being a hateful person

[Ziploc Surprise]

Things like this bother me so much. Atheists are described as being 'hateful' yet we aren't the ones putting other people's beliefs down. At least not like this. Sadly Christians seem to have the tendency to accuse us of hate yet a great number of them shout and yell at us with harsh words while preaching how 'loving' their god is at the same time. And they also attack their own kind. It's funny how people who generally believe in the one God at the end of the day can hate each other and say the other churches are wrong and don't worship in the right way.

sigh.... they say us atheists are spiteful and hold a lot of negativity. I just don't get it. :/

There is a psychological concept involved here. I wan't to call it Praxis but I know that's not the right term. It's where you make your enemies subhuman. They loose their humanity. It puts a lot of distance between you and the enemies and makes it easier to hate. This happens in war all the time. The enemies name gets changed to something like, for example, gook, jap, or rag head. Then exaggerations, untruths and generalities get placed on to them. They no longer become another human being who, though misguided, shares the same humanity with you .On the Atheist forum I admit we are guilty of this to some extent. I will say that it is easier to use some sort of abbreviation for the words "Fundamentalist Christian" and "Pentecostalism" and to some extent this is a defense of the use of the word "fundies".

Generalities are also used. Christians are often labeled as stupid instead of "people who are acting stupid and/or people unwilling to use the intelligence/thinking abilities gained from millions of years of evolution". Based on the numbers (I'm playing a numbers game here) the vast majority of Christians and atheists should fall within the normal range for I.Q. If you eliminate the normal range and look at the outliers there I suspect (but don't have any statistical hard evidence) the differences would be noticeable. In other words I make this assumption because I think there exists statistical evidence on above average (above the norm) intelligence and atheism but I haven't looked carefully into the evidence to see if it has any validity. You could also point to the vast number of the worlds known best and brightest and then look at their beliefs, but that would be very unscientific. There are many unknown people with high I.Q. There are average (withing the norm) people who are very successful as well. There are a lot of extraneous variables involved with this sort of speculation. You could also look at those outliers on the low end of the I.Q scale and assume that they would more eslily fall for religion because it is easier to understand (religion by comparison if far less conceptual and more a series of rules one must follow). Here one could say that the cause for their beliefs is their inability to reason themselves out of these beliefs -a diminished reasoning ability. In other words to say that most Christians are believers because they are of low I.Q. is probably incorrect because most people fall within the normal range of I.Q. The outliers are low in occurrances. It might be enough to make the numbers statistically significant but to what degree (numbers again) they are statistically significant, I don't know.
It is probably better to say that, if you were to equate reasoning ability with I.Q, Christians, and any believer for that matter, have equal or close to equal reasoning ability to that of most athiests, they just don't use it. In other words it's not lack of ability, it's personal choice in this case. I will admit it's easier to call them stupid instead of calling them unwilling to think or reason.

Couple all of this with one big extraneous variable. One that, in the future, will seriously effect belief worldwide. This variable being the alternative explanations for phenomena (in other words the rising evidence that biology, geology, archaeology, psychology and brain science, sociology, history etc has found). Obviously I am not talking about science as seen or interpreted through the lens of religion. Also, In this case, it's not just the existence of these explanations, but the availability/accessibility and the social stigma associated with looking into alternative explanations for phenomena.

When it comes to information that is now organized and readily available to the average person and lay person I would equate it to water rising in a bath tub (oddly, I could also equate it to Noah's flood). If you were to compare the water to plausible theories and scientifically obtained fact and the "things that would drown" to bullshit theories/religion/myth you could get a visual impression of how, when the water rises to a certain level, the bullshit theories must either sink or swim.

Right now a lot of the bullshit is swimming frantically -and not doing well. Creationism looks like it will be one of the first to drown. But there are other's. Forum member Minimalist just started a thread that went into how biblical archaeology (a word that is now more of a misnomer but I will use it here because it is short) has changed. After decades of digging the evidence is piling up against any historical validity of the stories in the Bible. The history channel has begun (by saying "begun" I'm referring to a period of 10 years or less) to show some documentaries about this. Unfortunately they show this stuff alongside programming about aliens, big foot creatures, ghosts, ancient clairvoyants and prophets. It sort of illelegitimizes a lot of legitimate things they show. I get tired of watching these channels because you never know when they are going to switch into the bullshit. I digress.

Stephen Pinker has been writing books about morality. From the Ted.com talks I have viewed these books look like they challenge milenalistic beliefs. Stephen Covey (author of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People") unintentionally (I believe, since he is a Mormon) provides a better structure than Christianity for teaching and practicing moral behavior. One that is based on conscious choice, careful planning and not blind obedience. In a nutshell conscious choice, as it is explained in the book, eliminates the "let go and let god" faith biased approach to decision making. Careful planning ensures that you will live a lifestyle of conscious choice and of soul searching to find what are the right choices. Soul searching (as it is defined in the book) instead of listening to a religious leader or obeying the Bible blindly, is a better way to weigh the facts and ascertain what is right when making personal decisions. It's taking the control out of "god's" hands and putting it into your own.

For me personally the theory of evolution was available to me from the get go. I never believed that the creation stories in Genesis were literally true. In order to make things match up I had some sort of hybrid theory that god somehow created the universe in a mostly hands off approach, allowing it to develop it the way it did. I got a load of shit for believing this but when you are a fundie it involves telling people to fuck off when you have found a better theory. When I finally had time to seriously question my beliefs I went straight to college level theology books because the explanations commonly given to lay people were proving unfruitful (and this was after years and years of questioning). College level theology was not readily available to me. It is not taught in church. I had to go to Amazon.com to get my books. It was this theology that finally deconverted me. Anything that followed served to affirm this decision.

Finally consider the issues of brain washing and the social stigma of considering alternate theories for experienced phenomena. It takes a lot of reasoning ability, exercise of choice, and skepticism to break through this. I could expand on this here but I think I reasonably did this on other posts so doing the same here would be redundant. I have mentioned it to point out that the hurdle is higher for a fundie than it is for someone who has never been a fundie due to brain washing and social stigma, therefore slapping the word "stupid" on them is again technically incorrect. When the waters of available and information rise and becomes more redily available the stigma will go away and, from this new perspective, doctrine will look more like brain washing.

My point is that when the water rises the bullshit theories must either sink or swim. Yes some of them could build a boat and ride out the flood but if the water's never recede then there will be no dry ground upon which to rebuild and repopulate. The dove will have to rest on the arc.