Wednesday, February 19, 2014

can we be honest about some things?



My brain has been mulling over something quite a bit over the past few weeks:

Atheists are kind of jerks. 

And,  if I'm being honest, I just say "kind of" to be socially acceptable. Every atheist I know is real life is a jerk regarding their beliefs (or lack there of). They are generally perfectly normal, nice folks in other areas of life.........and huge, huge jerks about believing.

I'd like to have some real talk about this.


My atheist friends are quick to jump into discussions about religion and immediate bash their believer friends. And those discussions typically take one of two turns........the "You're stupid to believe in fairy tales" approach or the wider "Look at all the problems that religion causes!" argument.

Let's start with the later. "Look at all the problems religion causes!"

Here's some real talk: In my day to day life, in my town, in my circle of friends, in the community I participate in every day,  I don't know any abortion clinic bombers. I don't know how any jihadists who have suicide bombed a building.

I do know people who go out of their way to attempt to make me, and other believers, feel badly about themselves. I do know people who regular call others "friend" and then seek to tear them down.

You want to talk about making the world better or worse? Let's be real about it. Let's be honest with what our contributions are to our community on a day to day basis. Because I think we could all agree that America is kind of messed up right now and a huge part of the messed-up-ness we find ourselves in lies in how disassociated we are from one another.

What makes my world worse, real life, day in day out, in my community, in my circle of friends, in my town........is people who find it ok to insult and demean others because of differing beliefs.  What makes my world worse and what demonstrates bad behavior to me is people calling me "friend"...and then seeking to hurt me.

The former argument my atheist friend use...the "You're stupid to believe in fairy tales!" argument... is just a tag-along to this. That argument was only created to tear others down. Because...lets be real... on a day to day basis, how many believers do you know personally who are going around deliberately trying to harm you? And, let's say you know some. Is the best contribution you can make to your community divisiveness? Resistance of compromise and understanding? That's really your best choice? That's really  helping things? What does it matter if someone doesn't believe the exact thing you do? How does it make anything better to take something someone finds very important and scoff and call it mere fairy tales?

At the end of the day, what makes my community worse is more conflict. More unkindness.


And I'm gonna go off on a little tangent here:
When you post your snarky little memes on social media, and you are aware you have believers as friends, you are being a jerk. You are insulting those you call friends. Let's just be honest about it. I don't know if you're trying to pretend your believer friends don't see it or you're falling back on the ol "It's my FB page and I should be allowed to post what I want" line. Either way, insulting your friends and calling them names makes you a jerk. (I mean, unless you have a ton of folks on your FB that you don't really like and don't care about.......but it's still a pretty jerk move to willingly insult your audience).

Anyways........


You want to sit around a belittle others for not doing life exactly like you? That's your best contribution to your community?

There is no "right" side of intolerance. There is no "right" side of hate or spite.

When you seek out to tear others down simply for the sake of doing it, you are part of the problem. And that's a truth for believers and non-believers a like.