Rant against anti-atheist agnostics.

[Mudhammam]

Albert Einstein famously said, "The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'—cannot hear the music of the spheres." The part that Einstein was most correct in that statement was the paradoxical characterization of religion as both a "hard struggle" and an "opium of the masses," which I'm sure even believers can appreciate. It's no secret that one aspect of the world Einstein never could understand was people, and I think it's easy to see why he did not, as result, get the so-called "fanaticism" of "creatures"--who are most certainly--not deaf to "music of the spheres" but indeed are "in a grudge against traditional religion." When one truly appreciates the devastating effects on the human psyche that religious indoctrination more often than not has on the developing mind, and many if not most atheists have an acute, first-hand knowledge of this damage, then the charge that one is

obviously more animated by emotional bile than any reason they actually own up to... obviously working through issues which cloud their judgment....

falls to the ground like a dead leaf. Of course we are bound to feel an emotional response to the intellectual and humanistic travesties that religions commit in example after example. Emotions are inseparable from reasons--one always animates or depresses the other. Israel Scheffler was fond of the term "cognitive emotion" in describing the irreducibility of their mutual interaction. I never understand the criticism of anti-theism that it ought to suppress any emotion that might accompany its pro-action--how can one experience or witness the toxic, anti-intellectual, guilt-driven, faith-based, xenophobic tendencies outsourced into the world by believers and/or their gods, and not feel a sense of outrage?