Why Are Atheists So Angry? (response)

This is a response to the Huffington Post article "Why Are Atheists So Angry?"

#1 Atheists are not, generally speaking, more or less "angry" than anyone else in my experience.

Are religious people somehow NOT 'angry' about children being raped and abused?

Would religious people be 'angry' if atheists (or members of other religions) pushed to make their religion of choice be against the law to practice or limited? What if I spoke of outlawing Judaism? You might not get 'angry', but many Jewish people surely would (and rightly so).

Christians are 'angry' about Sharia law being forced upon them in some locations? But they are shocked when non-Christians don't want their 'Christian' values (read: sexual repression) shoved down their throats?

Do Jewish people ever get annoyed when they have to explain for the 1000th time that NO, they don't eat Christian children? Some Atheists also get annoyed by the repetition of claims which are completely baseless and might express their frustration.

Why does a search for "angry jew" pull up 32,000 hits? Are Jewish people especially angry? [I'm not saying they are -- I am making a point about using bad data]

And how many 'angry' posts would I get if I posted an article dismissing the Holocaust? I dare say I would get more angry posts than you did -- and rightly so again.

These are the types of things I see people being 'angry', or more often simply frustrated, about.

You have failed to do the scientific work to conclude that atheists are any more or less angry than anyone else.

#2 Galileo got off easy compared to Giordano Bruno (murdered by the church); Copernicus suppressed his research due to the church, Campanella was tortured by the church repeatedly for supporting Galileo, Rene Descartes suppressed his research due to Galileo's treatment, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, William Buckland, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, Adam Sedgewick, Robert Chambers, Charles Darwin...

Might I suggest reading Andrew White's The Warfare Of Science With Theology?

The Christian church has been a consistent detractor and danger to scientific progress UNLESS it supported their theology. They were a brutal force of destruction for 1800+ years that is entirely deserving of our derision on all accounts (and the sitting Pope covered up child molestation and rape for the church).

No amount of building hospitals or orphanages (indulgences anyone?) will ever excuse the atrocities they committed. You cannot buy off the murdered.

#3 There are seemingly few "serious thinkers" on the side of theology. If a theist comes out making blatant factual errors, attacking straw men, and committing atrocious logical fallacies then sorry, they are a waste of time.

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus." ~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 30 July, 1816

The problem is that there are no simply no valid logical or empirical arguments for god. If you have a test I can perform that will clearly demonstrate GOD let's do it on National TV and be done with it?

If god were ontologically real and knowable then we would not have millions of different versions of belief about him - I cannot even find TWO christians who believe the same things about god.

For amusement I wrote this which barely even begins to scratch the surface: http://iconoclasm2000.blogspot.com/2011/01/christianatheist-pre-discussion.html

#4 There is a post on my blog that addresses your question about wonder:

http://iconoclasm2000.blogspot.com/2011/02/living-without-god.html

You argue for Epistemological humility but postulate god in the same paragraph. Epistemological Honesty demands the opposite, that we remain silent about that which we cannot demonstrate - not assume it is true and commence slicing off parts of children's genitals on his command, denying rights to LGBT members of society, oppressing women, or murdering healthcare providers.

I do not say "there is categorically no god", I say that you have no evidence that supports your claims about god and I refuse to believe in something about which we have absolutely no actual knowledge.

I do know a bit about human psychology and history and I know that men seek power and control and I can see that religion gives them a startling mechanism for motivating men into unjust wars by demonizing the other side. I also know that men seek explanations and fear the unknown and the fearful are willing to believe the most horrid things rather than feel that they have a gap in their knowledge, and nothing looms larger than a mans own death.

Just because some men are too fearful to admit that they simply "don't know" (but all evidence says that they will rot and decay and never again exist) they have been inventing ludicrous explanations for many thousands of years (shamanic cave art suggests some 30,000 years) before "Moses" supposedly talked to a burning bush in a story that reads exactly like other shamanic experiences.

I don't fear death, I fear a life wasted in banal servitude to a mere idea invented by a few goat-herding, misogynistic, barbarian simpletons just because of a accident of my birth location (or I might be Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Baha'i, Jain, or Wicca - e.g.).