RE: Message to any religious users regarding Violence in our community.
February 18, 2015 at 2:08 pm
(February 13, 2015 at 4:23 pm)IanHulett Wrote: <begin rant>
I'm glad that this is rare, but it still pisses me off that there are self-proclaimed atheists and anti-theists going around committing violence like that guy who assaulted that ohio pastor, or Hicks who goes around killing muslim people, claiming they're doing it "in the name of" atheism and/or anti-theism, or maybe I'm strawmanning, I don't know what these people are really thinking when they do these things. We're trying to get rid of this crap, and we keep trying to tell you guys that we're a peaceful group and tell the religious extremists that we won't take their sh*t, but then these morons come around and start committing physical attacks on you guys and now in addition to having to condemn religious extremists, we have to go around telling you that we won't accept the a**hats that commit violence who identify in our community.
{snip}, and any other religious people who have an account here, or who are visiting here from a google search or whatever, who are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Amish/Mennonite, or whatever religion you subscribe to, I need to tell you, I may be an anti-theist, and believe religion is harmful in most cases, and may even mock religion and call religion a cult or whatever, but I'm sure I can speak for a decent number of fellow atheists and anti-theists here when I say that this community doesn't support violence of any kind. Whenever an a**hole pops his ugly face and attacks or kills a religious person, we are that quick to disown this person. We condemn violence everywhere. We condemn it wherever it comes up outside our community, and we especially condemn it when it comes from within our own community, however rare they come up.
We're a peaceful community and prefer to solve our differences with words, NOT our fists. We disassociate ourselves from violence of any kind, I can't stress this enough. Fortunately these people are a rare occurance in our community and we rarely have to deal with them. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
</end rant>
Sorry if I upset anybody. I feel as though I needed to post this.
Um no, we are not a "group". Humans are individuals first. We do form groups yes, but that is evolutionary. The word "atheist" is a position, the "off" position on god claims. It is not a moral code. It is not a religion. It is not a political party. It is not a loyalty oath.
Our species ability to be cruel or compassionate is in our evolution, not the labels we assign ourselves or each other.
It sucks that another person holding the "atheist" label did what they did. But that does not make any individual automatically good or bad, only our actions do that.
