Okay, now I’m all riled up. I was just over reading this article on Pharyngula, and I just need to drop my two cents in on this discussion.

I am an atheist. This means that I do not believe in God. I do not believe in your God, but I also don’t believe in any God. I believe that there is no need for God. I believe that all of his mighty and brilliant books are nothing but spiritual self help with no actual basis in fact. I believe that all of his supposed great works can be easily explained away through an understanding of the work at hand. Sometimes we don’t know what the explanation is yet (and I say yet with purpose), but that does not mean that God did it. We do not know exactly what happened 14 billion years ago when the universe took up the habit of existing, and we do not know what happened ten seconds before that. But that does not mean that God did it any more than it means Roy Orbisson did it.

PZ Myers is also an atheist, and a much more knowledgeable mind than me. I love his blog because he is salty, spirited, intelligent, cutting, cunning, and witty. While I don’t agree with everything he says, I always find a lot of sanity in his arguments.

This piece of his I’m commenting on talks about the so-called Atheist 3.0 movement. This is a movement of atheists who don’t believe in God, but they TOTALLY RESPECT YOU for having your own creeped out faith. Now, I’ll never find myself in this camp. I can respect a person in spite of their beliefs, but I see no reason to ever give someone extra credit because they find it in their heart to accept Xenu. To me personally, I see faith as a form of insanity, but in the same way that I see many of my own activities as cute little insanities. The more violent the faith, the more violent the insanity, and the less I can accept. Thus, the fundamentalists with foam on their mouths shrieking about the hellish destiny that awaits us strike me as much more insane than someone who says “I’m pretty sure there was a God, but I don’t know if we know what’s on his mind…”

The quotation that truly drew my ire was this comment by Robert Wright:

If you’re a Midwestern American, fighting to keep Darwin in the public schools and intelligent design out, the case you make to conservative Christians is that teaching evolution won’t turn their children into atheists. So the last thing you need is for the world’s most famous teacher of evolution, Richard Dawkins, to be among the world’s most zealously proselytizing atheists. These atmospherics only empower your enemies.

There might be a shred of truth to this argument. When you’re talking to a raving fundamentalist lunatic who believes that all the truth in the world pales before his big poppa in the sky who dun created the world in seven gall-darn days, Richard Dawkins isn’t going to win him over. But neither will the statement that teaching evolution won’t turn their children into atheists. It’s ingrained in these fundies that original sin was eating from the tree of knowledge, and that knowledge that doesn’t come directly from God is a trick of the devil. You will never win this argument with this guy.

And frankly, of all the people on earth I want to be at the forefront of this atheist thing (which I don’t want to call a movement), it’s guys like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. They’re highly intelligent people with a deep understanding of their fields of study who can present the argument to those who might possibly hear it in such a way that it makes sense and resonates.

Back when I was a christian lad fresh out of high school and plotting my future, I had a friend who became an atheist. He was an idiot. He tried to use Schrodinger’s Cat to explain to me why there was no God, and he failed miserably at communicating the principal to me. He looked like a yutz, and in my still-Christ-addled brain, it just sounded like some anti-religious trickery because it didn’t make sense. If that had been an expert in the area who understood the topic and could communicate it well, I would have been much more open to understanding the point.

When you’re talking to an insane person, if you embrace their delusion it won’t make them well. It won’t make them embrace your reality. You’re just, for those House fans out there,¬†encouraging Freedom Master to jump off the parking structure. How do you imagine that is going to end? Do you think that holding the aforementioned fundamentalist parent’s hand and telling him that atheists are hunky-dory is going to result in him saying, “Aw, hell son. Go on and teach yer godlessness. Yer all right!”

Not bloody likely.

I’m a mouthpiece. I try not to be insulting to people when we’re talking in general and I bring up religion, but often I fail. But I don’t want to be a prick about it. However, when someone tells me that there was a great flood or that God loves a particular type of person best or that the Christian God is a God of love, then I have no recourse but to engage, and not respectfully. If they have a right to unholster their beliefs on me, you’re damn sure I’ll unholster mine on them.

This didn’t come easy. As I’ve said many times, I grew up a faithful boy. It was a very hard thing to do to discover for myself that the world was not as I’d always understood it, and that the God I had loved for so long was a fairy tale. It was awful. But it was necessary. The more I learned about the world, the more I saw through the lies I had been taught. And I will not smile and placate some delusional mind who wants to tell me that horoscopes are real, that Jesus turned water into wine, that Ganesha’s mom attached an elephant’s head to his headless baby body, or that your loving God¬†rewards us for blowing up coffee shops with an army of clean women to dirty. You’re allowed to believe these things, but don’t think that means I have to respect you for it.

Jim