Comment of the Week: Atheists Don't Have It So Bad?
I'm an atheist i live in America and i have absolutly no problems. The only way anyone would be treated negativly in America for being an atheist is if they walked into a church while a sermom was going on and said God is not real!
[original post]
Just because one atheist has no problem doesn't necessarily mean that there are no problems for atheists generally in America. That makes as much sense as an atheist saying that because they have suffered from some discrimination, then every atheist in America is discriminated against. It's illegitimate to generalize from one set of experiences in one person's life to everyone in an entire nation.
Beyond that, though, there are a number of questions we can ask about this one atheist's experiences. First, where do they live? There are undoubtedly places in America where distrust of atheists can be a lot lower. Second, just how "out" and public are they about their atheism? If hardly anyone knows this person is an atheist, then that's not really a valid basis for arguing that atheists aren't treated badly.
The idea of walking into a church during a sermon and asserting that there is no God is an interesting one. Religious theists — and by this I mean primarily Christians — display little compunction about "sharing" and promoting their beliefs in just about every context imaginable: school, work, sports, etc. These are all secular situations where religion isn't necessarily relevant, yet it's not normally considered inappropriate for Christians to "share."
An atheist walking into a religious situation (church) where people are doing religious things (sermon) and "sharing" a message of scientific secularism is somehow horrible. Despite how often atheists are accused of being "militant" and "intolerant," they don't normally do anything even remotely similar to this. It just goes to show how the deck is being stacked against atheists because theists can regularly engage in behavior that is treated as "normal" while atheists not doing anything close are still "militant."
Can you think of any analogous situations outside the atheist/theists dichotomy? You should, and what they all share in common are relationships of the privileged over the unprivileged. Assertive men are considered normal, but assertive women who are less assertive than men are still being rude. Whites who expect preferential treatment are just being normal, but blacks looking for preferential treatment just want quotas. Christians who want their religious holidays to be the standard days off are being normal, but Muslims who want their holidays off are asking for too much. Heterosexuals who want to engage in serial marriages are just being normal, but gays who want to marry just once are demanding special rights.
Comments
i live in Canada, and don’t experience huge discrimination for questioning the existence of god.
but i also don’t exactly proclaim it from the rooftops. the same goes for my sexuality.
i think the problem comes when you request or demand equal treatment, or question certain theists (or particularly biased heterosexuals) about a particular practice.
then the bias rears it’s head.
so as long as i sit quietly, for fear of upsetting the masses, then i’ll be okay right?
that is, until the “toleration” experienced now lessens, mainly because i haven’t stood up enough and proclaimed that religious or heterosexual privilege is not an acceptable future.
in a way, i can understand those in the privileged position because it is all they have known. not that i excuse the behaviour.
there comes a time, however, when you have to stop and actually think… accept responsibility for the suffering and humiliation the preservation of that privilege has cost others… people only looking to have the same equalities you enjoy.
if you are a person who does not stop and re-assess life often, it’s easy to get caught up in your own excuses for your unkindness.
and i’m no different. while i may be maligned for wanting to ask questions about the existence of god (does god not want logical, intelligence seeking followers?), and for feeling that loving someone who is the same sex is not an “abomination” (how can love be a sin?) i too am treating other people or animals unkindly in some way due to my own privilege or learned way of life.
do atheists have it bad? yes. do women? yes. do racial minorities? yes. are we all enslaved to some form of social control that we wish we could change? i would guess a lot of people feel that way if they think about it.
instead of saying “it’s not so bad.” we should be willing to stand up, even just a little, and help make those changes in our society. it sounds like a large truckload of pie-in-the-sky idealism, and yet, there is truth at it’s core.
no one makes changes to a system, if no one stands up and says “hey this isn’t working anymore.” and if you give people a privilege over others, chances are (as humans are wont to be) they will want that and more too. that’s human nature.
I think it depends a lot on geographical location. At the Atheist Experience TV e-mail list, we get letters every week describing mistreatment of atheists–I’d say mostly from family members. Many who write to us are minors, and my heart goes out to these young people who are subject in many regards to the whims of parents who refuse to allow them to express their beliefs.
Seriously, what would these parents think (or DO) if they knew their child was writing to adult strangers because it was the only way they could be heard and taken seriously? I sincerely wish these kids could talk to their parents, but most times I feel I need to advise them to simply stick it out, keep quite, and live their own lives once they can get out from under what, in my mind, amounts to parental tyranny.
In my mind, children suffer most of all when it comes to religion. In many homes, being an atheist simply is not allowed.
As long as anyone has good health and they are not in jail, they really don’t have too much reason to complain. (Of course the Republocrat crooks might spoil that dream as well.)
In Southern California life is pretty good regardless of your convictions on any issue. People seem to get along in spite of differences.
We have plenty of fundies and atheists, and adherents of and rejectors of all kinds of religions. Nobody cares. And California is not a Christian society and never was.
In and out of courtrooms countless times, I have never seen a Bible, and only once heard the words “So help me God.” The Penal Code is a masterpiece of rational skeptical thinking compiled largely by freethinking legislators of the 1870s.
Across the border, the region of Mexico known as La Frontera is prospering, with tremendous investment and economic growth. It appears to be the birth of a new and essentially secular society characterized by opportunity rather than faith, like the California of 150 years ago.
Around Los Angeles today you can see communities of Confucians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, fundamentalist Christians and whatever, living side by side in peace.
Among our great universities, Stanford is Humanist and Berkeley, UCLA and CalTech are quite secular. The three Jesuit universities are scholarly, not just blindly devout.
When I hear of the oppression of the faith-free in the Bible Belt, and the teaching in Kansas of risible biblical creationism as if science, I shake my head in compassion and wonderment and thank whatever gods there may or may not be that I am in urban Southern California, a relatively civilized society.
The existence of gods doesn’t seem to be an issue here. It looks a bit odd to see the freethinkers elsewhere in the country talking publicly about “God” a lot more than the believers do here, to the extent of erecting billboards about belief in “him” as if it’s assumed there is something to discuss.
All this shows is that we atheists, like some other “invisible” minorities, don’t have to show our beliefs in our appearance. You can’t usually tell that someone is deaf or gay just by looking at them either, but I doubt that many reasonable people would say that members of these groups have it easy. Only when an atheist’s beliefs become apparent to others could they know for certain how they’d be treated.
Then again, many, if not most atheists stay “in the closet” for fear of repercussions of simply stating their beliefs as others so freely do. That says something about the perceived threat, which is grounded in reality. Maybe Jack is really naive, and thinks that most people would not care or would embrace that he is an atheist. Or, like Austin said, he could just be lucky enough to live in area surrounded by some cool people. I think most believers care very much whether someone they know is atheist and would treat their friends, family members and strangers accordingly if they found out. Most other people don’t have to worry that their families could knowingly and willingly turn on them. One peril of being an atheist is that some of us must consider this. In the US, it’s generally not physically dangerous to be an atheist, but there are other ways of being ‘treated negatively.’ IMHO, Jack is naive.