Should Atheists be angry?

I'm just fed up with everyone being so angry all the time.
This group's angry, that group's feeling put upon, such and such is up in arms. Blah blah blah.
How about stopping with the anger and doing something constructive, preferably with a smile on your face?

 

Because anger is a stronger motivator to do something. Happy people are, well happy, and who the hell would want to do something to change that?

 

Agreed with folks here noting that anger by itself is unproductive, does very little good and can cause more harm than good.

Saw a quote a number of years ago that might fit the situation here: Anger + Imagination = Survival. As in, taking the anger, frustration, sadness, etc. and channel it into productive action to actually make a difference in the situation causing the anger.

I mean, duh.

 

I don't have the motor required for being angry. I want to be an atheist that can take a nap.

 

While a lot of what she posted is bothersome (the George Bush quote really does piss me off), I find most it basically a humans being controlling assholes to each other problem and not just an atheist problem. Also, I couldn't have that much anger, anger doesn't make me feel good.

 

Yea, I find myself very put-off by an "us vs. them" mentality. It's the same reason I had such a hard time stomaching Sam Harris's ideas about religion, even though I think he made some excellent points about the negative impact of certain religions on human rights.

 

I didn't make it all the way through either. I found a her a bit thin skinned too.
Yeah some people and institutions have done and said some really f-ed up stuff but so what ?Nut Up. You will always find opposition to what you believe, do you really want to allow that opposition to define you or what you beleive.

 

I glimpsed the blog through.

On top of my mind is a thought, some of the anger comes from atheist frustration, since they can't either prove their position correct. Wanting to be right and being loud does not necessarily make things more true.

 

I'm firmly with Baraka on this one. Being saddened, bothered, or disturbed by these things is important, but being angered is unproductive. One need not be angered to be driven to action. (I also realize I'm making a semantic distinction between these emotions, so we may simply have different perspectives on what it means to be angry.)

It is absolutely upsetting that atheists are thought of so poorly, and that government leaders can declare atheists non-citizens without any pushback, but anger is not the tool to solve these problems.

 

I doubt it. The same goes for every religion out there. Not a one of them can prove a fucking thing. Atheists just don't have a mystic scroll some uneducated back words seer wrote 2000 years ago to point at while jumping up and down scream"LOOK! IT SAYS I'M RIGHT!"
No, the anger comes from the same place any group that any any group that has been belittle for years comes from. Blacks, women, gays, they've all been through it. Now it the atheists turn.

 

Sure, I agree, religions can't prove anything either. I haven't read the Bible much, so I don't really know, how antiblack, antiwomen or anti-anything opinions are applied from the book. I've noticed, that many sayings we have today, originate from that book. They often make sense to me, but I don't really know the parts in Bible, which give advice to pressuring others.

I'm not in favor of anyone strongly imposing their religious views on others, but atheism does not look very tolerable to me either, whereas some religious people are genuinely trying to do some good. Not sure if they read the Bible that carefully.

 

What on earth do you mean? It is the Atheists' turn now?

Come off it. I'd be happy the Roman Catholic establishment has lost its power, otherwise you'd have easily found yourself declared a heathen and possibly labelled as an Illuminati. Which would have lead for you to have been hunted down and your throat sliced.

Also, whatever discrimination Atheists may experience (and I readily concede that you experience it just as much as Muslims do, just in different parts of the world respectively), it compares very little to what the black people had to endure in the past century.

 

Well, I'm not an Atheist, but I'm not a typical Christian, so I have an easier time calling out the Christians on their bullshit when they start getting uppity. As for it being their turn, for just the reasons you pointed out, for centuries Atheists couldn't even acknowledge their beliefs, or lack there of. While the discrimination may not be as hash as other groups have endured, but it is still there, and they still have ample reason to be pissed. What other group could a man running for PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES get away with saying they shouldn't be considered patriots or citizens? I'd be pissed to.

 

I made it through the article, and several of the comments. I consider myself an agnostic leaning towards deist spirituality. Whatever... I don't agree that anger is always a necessary component for social change, any more than I believe that it is necessary to hurt in order to heal. Christians frustrate me some times because SOME of them don't bother at all to follow what they claim to believe, but make me angry? No. I simply don't care what they believe, so long as they do not interfere with my ability to live and love. Many times it seems that Christians believe that atheists are incapable of loving, or of ethics. That view only gets perpetuated by atheists that react to everything with anger. This is much the same as believing that all Christians are incapable of following scientific method or arriving at a logical decision. Both viewpoints are incredibly narrow, and generally incorrect. If the atheists are following logical ethics, and the Christians, Jews, and Muslims (and most other religions) are REALLY following the rules and ethics of their religions, we really would arrive at about the same place in how we treated each other. Instead, as others have mentioned, it all becomes a way to divide US from THEM, and perpetuates hate and anger. I won't join in that activity from any angle at all. Act in such a way that shows the highest vision you have of yourself, (you know, the do unto others bit) and most of us will live in peace and love, even the atheists.

 

I'd be angry if I thought and really believed that there wasn't a Heaven.

 

Here's another one. I'm angry that the public faces of atheism are shitheads like Dawkins and Hitchens who, while they make very valid points about religion and the harm it causes, are little more than old-world imperialists and racists (both are staunchly and unconditionally pro-Israel and anti-Muslim/anti-Arab.) I want my nonbelief to be represented by someone like Carl Sagan, who never for a moment gave any indication that he possessed the capacity to hate.

Comparing discrimination against atheists to discrimination against any of those groups is entirely inappropriate.

 

I read parts and skimmed the entire article. I am vastly unimpressed.

I hate to say it, but this seems awfully typical with a lot of atheist rhetoric: she 100% conflates religion with fundamentalism. And despite what one might be tempted to believe, given the flourishing of Christian fundamentalism in American society of late, the majority of religious practitioners are not fundmentalists. Religion overall is simply not the same thing as fundamentalist religion.

The majority of the legitimate problems that she cites come from the rise of fundamentalism. But what she fails to note is that fundamentalism runs most rampant in the face of ignorance and poverty. If we were to focus a bit on improving social welfare and education in this country, I would wager many dollars to very cheap doughnuts that fundamentalism would begin to wane again.

And, of course, I can't help noticing that the majority of the issues she cites relate to Christianity; and it is, unfortunately, a widespread practice amongst atheists (at least in my experience so far) to criticize "religion" when they mean "Christianity," and in fact, often know very little about Judaism, Islam, or non-Western religions. And quite often, professional atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, when they encounter Judaism (and, I am told, Islam, although I don't know as much about those encounters) simply try to re-apply and re-arrange their anti-Christian rhetoric to fit, despite the chasm of difference between Christianity and the other two Abrahamic religions. Even Sagan-- whose science writing I enjoyed very much-- was an incredibly secular Jew, from an incredibly secular background: his conception of what Jewish theology and practice really were bore very little resemblance to the truth.

Personally, I don't give a fuck if people believe in God or not. It's not my business, and I can't really see how it should matter to anyone. As long as people behave well, I can't care, and I doubt God does either. But I dislike being tarred with a brush not meant or suited for me. And I dislike imprecision and shallow thinking when they are used in the service of angry rhetoric.

 

And how is that?