EnoNomi Deity Free

Alternate title: Living with the Christians

I’m attempting to catch up on my blog reading (oh blog reader, thy name is Sisyphus) and of course reading other blogs always stirs topics in my head for my own blog. Over at An Apostate’s Chapel  a commenter wrote: 

If you are right, and there is no God…then that is all there is to it. There is no God. I die and…nothing. It ends there. This is why sometimes I don’t understand the Atheists who are so zealous and find a need to convince/convert others to believe as they do because we will all eventually find out if you were right in the end.

Here was a very nice man who self-identified as a Christian, who was responding in a civil way asking heartfelt questions and trying to separate himself from others who he identified as “Christian-ese; something that looks and sounds Christian but is far off the mark.” He goes on:

What I am, is a by the ‘Book’ Believer. My breed is out there. We are genuine in our Faith. We do share the Message because we have been commended to do so. I think that to a fault, we are too quiet. We should rise up and call out the counterfeit. Why we don’t, I’ll never quite understand.

I think part of the reason for this is that we look at the Bible with an incorrect understanding.

Yet the Bible -as I believe it- is a revelation of God given to us; how we relate to Him, how He relates to us, how we have come along, what we have done, and what He has done/will do for us/to us, how to know Him, how He calls us to live, etc, etc. It is a very personal testimony of God that we must take and consider; to accept or reject.

(In full disclosure I’ve been quote mining to focus in on the direction I want this entry to go. You can read his full comments here and here.)

Why are some Atheists so zealous? On my path to de-conversion I watched a show called Living with the Kombai, where two travelers immersed themselves into a South-American hunter-gatherer tribe to learn their customs and live as much as possible, the life of the Kombai.  Part of the attraction and tension of the show was watching them deal with extreme clashes of culture and belief.  They were accepted fully by a family, fed and housed, taught the language and the ways and were suddenly confronted with the fact that their nice new adopted father had killed many men in retribution killings.  They were confronted with the danger of being accused of witchcraft as one of their adopted Uncles told them of how he once risked being executed for being a witch.  That even though he had been cleared of being a witch, his family clan still carried the stigma of that accusation.  And if he hadn’t been cleared, his brothers sadly admitted that they would have tied him up and killed him.  It wouldn’t be the Uncle’s fault, because the forest was full of harmful spirits that are looking for ways to enter their bodies and take control.  The more the two travelers learned about the tribe’s customs the more they saw the pervasive superstitions that caused very serious real world consequences.  They had to seriously consider at what point, if pushed, should their decision to not interfere with the native culture be allowed to continue.

For me, there was also a point where I was no longer able to differentiate between this tribe’s “superstitions” and other modern peoples’ “religions”. I live in a country where the majority of the population, including it’s leaders, believe in invisible spirits and believe they receive communication from those spirits. I live in a world where these same believers want to enact laws on me based solely on what those spirits have either told them, or told through others who may or may not have lived 2,000 years ago. Actually to be more accurate, they’re basing their beliefs on what they’ve been told through people who have interpreted what they’ve been told by others who’ve interpreted what they’ve read from an unknown generation copy of what someone claims was said by someone who may or may not have lived 2,000 years ago.

I personally don’t believe that Jesus ever existed. However, even if he had, he’d still be a myth, because people have formed him into being whoever they want to believe he was. He is a mirror. When like-minded people get together and do good things because “He” wants them to, it’s because they’re the kind of people who have empathy and, unknown to them, they would do those same good things without “Him”. And when other like-minded people get together and do bad things because “He” wants them to, it’s because they want to do bad things and have someone who’ll tell them they’re not bad. And the worst part for me is all those people call themselves by the same names; Christian. I single them out because they have the most influence on this country and the people who run this country. There are so many different Christs out there that I can’t separate them.

A world controlled by superstition is an unstable world. The ER physician who works on me when I’m 43 and have been raped may deny me emergency contraception. The doctor who works on me when I’m 80 may base his primary medical opinion on prayer. The disease that will eventually rob me of my senses and my identity may not have been prevented by stem-cell research. My desire to see the world when I retire may be robbed because people who focus on “the next world” aren’t too worried about saving this one. And when I try to debate with one of these Christs, I’m caught in the shell game of “that’s not my Religion, that’s not what real Christians believe, that’s not how I interpret the Bible.”

I would love to let everyone just believe what they want and I would if they would just leave me alone. But they can’t. They organize and they lobby and they have prayer breakfasts with the President. They’re on my money, they’re in my school, my bedroom, my pharmacy, my emergency room, my government, and they’re trying to get into my Constitution.

This Atheist is zealous because she is fighting for her life. Her only life. She’s fighting for it’s length and it’s quality. And she’s not willing to shut up and respect the superstitions of those who are trying to shorten it or hinder it. Religions? Destroy them all and let Reason sort them out.