Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless (5 page)

88. I’m angry at the unbelievable self-centered pettiness of so much prayer. I get angry when people ask God to help them find the peanut butter… and neglect to ask him to end tsunamis and drought and pediatric cancer.

89. I’m angry that so many religious believers feel guilty or ashamed when someone they love dies, because their religion isn’t giving them comfort even though they think it should. I’m angry that, when religion fails on one of its most basic promises — the promise to provide solace in the face of grief — so many believers react by thinking, not that there’s something wrong with their religion, but that there’s something wrong with them.

90. I get angry when advice columnists tell their troubled letter-writers to talk to their priest or minister or rabbi… when there is no legal requirement that a religious leader have any sort of training in counseling or therapy.

91. And I get angry when religious leaders offer counseling and advice to troubled people — sex advice, relationship advice, advice on depression and stress, etc. — not based on any evidence about what does and doesn’t work in people’s brains and lives, but on the basis of what their religious doctrine tells them God wants for us.

92. I’m angry about the trustee at a local Presbyterian church who told his teenage daughter that he didn’t believe in God or religion, but that it was important to keep up his work because without religion there would be no morality in the world. I’m angry that he, himself, felt capable of accepting a world without God — but thought the parishioners were too stupid, too weak, or too immoral to do the same, and decided on their behalf that they had to be lied to.

93. I’m angry that the idea of religious faith — the idea that it’s acceptable, and even virtuous, to believe things you have no good reason to think are true — leads people to ignore, dismiss, trivialize, and flatly reject reality. I get angry when believers make arguments for religion that amount to — and sometimes flatly state — that they don’t care whether the things they believe are true. And I’m not just angry because ignoring and rejecting reality leads people to make bad decisions that hurt themselves and others. I’m angry because reality is freaking awesome — terrible sometimes, for sure, but also delightful and wondrous and more surprising than anything we could make up about it — and it upsets me that so many people shut it out just so they can keep believing their made-up stories.

94. I get angry when believers respond to some or all of these offenses by saying, “Well, that’s not the true faith. Hating queers /rejecting science /stifling questions and dissent… that’s not the true faith. People who do that aren’t real Christians /Jews /Muslims /Hindus /etc.” As if they had a pipeline to God. As if they had any reason at all to think that they know for sure what God wants, and that the billions of others who disagree with them obviously have it wrong. (Besides… I’m an atheist. The argument that “Those other guys just aren’t doing it right” is not going to cut it with me. I don’t think any of you have it right. To me, it all looks like stuff that people made up.)

95. And on that topic: I get angry when religious believers insist that their interpretation of their religion and religious text is the right one, and that fellow believers with an opposite interpretation clearly have it wrong. I get angry when believers insist that the parts about Jesus’ prompt return and all prayers being answered are obviously not meant literally… but the parts about Hell and damnation and gay sex being an abomination, that’s real. And I get angry when believers insist that the parts about Hell and damnation and gay sex being an abomination obviously aren’t meant literally, but the parts about caring for the poor are actually what God meant. How the hell do they know which parts of the Bible/ Torah/ Koran/ Bhagavad-Gita/ whatever are the ones God really meant, and which parts aren’t? And if they don’t know, if they’re just basing it on their own moral instincts and their own perceptions of the world, then on what basis do they think that God and their sacred texts have anything to do with it at all? What reason do they have for acting as if their opinion is the same as God’s, and he’s totally backing them up on it?

96. And I get angry when believers act as if these offenses aren’t important, because “Not all believers act like that. I’m a believer, and I don’t act like that.” As if that matters. This stuff is a major way that religion plays out in our world, and it makes me furious to hear religious believers minimize it because it’s not how it happens to play out for them.

97. I’m angry that, when I wrote the piece on my blog about atheist anger, I got
comments
telling me, quote, “It’s a pity your mother didn’t have an abortion.” “I hope some guys bomb your house bitch.” “Just kill yourself, k?” “What you need is to get laid. Not with lesbian toys either. You need a strong man with some big junk and a strong will to set you straight.” “I fucking hate every single person who posted here, and if there were some magical button that I could press which could annihilate your collective existence in an instant, I would push it 1728 times.” “You’re a fat, ugly whore. Your anger doesn’t impress me. Go drink bleach.” I’m angry that writing my atheist opinions — angry opinions, yes, but opinions where I was careful to distinguish between criticizing behaviors and insulting people, on a blog that people are free to read or not as they like — resulted in me fearing for my safety and my life.

98. And of course, I get angry — sputteringly, inarticulately, pulse-racingly angry — when believers chide atheists for being so angry. “Why do you have to be so angry all the time?” “All that anger is so off-putting.” “If atheism is so great, then why are so many of you so angry?”

I look at all the horrors I wrote about in this book. I look at mutilated children. I look at demolished art. I look at people suffering and dying because of faith healing. I look at organized Christianity — not just the religious right, but supposedly “moderate” churches as well — interfering with AIDS prevention, getting their theology in the public schools, trying to stop me and Ingrid from getting married, protecting priests who rape children. I look at fatwas, and burqas, and 9/11, and Salman Rushdie having to go into hiding for years. I look at the caste system in India, and the religious justifications that get used to defend it. I look at girl children in Jerusalem being spat on by a mob for baring their arms.

