A military officer in uniform gave me religious hate speech.

Hi, and welcome back to the Bearded Atheist blog. It's been four years or so and this made me mad enough to start the entire thing up again. It's good to see you.

This is an evolving story and I will edit this to reflect any changing information or knowledge. This happened to myself earlier today at work; my place of employment is left vague intentionally to keep my Corporate Overlords from getting awks about it. I have witnesses to these events, but would prefer to keep their identities secret for the same reason.

To set the scenario up, it is important to know I carry myself with a much more queer bearing than I used to when I was younger. I was wearing pink earrings, blue nail polish, and I'm lucky enough to work at a place that allows me to wear a button that showcases my sexuality.

This one, because I also like DIIIICKS.

As the years have marched on, I have become something more of an activist, identifying with Intersectionalists and actively supporting BLM and Antifa (if you aren't antifascist, you are the most wrong). My atheist activism is folded into all of that. I still run my atheist show twice a year (two weeks from today, actually) but, considering the recent political climate, there is so much to focus on and it can be hard to keep up with everything. All that being said, I am much more aggressive about things and have become nearly immune to negative feedback. Also, my extreme, nearly militant opinions about everything have kept a lot of the worse people away from me. It is not out of character for me to out a man publicly for sending unsolicited dick pictures, or to question the Minister talking about the "gay lifestyle" exactly what the fuck that means to her face. I am not an awkward person about this and, if anything, leverage other people's awkward tendencies to my advantage. I am not always nice about it, but today's events bothered me because it was so wrong.

I currently work as a cashier at a popular grocery outlet near a busy intersection. During lunchtime it is not out of place for me to wait on a wide variety of customers, from actual farmers, WoC in hijabs, skateboarding teenagers, and soccer moms, all the way to Mormon missionaries, travelling businessmen, members of the state government, on duty police officers and the military. I have a dry sense of humor with strangers, but am mostly open and friendly to everyone. As always, I am passionately curious about people and what motivates them, frequently engaging in micro-conversations with the random aspects of humanity I meet. Within this mess an older, white male in full military camo, with an Army Ranger patch on his arm and a Lt. Col. insignia on the front of his uniform came into my line in express. His name was Peterson.

Lt. Colonel or Tree Star, I can never tell

Peterson and I talked about him going camping this weekend and then him heading further south to catch the upcoming Solar eclipse moving through our state in a few days. It was friendly and cordial, but then, right as he was about to leave, he reached into his back pocket and gave me this:

Watch a review about this here.

This, my friends is a Chick Tract. For those of you who aren't aware of these wonderful little booklets, they are handed out by a lot of Christians in an attempt to scare people into/back into their religion. They are full on garbage, and this one is horrible for a lot of reasons. If you've got 45 minutes. listen to my friends Hugo and Jake over at The Bible Reloaded do an entire episode on this one right HERE.

I have several problems with this. First off, an officer in uniform threatening civilians with violence by sending them to hell is highly unethical. These things are hate speech. Filled with lies and hypocrisy from the early 90's, this issue not only makes up what the bible says and what was happening within the LGBT community at the time, it insinuates that all gay men are also pedophiles through illustration, and it uses the story of Lot to make judgment on us. INCLUDING THE PART WHERE LOT GIVES UP HIS DAUGHTERS TO BE RAPED. That is not a typo or misrepresentation at all; in this story, the "godly" man offers his virginal daughters up to be raped and yet he is somehow considered a good person. According to this tract, Rape > being Queer.

So, to my full understanding. Lt. Col. Peterson finds it be completely acceptable to hand out religious paraphernalia threatening violence to people while in uniform, and does so from the cowardly position of them being forced to be nice to him since they are at work and doubly cowardly because he did it at the end of the conversation. Like a cowardly coward. Let me repeat that, Lt. Col. Peterson is a coward.

Now, I'm personally pro-soldier because they get me drunk a lot when I'm on the road doing comedy and many of my friends and family have served, also they do not create the horrible policies I am actually against. I also know it is most likely against the rules and this behavior does not represent the Army Rangers or the service they have done for this country. But our taxes pay this man and he is representing our country in a leadership position and we should expect more from him, and I'm certain most of you can at least agree we don't want our military officers using their uniform to push whatever religion they happen to be into. This is unacceptable and I am not going to drop it.

Feel free to leave comments or questions here and I will get back to you as soon as I can. I will be talking about this on a podcast in less than two hours and will post a link to that with our opinions as soon as it's posted. Thanks for reading.

