Yesterday, in Part One of this series, I laid out how America sees its atheists: last in trust, coldest on the thermometer, and — in Gallup’s long-running ballot test — acceptable as a presidential candidate to just 41% of Republicans, against 69% of Democrats. That gap has a question buried in it, and it’s my question, because it’s about my side of the street.
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For as long as pollsters have been ranking groups of Americans, atheists have finished at or near the bottom of every list they make. Least trusted. Coldest rated. Last hired for the jobs that involve other people’s children. And the strangest part is who is doing the ranking: people who, by their own admission, mostly don’t know any of us. They are not rating neighbors. They are rating an idea.
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Back in March of 2018 I wrote a post called Atheism Is Not a Light Switch. The argument was simple: when somebody announces “I used to be an atheist,” the first question to ask is why they became one in the first place. Most of the time, when you hear the answer, you find there was never any disbelief there to lose. They were mad at God. They were mad at church people. They hit a crisis and “atheist” was the word they grabbed for how it felt. Then life changed, the feeling changed, and the label changed back. But atheism isn’t a light switch. You don’t flip it on in a bad year and off in a good one.
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Believe it or not, atheosts read the bible. And other holy books of other religions as well. Why? Well, it makes sense to knw something about a subject to be able to speak about it intelligently. So, I read the bible on occasion. Not daily, but when I’m interested in finding out something that supposedly occurred in the Hebrew text or the Christian work. Some of it is absolutely fascinating, even though not exactly historical in all instances.
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I think it’s interesting to see all of the online Christianity lately. It’s interesting in that it seems that wherever I turn, there’s somone claiming the mantle of Jesus, and informing the rest of us that we are heathens – or at least the tone of their posts seem that way. I don’t think this is the first time where people used some religious connection to make a name for themselves.
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