And I look at atheists occasionally being mean-spirited and snarky in blogs and books and magazines.

And I think: Can we please have some perspective?

Do you seriously look at all of this crap I’m talking about, thousands of years of abuse and injustice, deceit and willful ignorance, brutality and exploitation — and then look at a few years of atheists being snarky on the Internet — and see them as somehow equivalent?

Or worse: Do you somehow see the snarky atheists as the bigger problem?

99. But perhaps most of all: I’m angry because this book touches on — maybe — a hundredth of everything that angers me about religion.

This book barely scratches the surface. I know, almost without a doubt, that within five minutes of it going to press, I’ll think of twenty different things I wished I’d put in. This book could easily have been titled, “200 Things That Piss Off the Godless.” “500 Things That Piss Off the Godless.” “100,000 Things That Piss Off the Godless.” I could write an entire encyclopedia on everything about religion that makes me angry… and I still wouldn’t be done.

And that seriously pisses me off.

“But what about…”

Now that you’ve read my litany of rage, I want to answer some of the questions I know it’s going to raise. I know from experience that atheist anger makes emotions run high… and I know what most of the responses to this litany are going to be. So I want to head them off at the pass.

What hurts is repressing anger.

Besides, it’s not like I’m angry every second of every day. I wrote this book about some of the things I’m angry about, and that other godless people are angry about. But most of the time, I’m a pretty happy person. I’m good-tempered, cheerful, optimistic, easy to please, and inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt. My life is full of joy and pleasure and weird hobbies: I’m conscious of how fortunate I am; and I make sure to savor my life… especially since I think it’s the only one I’ve got.

Anger is just one part of my emotional makeup. And it’s not a bad part. It’s possible, even healthy, to be a happy and upbeat person, and still sometimes get angry about things.

Really, I’m fine. This book isn’t the only thing I’ve ever written; it isn’t the only thing I’m ever going to write; and it’s a little silly to think that it represents my entire philosophy of life. To assume that I, or Richard Dawkins, or PZ Myers, or any other famously “angry atheist,” is angry all the time because our angry atheist writing is the only thing people have seen from us… it makes about as much sense as assuming that the only thing Roger Ebert ever does in his entire life is go to the movies. Thank you for your concern, but it’s not necessary.

Why?

Because anger is always necessary.

Anger has driven almost every major movement for social change. The labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the modern feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the anti-war movement in the Sixties, the anti-war movement today, the American Revolution itself… all of these have had, as a major driving force, a tremendous amount of anger. And that’s just in the United States. Anger has driven social change movements around the world: from the resistance in Nazi Germany to the French Revolution; from the fight against apartheid in South Africa to the fight against fascism in Spain; from the movement against Pinochet in Chile to the Arab Spring uprisings and the anti-theocracy movement in Iran today. Anger over injustice, anger over mistreatment and brutality, anger over helplessness — all of these are powerful inspirations for social change.

I mean, why else would people bother to mobilize social movements? Social movements are hard. They demand time, they demand energy, they sometimes demand serious risk of life and limb, community and career. Nobody would bother if they weren’t furious about something.

So when you tell an atheist not to be so angry, you are, in essence, telling us to disempower ourselves. You’re telling us to lay down one of the single most powerful tools we have at our disposal. You’re telling us to lay down a tool that no social change movement has ever been able to do without. You’re telling us to be polite and diplomatic, when history shows that polite diplomacy in a social change movement works far, far better when it’s coupled with passionate anger. In a battle between David and Goliath, you’re telling David to put down his slingshot and just… I don’t know. Gnaw Goliath on the ankles or something.

The belief that “anger doesn’t help your cause, anger only alienates people” is a common one. But it’s not borne out by history. Anger in a social change movement mobilizes people. It inspires people to action. It gets people off the fence. And it creates visibility for your movement, and awareness of your issues. (I’m always entertained by reporters who ask in bewildered tones, “Why are these people so angry? What do they hope to gain by it?”… when they’re featuring them on the nightly news.)

And even the social movement leaders who get tagged as non-angry, peaceful, “good cops” were often very angry indeed. Look at the quotations from Martin Luther King and Gandhi that open this book. These leaders were angry. They championed anger. They simply channeled their anger in constructive ways. Which I think is a grand idea. But acknowledging your anger, and expressing it, is a huge part of that process.

I’ll acknowledge that anger is a difficult tool in a social change movement. A dangerous one even. It can make people act rashly; it can make it harder to think clearly; it can make people treat potential allies as enemies. In the worst-case scenario, it can even lead to violence. Anger is valid, it’s valuable and necessary, pretending it doesn’t exist does way more harm than expressing it… but it can also misfire, and badly. And contrary to popular opinion, research shows that expressing anger doesn’t make people calmer and less angry. Expressing anger actually makes us angrier. So I don’t want to be cavalier about anger. I think it’s a difficult tool, and one we need to be careful with.

But unless we’re endangering or harming somebody, it is not up to believers to tell atheists when we should and should not use this tool. It is not up to believers to tell atheists that we’re going too far with the anger and need to calm down. Any more than it’s up to white people to say it to black people, or men to say it to women, or straights to say it to queers. When it comes from believers, it’s not helpful. It’s patronizing. It comes across as another attempt to defang us and shut us up. And it’s just going to make us angrier.