AAP, you don't understand how insidious religious creep has become in this country, the USA.
I remember a time when things were more like they are in the UK. You believe what you believe, and I believe what I believe, and you keep yours in church, and I'll keep mine to myself. But that's no longer the case.
A big part of the growing fundamentalist Xtian movement in the USA is not only to proselytize, but to impose those beliefs directly into the government that governs us all. For a long time, atheists took the laissez faire approach you advocate. What we have gotten for our live-and-let-live approach is the Ten Commandments shoved in our faces at courthouses throughout the country; a fully false but now quite persistent meme that our nation was founded as a Xtian nation (exactly the opposite is in fact true); public meetings now opened with prayer. Atheists here have begun to realize that if they don't fight back, we will lose our rights to ignore what Xtians believe. The militancy of certain religious groups here is hard to grasp unless you have lived it. Shunning is a big tool in their toolbox.
I have a wonderful community of non-believer friends. It's not hard to form a community without religion if you choose to do that.
I'm all for letting people believe what they want and always have been. But I am no longer indifferent to the harm I suffer from the spread of religious practices within my government. I speak out much more often now, and I'll continue to do so.
I am also incapable of putting even a tacit imprimatur on the validity of notions that don't withstand even the most basic scrutiny with a critical eye. To put the creation story up as an equally valid alternative to, say, the fossil record, is, in my opinion, an insult to the nobility of science and its reliability as a method. One is a pretty story so people don't have to think about things too much; the other is the truth. When someone tells me they don't "believe" in evolution, they may as well say they don't "believe" in the food they're eating as we enjoy our lunch.
If you lived here as an atheist, you'd understand, I think.
I remember a time when things were more like they are in the UK. You believe what you believe, and I believe what I believe, and you keep yours in church, and I'll keep mine to myself. But that's no longer the case.
A big part of the growing fundamentalist Xtian movement in the USA is not only to proselytize, but to impose those beliefs directly into the government that governs us all. For a long time, atheists took the laissez faire approach you advocate. What we have gotten for our live-and-let-live approach is the Ten Commandments shoved in our faces at courthouses throughout the country; a fully false but now quite persistent meme that our nation was founded as a Xtian nation (exactly the opposite is in fact true); public meetings now opened with prayer. Atheists here have begun to realize that if they don't fight back, we will lose our rights to ignore what Xtians believe. The militancy of certain religious groups here is hard to grasp unless you have lived it. Shunning is a big tool in their toolbox.
I have a wonderful community of non-believer friends. It's not hard to form a community without religion if you choose to do that.
I'm all for letting people believe what they want and always have been. But I am no longer indifferent to the harm I suffer from the spread of religious practices within my government. I speak out much more often now, and I'll continue to do so.
I am also incapable of putting even a tacit imprimatur on the validity of notions that don't withstand even the most basic scrutiny with a critical eye. To put the creation story up as an equally valid alternative to, say, the fossil record, is, in my opinion, an insult to the nobility of science and its reliability as a method. One is a pretty story so people don't have to think about things too much; the other is the truth. When someone tells me they don't "believe" in evolution, they may as well say they don't "believe" in the food they're eating as we enjoy our lunch.
If you lived here as an atheist, you'd understand, I think.
