Should Atheists be angry?

Honestly, whatever Bush Snr. may have said, it's his opinion. You like to exaggerate the importance of him having been President when he said it. As long as he didn't make it law, there is very little Atheists have to complain about, as millions of others believe the same.

Such is the nature of free speech and freedom of thought. There is quite a group in Germany that believes Muslims/naturalized immigrants should not be considered citizens. Does it bother me? No. Let them think what they want. It will only bother me if it is ever seriously discussed in parliament (which, knowing ze Germans today, is extremely unlikely).

Atheists' major suffering ended roughly 500 years ago, and even then it was not a situation you could have compared to how Jews or black people were treated. Atheists had a strong community 1000 years ago, when the Church really started to go against them. They had many influential people in their ranks, which made them a powerful group to wage war against as the Catholic establishment did. Besides, the Atheists won; they built Universities and through education became the long-term winners, leaving the Catholic establishment to remain a fragment of what it used to be. Jews didn't resist nearly as well when the Nazis came around, and black people were never given a chance until the past century to build their ranks.

So no, you cannot compare the plight of Atheists to those of some other groups. It's nothing more than insolence to portray it as such.

 

Black people have been the targets of legal discrimination, and still are the targets of discrimination, enculturated racism, and racial violence. Women are paid 20-30 percent less than men in equivalent positions and are the victims of western rape culture. Gays are slowly being granted the same rights that heterosexual couples enjoy in the face of widespread opposition and are targets of violence and institutionalized discrimination. Roughly 40% of homeless teenagers are homeless because they are not GLBT/etc. and disowned by their families.

Black people cannot conceal the fact that they are black. Women are almost universally identifiable as women. Gay people can conceal their sexual orientation, but only by depriving themselves of the same interpersonal relationships that heterosexuals are able to take for granted, relationships that are desired as the result of fundamental biological desires. Atheists can keep our mouths shut when it's convenient and fend off questions with relative ease, and there is nothing inherently visible to others that identifies us.

 

I'm not really sure if I'm rising to your question or if I'm just conveniently avoiding it, but I think the reason why many religious debates on a grand scale lead to conflict is because of the notion that it's a zero sum game. It might even be worse than zero sum, since it's not like there's a finite amount of resources available and we're fighting over who gets what. It's that the end game is whether god exists and, if so, which belief system does he/she/it/they ACTUALLY condone. I think you'd find that atheists would be much more humanist if there weren't a sense from many religious people that being an atheist makes you a defective person, lacking something essential and, for better or worse, damned (that's not to say atheists don't fire the same vitriol back, but you see where I'm going here).

I think MOST people ARE humanists, regardless of their religious beliefs. I think New Atheism believes that it would be easier for people writ large to get along if they didn't have the artificial (I say artificial because religion is a taught social construct, there's nothing innately biological about what you believe) barrier of religion dividing them. So they've decided that the best way to achieve that goal is simply to attack the foundations of religion with the hope that they'll somehow convince people that it's wrong and everyone will agree to have it go away.

Obviously this approach is sheer nonsense and really no better than a radical member of any religion trying forcibly convert other people to their religion.

At the same time, when you have public figures like Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum spouting the utter bullshit that they're spewing based largely on their religious beliefs (or at least the perceived religious preferences of their nominal voting block), it's easy to get angry. There are a lot of very religious people out there who want to control the rest of us based on what their religious beliefs tell them is right. While you're correct, Baraka, that there's a place for religion in this world, that place isn't regulating the lives of people who don't believe in that religion's doctrines. Or, at least, I certainly don't want to live in a world where that's the case.

I think the bigger (and better) question is, is anyone a humanist? I'm happy to live and let live, so long as I'm allowed to live, too.

 

I think you're correct that the problem isn't strictly religious, but one thing you say strikes me as one of the core problems in this discussion.

At the vague, unfortunate end of really any discussion regarding religion or humanism or atheism is the problem that there isn't a rational middle ground. I mean, I guess we could say that the "common ground" is that at the end of the day we all ought to be decent to one another, which is the core value of humanism, but it's difficult to separate that notion from the religious background from which most values originate.

When the response to "be good to one another" is "why would you be good if there is no God to hold you accountable for your actions" have you had any luck having a rational discussion with people? I ask that more as a matter of curiosity than as a challenge. That's certainly the sticking point I've had, at which point the conversation kind of breaks down. Where have you been able to guide the conversation to a productive resolution once you reach that point?