How can we understand angry Jews?
April 27, 2006
Dear Rabbi Gellman:
How can we understand angry Jews?
And by the way, why do you beat your wife, Rabbi?
Your patronizing web-column, "Trying to Understand Angry Atheists," is nothing but recycled ad hominem attack.
As the co-president of the nation's largest organization of atheists and agnostics, as someone who has been a freethinker all of my life and rubbed shoulders with other skeptics for more than 30 years, I can attest that most atheists are not angry people. Your unflattering image of atheists as bulls charging at the red flag of "good, sacrificing, loving" religionists has it backward. Identifying yourself as an atheist in today's increasingly intolerant society is the equivalent of raising a red flag.
Most atheists are polite, law-abiding, open-minded people who are frequently timid about identifying their nonreligious beliefs. Most believers are thin-skinned and seem to take a matter-of-fact admission of atheism or agnosticism as a personal insult. Nonbelievers in America often keep silent about our lack of religious credulity, no matter how often we are proselytized by "Onward, Christian Soldiers" boors, fearful of retaliation: against ourselves, our jobs or our children.
Most atheists and other freethinkers come to religion through reason. They apply the tests of logic and evidence to religion's extraordinary claims, and find them lacking. It is atheists who have the respectable point of view. Atheists don't make absurd claims, then insist those who agree with us will be rewarded with everlasting life, while those who disagree will be punished with eternal torture! What could be angrier and less loving than such spiritual blackmail? Aren't atheists due more credit when they do good? When we do good, we do it for goodness' sake, not to placate or propitiate a god who, let's face it, often seems very angry in the books written about him!
Your column exemplifies the findings of a recent survey by the University of Minnesota, "Atheists as 'Other,' " finding that society has grown more accepting of every ethnic, racial, sexual and religious minority--except atheists. In such a society, atheists are often characterized as "angry," but it is the believers who in fact get angry when their unquestioned beliefs in irrational claims are challenged. In a society that either ignores or demeans atheists, we actually would have a good claim to be a little miffed and frustrated. But what we are mostly concerned about is halting the religious right's intention to sacrifice our secular form of government and the rights embodied in our godless constitution upon the altar of religious tyranny. Protecting the constitutional separation of church and state ought to be something that every progressive, regardless of religion, can agree upon.
Annie Laurie Gaylor
Co-President
Freedom From Religion Foundation
PO Box 750
Madison WI 53701