The Eclectic

In this month’s Wired, there is a cover story on the rise in atheists who are taken on theists. Now as a theist, I am biased of course but some of the quotes struck me as well, odd.

For example, almost everyone quotes in the article was listed noting their intellectual prowess. Even the sidebar profile of Bad Religion’s lead singer noted his Cornell PHD in Zoology.

Yet where are the blue collar atheists? Those men and women who vote GOP, drive pickup trucks and don’t believe in God.  Better yet, where is the cat who never finished 8th grade, lives in a trailer park and thinks theists are dumber than he is?

I also love the quote from the BR singer “If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything,”

Wait a minute, that’s a bad thing? I mean 100 years ago, our beliefs shifted on things as trivial as what past for popular music to the fundamental understanding of how diseases function in the body. If we had limited our beliefs to only those things we could see and observe in the natural world, then we could have never had advanced as far as we have. We never could have believed that their was always something more behind what we can see or even measure for us to find.

One thing that has never quite sat well with me and atheism is the notion that the belief in a God is foolish at best and dangerous at worse. If it is a coping mechanism, what is so wrong with that. People have had them in the form of myth for years. As for the dangerous rise in fundamentalism and their attacks on modernity,yes those of this belief use the hope of the afterlife to bring horror to this one. Yet atheist never talk about the full impact of a Godless society would be on people. From my own experience meeting with Russians who were born in the 1970’s and grew up in the USSR, they talked about a hopelessness that if this life was all that you had, then why not spend it drunk or else deal with the soul crushing reality around you.

I’ve often joked to my GOP friends that the reason I’m a democrat is that I was first a Christian. Still it’s a more powerful condemnation of the people of God that atheist feel we are a harm to the world than a hope for it.