(January 12, 2015 at 1:39 am)robvalue Wrote: Hello, welcome aboardI'm very sorry to hear about your childhood, everyone deserves better than that.
I understand your jaded attitude towards people, I feel the same. I don't like the human race as a whole, and I see people being selfish and inconsiderate when they think they can get away with it. Many people are just plain evil and I can't even bear to think about the things they do.
I don't think this has anything to do with atheism though. Atheism is a nothing, it's the default position. For example, you wouldn't generalize people who don't believe in unicorns.
People suck, and a lot of those people are atheist. Religion, in my opinion, is not a better alternative.
As many words as I spent, I know my emotional state isn't leading to the clearest expressions. I'm not trying to argue, but to clarify.
It's not atheism I blame, not by a long stretch. What I think I'm perceiving, is the "exit programming" of religion, combined with the simple fact that, in a culture dominated by religious values, atheists find themselves in a bit more empty a position than they bargained for - suddenly without a community, which means, suddenly expected to live without the benefits of a community, which means, embarking on a lonely path where the school of hard knocks will teach you all your lessons.
This is not the same situation atheists would be in, if atheists were truly free in this society. Without the persecution, and marginalization, and pressures, keeping so many functional atheists clinging to their church communities as reinforcement to the notion that there is no community outside the church... there would probably be community outside the churches. Functional community, not the stumbling we have today.
I'm not out to promote something like a church of atheism, but I do accuse atheists of checking out of the human race, becoming dysfunctional Thoreau-wannabes, exchanging bastardized Nietzsche for unfiltered Rand, intending to wait until the crazies nuke each other, and hoping to come out ahead in the end. I'm accusing atheists of raising a middle finger to the next generation of people born under fundie oppression, denouncing any responsibility of community, and therefore of participating in the shutdown of all the good parts of our culture, at a time when that shutdown is so beneficial to the 1% and dooming to the rest of us.
Without being a put-upon group programmed to forever see itself as a minority, atheists would not, I think, be so morally lazy and uncaring towards the human race. That's my indictment towards the trend, and not toward an imaginary culture: the rebellion required to free oneself from religion, has mixed with American culture, to produce something not functional. A creed of mutually, societally-suicidal loners, clinging to a shell-shocked arbitrariness and disdain for hope.
I don't hate humans. I do fear and pity the current state of my fellow Americans, however.
