Endless claims of victimhood plague our nation from every pore of every organ of our society. Everlasting waves of butthurt wash all of us as the winds of moans carry off the sickly scent of wailing evaporating from us under the oppressive heat of complaint. The victim card has become frayed and dirty with use, dragged from the thickest moors and most repulsive bogs to be played by everyone, from young to old, rich, poor, theistic, atheistic, gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, transgender, genderqueer, black, white, Asian, latino and anyone between. I despise these people as you may have already guessed; I hate them with a burning passion. Not to say that I hate victims that are actually victims, and this does happen; people are often victimized and harassed for their race, gender, religion, et cetera. However, there is a distinct difference in what people perceive as victimization, what these whiners call victimization, and what victimization actually is. With that being said, I’d like to take this opportunity to whine and complain about the victimization of atheists, specifically in overly religious areas of this great nation of ours.
You know, growing up, I don’t think I was exposed to a single atheist until I was about thirteen or fourteen after I realized that my brother was an atheist. At this point, I was still a pretty devout Christian but I had obviously known my brother for a long time, so consequently, it didn’t come as much of a shock to me that atheists aren’t all walking pillars of evil. It never even occurred to me that they would be. Apparently, Christians only ever do good things and refrain from the bad for service to God, or so it seems from the majority of those I’ve spoken to on the issue of morality. There are several things wrong with this that I’ll address all in good time. I, as a person with an IQ above 60, realized that every single time I was presented with a choice, I didn’t think of what God wanted me to do, I just did it because it either made me feel good, or it just felt like an innate reaction, like breathing: because it’s what I would want done for me, ya know, the golden rule. I realized that atheists must feel this as well, so they do good things and refrain the bad just as much as Christians do. It is important to realize that atheists are no more or less moral than the religious. Yet, somehow, this hadn't dawned on many of my peers apparently. I only realized that much when I was fourteen as I began to doubt my belief in God.
Big problems with being the only atheist that I know of other than my brother is both the sense of alienation and the constant need to defend myself. The alienation is simple enough, my brother and I are the only atheists I know of, and my brother didn’t really bring it up to the point that anyone except me and his apathetic friends knew in high school. Even the homosexuals at my school did not identify as atheistic; they claim to be purely agnostic or deist, but even if they were atheistic, I can’t really blame them for not staking claim to another taboo area of Southern life; they often get enough crap as is. Another cause of the alienation is the previously brought up belief that all atheists are evil, citing the popular Bible verse, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good.” (Psalms 14:1) I’ve talked to atheists and experienced, first hand, the sensation that you have just struck fear down upon someone you may not even know with the four or five simple words “I am an atheist” or “I don’t believe in God.” I’ve heard of stories from other atheists on the internet in which they simply walk through the halls of their deep Southern high school and have a ten-foot radius of space as he passes through at all times. While I could see this as sometimes pretty funny and amusing, it seems as if such behavior would get old quite swiftly. Though that entire story may be a fabrication or at least an exaggeration, there is no doubt that that happens elsewhere.
Being godless in Dixie doesn’t entirely mean that you will be mistreated: no, not really. As I stated earlier, the status of victim is such an overused concept that I could upset my own stomach if I said such things. However, atheists are indeed the most distrusted minority group in America according to several studies. As a result, if you are the least bit outspoken about your religious views and opinions, as an atheist, bad things are more likely to happen than good.
I personally have lost long-standing and potential friends, I’ve been kicked out of rooms and reduced my mother to tears when she found out because she had apparently "failed twice." Not to say that in every instance when I was ostracized in public that it was for the express purpose of my lack of religious views, but I cannot help but notice that these instances didn’t start until after word went around in my sophomore year of high school. Regardless, I am not writing this to defend myself or call attention to my own woes. In fact, they have diminished greatly sense reaching college, where no one knows or cares who you are. The reason I write this is to point out the mistreatment of some.
It is not unusual to hear a story, especially the further South you go along the East coast, about a teenager, or even small children, who are forced out of the house by their hyper-religious parents. One story I have heard was of a boy who went to my middle school. He had gotten into a discussion one day with his parents that turned into an argument when he admitted that he had apostatized. When his parents realized that trying to convince him otherwise, then yelling at him, was not going to work, they suddenly gave him the cold shoulder for the rest of the day. The next morning, at school, he gets a text message from his mother telling him that he is no longer welcome in their house, so he walked outside and ran away from school. The cops found him three days later when he walked to a friends house for help after almost dehydrating in the woods; he was twelve years old.
Yet, this is just America. Worse things are done in other places of the world and not just to atheists. I’m speaking, of course, primarily about our good friends in the Arabian desert. Yet, the basis for religious distrust of the secular is a lack of morality? Are the religiously conservative completely insane or merely blind concerning this issue?
Atheists lack a god to fear punishment from, and this to me proves that they are yet even more morally superior people to theists who purport that morality can only stem from the edicts of a god. I say that, if you really need someone always there to hold your ear and make you place nice, you are not a good person at all. Thugs do the right thing because the wrong gets them hurt; good people do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.
So, is the fear that atheists lack a moral compass the reason we are so distrusted? Perhaps that is some of the reason, but not all. You see, atheists, because they are atheists, fundamentally subvert the very basis of a religious person’s world. Nonreligious people that still claim they believe in a god, you see, they are not the ones that are to be worried about if you disagree with them because they don’t really care. However, zealots who spend every Sunday and Wednesday in the pews and walk around with a cross around their neck and pocket bible bookmarked to their favorite verse: these are the ones you must worry about. These people have built their entire reality of their world upon the assumption of a just and loving God. When someone comes along and upsets the very nature of your universe by stating that they don’t believe in that: it’s usurping. Just as upsetting as if someone approached me and said they don’t believe in science or rational thought because these are the cornerstones of my own worldview.
What is else? Atheism can take on a much more macabre and dark persona to others. This is probably more applicable to the less religious: the less certain of their chosen religion: the representation of an atheist as death. The doom of everyone on Earth is almost a certainty for most, though there are actually really interesting steps being taken towards immortality, it is nowhere near a certainty or likelihood that this status will be reached by the time we millennials are very old and very gray. This means that we’re going to die someday. This means that, eventually, our hearts are going to stop beating, our organs are going to shut down, fresh blood will stop being pumped to our brains and the little electrical impulses in our brain that make up everything about who we are: our memories, preferences, and sensations, will go dark: never to be seen again. The dial will go to “E” and we like to think that we will somehow live on afterward: that there will be some sort of soul that will capture us and whisk us away to a magical land where we can live on in some form or another. Therefore, the lack of belief in God is the belief that existence is finite and that death is an unavoidable byproduct of life. The fear of an atheist is the fear of the manifestation of the very thing quite a lot of people fear the most: death.
What I mean by all of this is, if you are indeed godless in Dixie, don’t be afraid of who you are and don’t let other people fear who you are. Don’t let people hate you because you don’t believe in their imaginary friend. Realize that you are not alone. Believers, realize that atheists are everywhere; they are your uncle Timmy, your cousin Betty and even your little brother. If the other side tries to convince you otherwise, give them a fair shot: hear what they have to say. If it convinces you that you were wrong, that’s great; live your life how you please, and allow others to live how they please.
