Myth:
Although there are many kind and loving atheists, history indicates that people who have hated religion also have hated some other group of people.
Response:
When religious theists accuse atheists of being incapable of morality, it's easy to rebut this by pointing both to the gross immorality committed by believers and to the lack of widespread atheist crime or immorality. This doesn't prevent anti-atheist bigots from trying to associate atheism with immorality, however, and this myth is a one response which grants the morality of individual atheists, yet denies that atheism is much more than dressed-up hatred. Is there any truth to it?
There are a number of serious errors in this myth, all of which deserve at least some attention. To begin with, we shouldn't give too much credit to someone willing to say with a straight face "Although there are many kind and loving atheists..." There is a large "but" in that statement, designed to communicate the bigoted assertion that kindness and love from atheists is an exception to a general rule that atheists are not kind or loving.
Such bigotry is more obvious when other minorities are the subject — for example, if someone says "Although there are many honest and generous Jews..." or "Although there are many law-abiding and educated black people..." If we heard someone starting out with those words, we'd immediately recognize that they are trying to rationalize racist or anti-Semitic bigotry. We shouldn't treat a person as being any better or having anything more reasonable to offer when they are doing something similar with atheism.
The bigotry behind this myth is revealed much more clearly in the following clause where "people who have hated religion" is used to refer to the "atheists" in the first clause. The unambiguous intention is to create a perception of identity between the two groups: atheists are people who hate religion and people who hate religion are atheists.
This assertion stands in clear conflict with the facts because some atheists are themselves religious, some atheists are indifferent to religion, and some theists hate religion. There is a strong correlation between atheism, being irreligious, and criticizing religion, but this is due to accidental historical factors in Western culture and not to anything inherent in atheism itself. Even if we were to pretend for the sake of argument that there were some inherent connection there, though, it would not justify the above allegation against atheists because criticism of religion isn't the same as hating religion.
Masking Theists' Bigotry Against Other Theists
That individual atheists may hate groups of people cannot be denied — but of course, the same is true of individual theists as well. There is nothing about atheism that would prevent an atheist from hating because atheism is nothing more then disbelief in gods. Atheism carries with it no particular moral implications, positive or negative. Theists, on the other hand, frequently claim that their religious beliefs carry all sorts of positive moral implications — so what's their excuse for their hatred or bigotry?
In fact, if we narrow the above claim a little bit we'll find that it's true about an awfully large number of religious theists. How many Christians hate Islam and, according to the above argument, also must hate Muslims? How many Muslims hate Judaism? How many Christians hate scientific materialism and naturalism, or atheistic communism? There are many belief systems which religious theists have hated, but if the above argument is true then these same religious theists must have also hated adherents of those belief systems.
Theist Hate Mongering
The above myth is little more than an attempt to encourage the belief that atheists cannot be trusted because atheism encourages hatred. Everything about it is false, though, and even worse is the fact that the accusations being made against atheists are at least as true — and possibly more so — about religious theists themselves, especially those most likely to be making the accusation in the first place.
People promulgating this myth have to know all this, which means they would be promulgating things they know to be false for the sole purpose of instigating suspicion, fear, and hatred of atheists. That's hate-mongering, pure and simple. What's ironic is how atheists here are being accused of hatred while the speaker is the one who is actually encouraging bigotry and therefore also hatred.