The War Against Atheism

One of the best parts about being an atheist is how low-key it is. I get to go about my day to day business without a single atheist based thought, listening to my jams and working on some Family Guy/Resident evil fan fiction without a care in the world. Then I head to the store to buy some more pulp less OJ, because I am not a filthy animal, when I see something like this...

Wait, what?

...and my brain resets. Atheists have their billboards too, simple things like reminding people that it's okay not to believe, they might even go so far as to call religion out for having been harmful or unnecessary, but they never threaten open revolt. Those of you who have been reading my atheist stuff for a while should remember that I belong to the school of thought that believes that there is plenty of room in our culture for religion, just so long as that religion doesn't try to inappropriately try to influence the government or actively try to ruin people's lives (I'm a big fan of reminding everyone that the Catholic church still hasn't done enough to stop kid fucking in their system). I think that's a balanced and even tone for an atheist, even most of my posts on here are just a lame attempt to explain something about us atheists to people who might not understand. There's no hatred here, I honestly don't care what you believe as long as you're not being a dick about it.

So, where does all this hatred come from? Why do some believers hate us so much? Some atheists seem to believe that the basis of that hatred is fear, just like Yoda says, that the fact that there is a group of productive and happy people who openly defy the will of their god undermines the belief that you need faith to be happy and productive. I don't know about that, but the things said about atheists are sometimes so silly that it's hard to even answer them, never mind taking someone who says this stuff seriously.

Atheists, according to Fox News.

But who honestly believes that atheists are actively trying to murder your children? Turns out, plenty of people. Thomas Aquinas called unbelief the "greatest of sins", and the rhetoric has only gone up from there. Since time immemorial, atheists have been ostracized, tortured, and murdered simply for not believing. It's been done by a lot of religions with a lot of excuses, but it all comes down to the same thing, the believer's complete inability to empathize or understand why somebody would disagree with them. Here's an excellent example of how completely without reason their line of thinking is: 

Seems legit. 

Stare at that for a second. We have a bald and angry man, chosen for the emotional response one gets while staring into his over-ham exposed face, and an interesting attempt at logic to show why being an atheist is stupid. You see, every atheist obviously hates god because they don't believe in him. Wait, maybe they don't believe in him because they hate him. See, being an atheist is silly.

Atheism is the first world view. You are born completely without understanding or knowledge, reliant upon your parents and your culture to imprint on you a world view. Every child is exposed to the religion of their parents and then grows up believing what they were told as a child, and some people seem to act like if you disagree with their religion, you're calling their parents morons (which, considering the number of morons on this planet, might actually be true).


And don't even get me started on the 'War on Christmas'. Saying there's a war on Christmas when it's already an eight week long economy masturbator and stolen collection of pagan rituals is borderline idiocy.

Somebody already got me started

So, sometimes we get mad. Sometimes we fight back. And yet, when we do that, we play right into the hands of the pundits and they continue to paint us as terrorists and feminist promoters (I cannot underline enough how completely out of touch with reason some of these people are), they like to call us Nazis despite the fact that nobody takes the Nazi insult seriously and that Hitler was an open Catholic with support from the church. 

Related

Sure, sometimes a teenager will sue her school because of a bible verse located in the gymnasium after she asks nicely and they ignore her. I can see why this would piss off people (I can't see why this would piss off people), but the response was pages of death threats and insults to her social media accounts. Once again, she did something completely legal and protected by her constitutional rights, then many god fearing Americans decided to insult, threaten, and vilify a harmless teenager. You know, God's work.

And that's why were here. That's why I give a shit. Because there aren't any atheist groups threatening the lives of teenagers for any reason. So does that make me an atheist soldier? I don't know. But do I have a handful of jokes I tell on stage and a blog where I try to help us all get along? Absolutely. And if that makes me evil, maybe being evil isn't so bad after all.

We have cookies. Lots of cookies. 

What is an Atheist?

An atheist is someone that lacks faith, someone who doesn't believe in something that other people do. When you have faith, you have confidence that something is true, you rely on it and expect things to happen the way you believe that it will. You have confidence in these things and your ethics, life choices, and daily habits are all influenced by this thing that you feel to be true. But all of these things are tied up into emotion, and emotion, as any tantrum throwing child could tell you, doesn't do much to change reality.


An atheist lacks these feelings. But can we label someone based on their lack of an emotion? To be fair, there are a lot of links in any search engine where a theist will attempt to justify that faith is not an emotion, however the root of the word lies in Latin where it essentially means 'to trust', and trust is not based in reality any more than the promises of all of the ex-girlfriends that I used to have faith in. The label itself is fairly silly, but it we use it because it simplifies conversation and, at heart, primates are pretty lazy.



