Ask an Atheist

I believe that morality is relative and created by humankind. Hundreds of years ago, most Christians were OK with using force to control their wives, OK with slavery and rule by nobility, and OK with beating their children. Today, most Christians oppose all of those things wholeheartedly, they find them immoral. Society has evolved and morality has changed - even for those who are religious. The more everyone listens to their sense of empathy, the more humane we become as a society, religious or not.

If morality were absolute and Christians follow that absolute, then why don't all Christians agree on morals?

A while back I wrote a more in-depth article about where I think morality comes from which you can read at Without Heavenly Decree, Threat of Hell or Promise of Heaven - Where Might Morality Come From?

It may be the area of the country I live in but, until recently, I never even met a person who I knew was an atheist outside of my own family. When you might go a lifetime without meeting someone in person who admits they are an atheist, it's kind of hard to feel a sense of atheist community. I'll admit that I was excited to meet him because it's really nice to be able to talk openly and not have to navigate a conversation laden with religious references that one must pretend to also believe to avoid offending anyone. But I get that kind of conversation with my liberal, non-atheist friends, too.

All atheists really have in common is their absence of belief in God. Beyond that, there's not too much held in common. Most atheists are upset by religious laws, religion based discrimination, and religious practices that infringe on human rights but then again most non-atheists are, too.

What I see among online atheists (the only type I interact with regularly) is more a type of understanding of certain situations atheists in America encounter rather than a sense of community. When I relate my experiences with anti-atheist bigotry to my liberal religious friends they express shock and sometimes disbelief but most other atheists I've conversed with have had similar experiences. They can relate to the problems of biting your tongue to keep your job or having friends or family disown you if you are "outed" as atheists. They can relate to the vandalism and the death threats, especially atheist writers. Even if they've never had the specific action performed against them, generally they've experienced something in the same spirit.

While this might not create a sense of community it does tend to inspire activism. When I see a negative behavior among people as just my own experience, I tend to just take the indignity or abuse without raising a fuss. But when I see that the behavior isn't against just me, and is deemed acceptable to my society, it outrages me. I think that is the something some atheists do belong to - a desire for positive change inspired by shared negative experience. But it is by no means exclusive. You don't have to be an atheist to be part of it. Just speak out against unjust religious legislation - anti-gay laws and anti-science education laws (religiously motivated legislation to alter the teaching of evolution, geology, history, and/or environmental sciences in public schools) are all in legislation right now. Speak out against religious discrimination against non-Christians in the workplace. Object when people slander homosexuals. Protest religiously motivated discriminatory child custody practices. Protest the medical and educational neglect of children. Any of these will make you a part of it.

Atheists in America care a lot about religion. This is primarily because religious groups in our country have a great deal of political power. Religious groups in America have successfully created religious laws which the entire populace, religious or not, must follow. These laws include the ban against same sex marriage, blue laws, and anti-cohabitation laws.

Christian religious lobbies are also trying to insert Christianity into public schools in place of science education. They have succeeded in getting "abstinence only" rather than science based sex education into public schools, paid for entirely with taxpayer money. Fortunately, President Obama has re-allocated the budget for religion based sex education to fund science based sex education.

Additionally, religious organizations are granted tax-free status even though they are politically powerful and often use their influence to create legislation or to support specific political candidates. While religious organizations do not pay taxes, they benefit from them. This means that people who are having laws passed to discriminate against them by religious lobbies are required to pay the taxes that benefit the very organizations behind the discriminatory laws.

The dominant religions in America teach that only they are right and that any other belief serves their opponent, Satan. Their belief systems hold that those who do not follow that specific belief system are sinful, evil, and immoral. This leads to intolerance, not just of atheists but of people who don't share the same belief system or don't practice it exactly the way they do.

People's behavior is affected by their beliefs, sometimes even dictated by their beliefs. If people have beliefs that are different from mine and antithetical to mine, I have a great reason to be concerned. I believe in freedom of expression, human rights for all, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. These beliefs are the polar opposite of the most visible Christian conservative beliefs.

Prejudice against homosexuals, people of other religions, and women often stems from religious belief. White supremacists and other such cults have a religious basis. We are all affected by bigotry, regardless of our belief or absence of belief.

Another piece in the puzzle is that, as human beings, atheists are concerned when other human beings are mistreated. There is a visible amount of religiously motivated child abuse in America - people who deny their children medical treatment, people who punish their children physically for perceived sins, people who deny their children an adequate education - all in the name of religion.

Because religious people are the majority in America, and some of those religious people try to use the weight of that majority to step on minorities, including atheists, of course atheists are concerned!

My answer to this is - I don't know and I don't think it is necessary to know to be an atheist. There will always be unanswered questions but simply because we don't have an answer yet, it doesn't necessarily follow that we should give up looking for one and put every unknown in the category of "God must have done it".

Historically, mankind has attributed things it doesn't understand to God. With time and a few people unsatisfied by a simple "God must have done it" many of these unexplained phenomena are now explained. Human civilization has only existed for a short time and science for an even shorter time. It seems arrogant to assume that everything we haven't answered yet must be unanswerable since we've been in the business of looking for answers using the empirical method for such a short period of time. We have yet to unravel the mysteries of such things as diseases even though we have a sound basis and have germ theory and whole divisions of biology devoted to the study of diseases. If we have yet to puzzle out such relatively simple matters, why is the assumption that if we haven't figured out more complex matters with less accessible physical data such as the origin of the universe that the answer can be nothing other than God?

In my opinion this question would be better aimed at a physicist several hundred years in the future, rather than at an atheist today.

I think that the small percentage of atheists who simply attack instead of discuss religion sometimes give the rest of us a bad reputation. I think we should call them on it and tell them they are out of line. However, I don't think it's appropriate for the rest of us to accept responsibility for their words.

In my opinion, all Christians should not be held responsible for the verbal attacks, the religious abuses, the religiously motivated murders and hate crimes, and the political pressure perpetrated by some Christians. It's supremely ignorant to blame the whole of a group for the actions or words of a minority of its members - and I don't think religious people are ignorant. I think that it's enough for us to disapprove of attacks and to not do any attacking ourselves.

The problem is that anything said in defense of atheists existing and not being abused or speaking out against religious abuses of power is seen by the religious community as atheists attacking religion. If you speak out against religion made into law, if you complain because someone was fired for being an atheist, you are seen as attacking religion. If you relate the story of religiously motivated abuses you've suffered, if you lay out in words an explanation or even just a statement of your non-belief, you are seen as attacking religion.

So I think the answer to the problem of atheists who speak in anger and make attacks rather than participate in discussions is to publicly express our disapproval, explain that we do not support their actions, and to conduct our own affairs courteously. This also means that when religious people respond to us aggressively and provocatively, we musn't take the bait and fan the flames. We must remain firm in our objections but not rise to provocation.

The red letter 'A' in Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous book, The Scarlet Letter, stood for adultery. It was worn by an adulteress as a badge of shame, intended to humiliate her.

The symbol has been adopted by atheists as part of the Out Campaign which encourages atheists to come out of the religious closet. The Scarlet 'A' is used to ironically express the social stigma of being an atheist.