Heaven seems awful 2 me-"Theist laughs at loudly & with great cruelty"

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Most? Perhaps that is what your personal experience tells you. As for me, I do not think that atheists as-such have any diabolical plan to destroy public morals, corrupt the young, etc. Most go along to get along until provoked by the outlandish pronouncements and/or over-reactive behavior of some Christians. I say this as respectfully as I can. In their zeal, activist atheist groups (like Freedom From Religion) and adamant left-wing secularists (like the Frankfort School) serve as the unwitting tools Satan uses to undermine the intellectual foundations of liberal democracy such as the belief in inherent human dignity and inalienable rights.

Well, you know I can't agree on this last paragraph, since I don't see the FFRF (and don't actually know what the Frankfort School is) as being any of the things you just described, but the rest of your response was exceptionally well-stated, so the Kudos goes for that.

The FFRF is winning their lawsuits because the Christians who have tried to insinuate their sub-culture into a dominating force within the secular parts of our nation (public lands, etc, paid for by my godless tax dollars) frequently step over the line in their zeal. The FFRF pushes back against that zealotry... it does not make them zealots, except in the eyes of the actual zealots they're trying to resist.

I know your argument about the historical foundations of liberal democracy, and I don't entirely disagree. But I also think you tend to overstate the importance of the religious upon the Enlightenment principles that turned Medieval thinking into modern thinking, in the sense that most of the transformations we take for granted now (equality for women, for instance) were heavily resisted by the religious conservatives, and railed against by church leaders of various sorts. Even today, we see the same slow march toward progress -- and by progress I mean "the belief in inherent human dignity and inalienable rights" -- being resisted by the religious conservative culture, decrying the "demise" of our civilization, as they have always done, at each step, only to be proved dead wrong.

I'm sure you, as I do, still have old relatives clinging to their outdated assertions that race-mixing is going to be detrimental to "good Christian society!!", even though not many people today think of that as a religious (or righteous) claim. I'm sure that he (the great-uncle to whom I refer) would call pro-miscegenationists the "unwitting tools of Satan", as well.

Yes, I have personal experience with this. As do many, many, many of us. It's such a common thing among us that it's clearly a phenomenon in our culture for the religious to lie to their fellow congregants about the nature of atheists. After all, we're stopping them from doing whatever they want to do-- they put up crucifixes in public parks, as if they are shrines to their personal religion, and then whine when we ask them to take it down, then sue them to force them to comply with the (secular!) federal laws on the subject. When we ask them to stop trying to theocratize the nation (however well-intentioned they may be in doing so), they call us the ones who are destroying civilization. This is exactly the phenomenon I'm talking about. It's much more than personal feelings-- it's happening to us endlessly, constantly, and is everywhere you look if you'll just look, or just listen.