But what about the middle ground, can I be agnostic?

Sure, agnosticism is about knowledge. Faith is a light switch, you either have the feelings or you don't, there is no middle ground, but most people are agnostic because not knowing everything is pretty normal in our corner of the universe. There are even Gnostic Christians around, people who assert that they have evidence of God based upon the facts found in his writings, my father is one of them, but most Christians rely on faith and not knowledge because metaphor is a lot more flexible than trying to defend the biblical assertion that the bat is a bird (Leviticus 11:13-19) or any of the other inaccuracies that keep the Bible from being taken seriously as a scientific source.

A lot of intelligent scientists and atheists have labelled themselves as agnostics because they are educated enough to know the difference between the two words, but they are still atheists in that they lack faith. As a matter of fact, I would suggest to you that even considering yourself an agnostic (by the normal usage of the word) means that you lack enough faith to be counted amongst the faithful, so you automatically fall in with the rest of us. The problem here is one of perspective, people have a tendency to simplify thoughts that they don't entirely understand, so agnosticism as been thrown out there as a middle ground between those that believe and everybody else when, in reality, it's another thing entirely.



Do atheists have faith?

Pictured: a gross over-simplification of something that most of us don't entirely understand. Not faith.

In the beginning there was something, probably, and then something happened, we think. It seems to make sense that since we're here now that something had to cause that, and our species has collectively done a lot of work to get as much information as possible as to where we all came from, but we can only go back so far before the laws of physics break down and we aren't exactly sure what happened before that. This isn't faith because it has nuance and changes with facts, even the theories about the history of reality before that aren't considered faith because nobody believes in them. Faith is what you rely on when you don't know something, even if that feeling itself is so strong that you have certainty, it's origin are based in something else entirely. And this is why atheists are always asking for evidence, because in the absence of our shared emotion, the only thing we have to share is something tangible that might change the facts that we have accumulated about the world. Faith can be learned, it can be instilled, it can be challenged, but it is mostly used to fill in the gaps of things that cannot be known for sure, because it is disconcerting to admit that we just don't know something.



So, what is an atheist? Well, I'm an atheist, and so is everyone else who isn't born with the feelings of God (protip: everybody that has ever been born) that is, until someone convinces them otherwise. Atheism makes no claims, has no rules, is not an organization (although a branch of us are becoming a lot more organized), and accepts as default everyone who doesn't claim a specific faith. So that's what an atheist is, just somebody who doesn't feel the same way that you do. Funny how it's such a big thing.

Why are atheists so smug?

Atheists get called a lot of things, but arrogant and smug are two of the most common. I get where you're coming from by asking, the New Atheist movement has no problem shoving their opinions in everyone's face and, when you watch videos of Dawkins or Hitchens casually dismissing away thousands of years of belief as superstition, it doesn't sit well with the average believer who has built their life on a foundation of ritual and faith. There are also innumerable Facebook groups created seemingly only for the reason of mocking faith, and the condescending attitude that we atheists cam have towards the faithful can be downright infuriating to those who don't understand us.

So, in the interest of creating a greater understanding, here are a few of the reasons why I believe we atheists can be such dickbags when it comes to dealing with people who don't see the world like we do.


1.) Santa Claus

This is how you teach your children not to trust everything you tell them.

This first one is going to require a little bit of imagination on your part. Now, I understand that it's easy to get defensive about what you believe, but if you're really curious about what makes us tick, try to keep it bottled up and ignore the imperfections in the analogy.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which almost everyone you knew never stopped believing in Santa Claus. When you drove to work, there would be posters of him everywhere, and his message of secretly watching you and your behavior for an upcoming judgement day would just casually slip out of the mouth of nearly everybody, from newscasters to politicians everyone believes in Santa.

But here's the thing, you don't. Now, for the most part you can just ignore it, after all, what harm does it really do? But then you start noticing that an uncommonly large amount of daily discussion has to do with this mythical creature. You turn on the news and there's wars overseas over the names of his reindeer or what color he is. Santa's rules for who is naughty or nice seem kind of arbitrary or common sense, but people will straight up punch you in the face if you disagree with them.

