Come out.
This, by an order of magnitude, is the single most important thing atheists can do: to persuade others into atheism, or simply to create more acceptance of atheists. Often, just encountering atheists and atheist ideas can be a big factor in deconversion. And knowing about the existence of other atheists — especially other good, happy atheists — can help people feel like they have a safe place to land once they take that step. (The analogy with coming out as gay /lesbian /bi /trans is inevitable.)

Don’t expect your arguments to deconvert anyone overnight.
This rarely happens. So be patient. Don’t think of yourself as dynamite under the foundations. Think of yourself as water wearing away the rock.

Don’t expect to deconvert a strong true believer.
Meeting atheists, encountering atheist ideas and arguments… these things can have an effect on believers. But they tend to have an effect in the end stage of deconversion — not at the beginning. The initial cracks of doubt typically come from within: from people considering their beliefs, and having doubts about whether those beliefs are moral, or consistent with reality, or even consistent with themselves. We can help widen those cracks… but we rarely make them happen in the first place.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t engage with strong true believers. The engagement can help strengthen your own arguments and clarify your own thinking. What’s more, if the engagement is happening in any sort of public setting — an online discussion thread, say — it may have an effect on other people following the argument… even if they’re not saying anything. And sometimes strong true believers
do
come around to atheism. Just don’t count on it.

Remember that arguments can have an effect.
I know how resistant to evidence religious belief can be. I know how frustrating it is to debate believers who don’t seem to value reason. But lots of non-believers say that encountering atheists or atheist ideas was an important part of their deconversion process, and that they were at least partly persuaded by specific atheist arguments or ideas.

Again: We often come in at the tail end of the process, instead of at the beginning. But that’s an important part. Don’t dismiss it.

On the other hand,
no one argument is going to convince everybody.
We’re not going to find a magic bullet, the One Good Atheist Argument that convinces everyone to deconvert. Different people find different arguments and ideas compelling. We have to keep presenting all of them.

Be willing to argue in public.
Remember all those emails I get from people saying, “Your arguments helped persuade me out of religion”? There’s a very important point about those emails:
They didn’t come from the people I’d been debating.
They came from people who’d been lurking. They came from people who’d been following the arguments. It’s possible that one of the people I tangled with is now a full-fledged atheist because of our debates… but if they are, none of them has told me about it. It’s the onlookers who were persuaded.

So remember that. The people you’re trying to convince? They aren’t necessarily the people you’re arguing with. They’re the people who are looking on, who are following the comment thread or listening to the argument in the bar. This is true for big public debates, and it’s true for little arguments on Facebook and in online forums and so on. So be willing to challenge the social convention. Ask questions about religion, contradict people about it, have debates about it… right out in the open, where other people can hear.

Expose people, not just to specific arguments against religion, but to methods of skeptical, critical, and scientific thinking.
While specific arguments do help people deconvert, people generally need to begin the process on their own. But having critical thinking skills can help that process begin — and can help it come to its conclusion.

Encourage people to read the Bible or other sacred text of their religion.
For lots of people, the loss of their belief started by examining more closely what they supposedly believed, and being either intellectually baffled or morally repulsed. (See Julia Sweeney’s performance piece,
“Letting Go of God,”
for a beautiful and hilarious example.) To put it more bluntly: For lots of people, the first step to losing their religion is reading the Bible or the Koran or what have you, and going, “It says WHAT now? Are you fucking kidding me?” Let’s encourage more people to do that.

Build community.
For many people — maybe even most people — the reasons they hang on to religion have nothing to do with theology. When you ask religious believers why they go to their church, synagogue, mosque, coven, etc., most say it’s because of community. They want the social connection, the emotional support, the practical support, the feeling of belonging, the shared activities, the shared purpose. And when people start questioning their religious beliefs, letting go of all that is often one of the scariest parts. Letting go of religion often means alienating friends and family. Especially in parts of the world where religion dominates social life.

So atheists need to do more than just pry people out of religion. We need to give them a safe place to land when they fall. We need to develop secular and atheist communities, to replace the ones people often lose when they let go of their religion. (If you want to know where to look for these communities, see the Resource Guide at the end of this book.)

Finally, and most importantly:

Don’t despair.

What we’re doing can work. It is working.

What we’re doing can feel frustrating to the point of futility. Religious belief is stubborn. It is resistant to reason and evidence. It is shielded with a wide variety of armors against criticism… and indeed, against the very idea that it can and should be subject to criticism. Trying to persuade people that their religious belief is a mistaken hypothesis about the world — even trying to get people to see their religious belief as a hypothesis at all, one which should be able to stand on its own against other hypotheses — can feel like shouting into the wind.

But what we’re doing can work. It is working. Rates of non-belief have been going up dramatically in the United States and around the world, even in just the last few years. And in some parts of the world — specifically in Europe — non-belief is now so common that in some countries it’s more common than belief.

And again — ask around in the local atheist group, the atheist blogs, the atheist online forums. Ask people why they’re atheists, and what made them change their minds. And see how many people give a long, complex narrative… ending with the word, “Finally.” “Finally I was persuaded by
The God Delusion
.” “Finally I was persuaded by Daniel Dennett.” “Finally I was persuaded by something my sister said, or my uncle, or my best friend.” “Finally I was persuaded by something someone said on an internet discussion group.” “Finally I was persuaded by something I read on this blog.”

What we’re doing can work. It is working.

So let’s keep it up.

“But why are you atheists so angry?

“If atheism is so great — where does all this anger come from? Surely that’s not a good sign. Surely it’s a sign that you’re dissatisfied, that you’re self-absorbed, that you lack meaning and purpose in your life. Doesn’t all this anger show that there’s something wrong with atheists?”

Many people will read this book, and will agree with all or most of it. They’ll read the first chapter, the long list of outrages committed by religion, and they’ll be sickened and appalled. They’ll agree that terrible, wicked, unthinkably hideous damage has been done, to millions of people, for centuries and indeed millennia, in the name of religion.

And they’ll still think that atheists’ anger proves there’s something wrong with us. They’ll think atheists are angry because we’re selfish. Whiny. Absorbed in our own problems. They’ll think atheists are angry because we’re unhappy. Because we lack joy and meaning in our lives. Because we have a God-shaped hole in our hearts.

So I want to conclude by pointing out something about atheist anger.

Most of it isn’t about how atheists are treated.

It’s about how believers are treated.

Of course we’re mad about damage done to atheists. And that’s valid. There’s real bigotry against us, real discrimination, and it’s entirely fair for us to be angry about it. But most of our anger isn’t about how religious believers treat atheists.

It’s about how religious believers treat other believers. It’s about believers getting taken advantage of by religious leaders. It’s about believers getting AIDS because their church told them not to use condoms. It’s about believers getting their genitals mutilated because their religion tells them their god demands it. It’s about believers being terrorized into unquestioning obedience by the threat of eternal burning and torture.

It’s anger on other people’s behalf.

Atheists aren’t angry because we’re selfish, or joyless, or miserable. Atheists are angry because we have compassion. Atheists are angry because we have a sense of justice. Atheists are angry because we see millions of people being terribly harmed by religion, and our hearts go out to them, and we feel motivated to bloody well do something about it.