
Why do Americans still dislike atheists? - pavel
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-do-americans-still-dislike-atheists/2011/02/18/AFqgnwGF_story.html
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loup-vaillant
Very brief attempt at answering that: many believers tend to think atheism is
a _choice_.

Most of the time, it isn't. My only choice was trying to see the world as it
is. And the evidence at my disposal tell me that the Earth is very old, and
that God does not exist (almost certainly so). I'm not at liberty to believe
otherwise.

~~~
melling
Not really solid reasoning. The reality is that you can't prove either case.
You could spend a lot of time trying to debate either side, but in the end
it's probably just wasted effort. Pick a side, be happy, then get on with
solving "easier" problems. NP vs P is still open.

~~~
danilocampos
> The reality is that you can't prove either case.

Perhaps, but under what circumstances should one have to _prove_ a negative?

We, similarly, can't prove that we're not living inside a magic pill ingested
by an all-powerful rhinoceros who deplores our existence and wishes to excrete
us at the first opportunity unless we all bake delicious lemon tarts and
sacrifice them to the rhino by putting them into our toilets.

We can't prove Tupac and Biggie, now at peace, aren't living on an island,
with black Michael Jackson as their producer, cranking out new tracks and
submitting them anonymously to YouTube.

We can't prove there's no sea monster who looks identical to Regis Philbin,
but bigger than Burj Khalifa, who is contributing to global warming.

But basic examinations of the facts lead us to the conclusion that such
claims, especially absent evidence, aren't worth arranging our lives around.

~~~
melling
Look, I could care less which side you take, or why you take it. I'm simply
saying that just because you don't see something doesn't mean it doesn't
exist. Smarter people than you and me have taken different sides.

I could easily make a case for either side. However, this is HN, and this
discussion doesn't belong here.

~~~
sofal
The reason why this discussion "doesn't belong here" is that people are unable
to critically discuss issues which are so closely tied to their personal
identity, like cherished religious beliefs, without getting too emotional
about it. The HN community is just as vulnerable to this as any other, and
this is unfortunate.

------
tokenadult
The article itself answers the question posed in the headline by saying,
"Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked
and angry." I'll expand on that point a bit, as an American person who was
brought up with belief in God that was taught to me as a basis for personal
morality and who no longer believes in God but still likes to follow standards
of personal morality. Teaching of children in a great variety of religious
organizations, not just Christian organized religions, presupposes that one
rationale for morale behavior is the approval of the God or gods (or
conformity with the thought of enlightened men) promoted by believers in that
religion. Young children so brought up are not encouraged to consider the
possibility of moral behavior on the basis of purely human, this-world
considerations.

In my own life, I was influenced at what I think is known to be a critical age
for forming group allegiances (around the time of puberty) by two boys who
were my classmates in junior high. They were my two best friends at that age.
Both were very smart, eventually becoming engineers who have done challenging
work in their adult careers, and one was deeply devout by upbringing, while
the other was militantly atheist by upbringing. It happened, I would now say
by coincidence, that the devout evangelical Christian I knew among the two
friends was a young man of exceptional kindness and quiet self-confidence that
never crossed the line into arrogance, while the militant atheist was a young
man who delighted in teasing other students (even a girl in our class with
cerebral palsy) and who never hid his pride in his IQ and his secularism. The
religious point of view that resulted in kinder, less arrogant behavior was
appealing to me, and with the example of the two friends in mind, I became
much more evangelical Christian in my outlook during my school years than I
had been brought up to be.

Over quite a few years, including years when I was employed doing evangelistic
work in another country, I have become entirely an atheist, but still very
much interested in encouraging myself, and the children in my care, to be
kind, non-arrogant, and willing to take on intellectual challenges. Meanwhile,
my childhood evangelical Christian friend is a still an active church-goer,
but now a member of a "liberal" denomination and certainly, as his career
verifies, not at all "fundamentalist" in his view of science (as he once was).
The formerly atheist friend is now a follower of the Baha'i religion. He seems
to have mellowed out quite a bit in his middle age. I am much better
acquainted these days with the first mentioned friend than the second, because
the formerly atheist friend traveled to other far-away places over the years.

I think many people rely more than they realize on salient personal examples
to form their opinions on abstract subjects such as religion. Perhaps atheists
in the United States will gradually gain more acceptance as more people have
personal experience with interacting with kind, thoughtful atheist friends (as
I have). Because the United States population includes a large percentage of
people whose ancestors settled in America specifically because of their
religious commitments (as did more than half of my ancestors), religiosity
probably still has a long time to go as a characteristic feature of American
national culture. On my part, I think the writings of Sam Harris go a long way
to helping religiously committed Americans to rethink their point of view and
to be open to the possibility that morality is separable from religion.