Most of the time you keep your mouth shut, but eventually everything just seems so silly. We've been to the North Pole, there's no sweatshop full of elves making toys. When you mention that at a family dinner, your mother tells you that parents buy the toys themselves and are happy to assist in Santa's good work. You want your mother to see the truth, but when you try to have a nice, logical discussion about it she clams up and you can see the disappointment in her eyes. Clearly she agrees with the community that if you don't believe that Santa is watching you every minute, there's no reason for you NOT to go on a murderous rape rampage any day.

I know that sounds silly, but that's pretty close to the world that we live in. You might believe in God, you might not, but if you don't there is absolutely no way to talk about the subject without sounding like you know something everybody else doesn't, because that is exactly the way that you view the world. And when only one out of ten people agree with you, it can get very frustrating.


2.) SCIENCE!

I think I can see my genome from here!

Humans like to codify their existence. We've always enjoyed naming and then grouping things together, and there are few arguments more intense than over the minutia that separates two very similar things, thoughts, or ideas. We've been noticing patterns in reality for thousands of years and this has led to every single modern advancement, be it beer, cellphones, eyeglasses, or even the Internet you're using to read this. This conversation amongst ourselves has involved every single type of person, religious creed, sex, or nationality that wanted to get involved. It isn't owned by anybody and the advancement of knowledge could arguably be considered one of the best pursuits of our time on this planet. Science isn't a religion, it's the way of the human species. It's how we've grown and evolved from wandering groups of barbaric tribes to civilizations with robots in space.

That being said, a lot of the war about religion takes place here and, while it's true that a lot of scientists are also atheists, it is not an atheist endeavor; there are many people of many faiths involved in the process and if you are ever interested in any aspect of it, the information is practically free for you to discover. The more you know about science, the more amazing the world around us is. So it seems strange to me that this is where the battles are most frequently waged, and the people with decades of experience, knowledge, and training, are somehow given less weight in the discussion when it happens in the public. If you watch a talk show about psychics there are going to be three or four charlatans well versed in duping the crowd, and exactly one person who everyone despises who will try to politely discuss how psychics work and nobody will listen to him. A politician can casually dismiss millions of man-hours of dedicated research, laboratory testing, and heated discussion hammering out theories that stand up to reality, many of them completed by people who believe exactly what he does, and the audience will actually cheer him for it.

Let's pause on that for a second.

There is no other occupation that I know of where the smartest people in the room are considered the least qualified people to listen to. Here in America over 50% of the GOP think biologists are full of garbage. Even the Catholic Church admits that evolution is true, and we even have evidence of it, but that doesn't stop the faithful for dismissing the greatest achievements of human intelligence because it's too complicated for the uneducated to understand. People would instead rather trust the man behind the pulpit (not the molester, we have a new one) who tells them differently because of something he read in a book once. Apparently it's easier to believe that thousands of the smartest people in the entire world are somehow trying to scam the rest of us because, profit? I'm not sure how it works, but that seems to be the discussion.

So, how do you talk to talk to someone who doesn't even believe in reality without sounding smug? I don't know, but it's difficult.



3.) Revenge. 

This is why we get angry.

 I'm going to be perfectly frank here: religion is about control. That's not necessarily a bad thing, parents have to watch their children, but unchecked authority rarely turns out well for the people involved. The list of crimes against religion are legion, and they are still happening every single day.
Is it really arrogant to tell the same group of people who used to burn herbalists for being witches that it's superstition that makes them believe that a woman who owns a cat she so doesn't get the plague must be using the powers of Satan? Sure we don't believe that anymore, because of science, but when the conversation is brought into something that matters today, like who has permission to get married, the arguments against it are unscientific and superstitious. Sure the Bible suggests that we should kill gay people, but there are also a ton of verses that equate women to property, and we're mostly smart enough not to take those seriously anymore. You also aren't allowed to shave or wear mixed fibers in your clothing, but nobody marches in the street over those issues.

Atheists and nonbelievers have been treated badly for thousands of years, almost worse than people tend to treat the heretics of a different (read: almost identical) faith. Now that we understand enough of the universe to be able to close many of the gaps in human knowledge, the conversation and deference to power have started to shift. New Atheists like myself aren't against you or even what we consider to be your quaint and harmless rituals and sacrifices, but when religion is still trying to control us when we know better, the conversation easily takes on a new and different flavor.

If you've been grinding someone's face in the dirt for untold centuries you shouldn't complain when they start to fight back. And now, mostly thanks to the internet and free information, the numbers of nonbelievers are increasing every day. We don't try to actively convert most of them, all it takes is a simple internet search and everything that your religious leaders don't want you to know is right in front of you.

And it's not smug to point at things if you're the only one who has their eyes open.