So, today I added a list of my favorite atheist blogs to the sidebar of this blog. When I first started writing here, I was planning on keeping the atheist angle low-key, but an experience I had this weekend changed my mind. I have decided that, more than ever, it is important that I express my views on atheism and add my voice to the atheist blogosphere, because we atheists need all the publicity we can get.
The incident in question occurred when I brought up
this article in the company of a group of friends on Sunday night. A brief explanation is in order: I am very close with this particular group of friends. We have known each other for many years and I have always found them to be a very open and understanding group of people. However, one of the few things that I do not know about any of them are their specific thoughts or feelings on religion. I know that some of them are nominally religious, most of them seem to be fairly indifferent to religion, and I am pretty sure that non of them are extraordinarily fundamentalist or anything, but I'm not really sure. Religion just never comes up in any of our discussions. I brought up the article that I linked to above because they all had lived in Boulder at one time or another, and I wanted their opinions on whether they thought it was the "smartest city in America." I also found it funny that the author of the article called Boulder the "most delusional" city, a statement that I tend to agree with, so I mentioned that part of the article as well, which then required me to explain to them why the author would have said that about Boulder.
To summarize, the article describes a situation in which an organization known as the
Boulder Atheists set up a booth at a local community festival, and in order to get noticed by the milling crowds of people, they gave out free bottles of water. While they were noticed and thanked by some people for providing such a wonderful service on a hot day, there were some people who refused to take the water because the people who were giving it out were atheists. I thought it was pretty silly that people living in a city like Boulder, which is full of a healthy mix of rich conservatives and free-spirited new-age hippies and seems to be fairly accepting of everyone, would have such a negative reaction towards a group of atheists. But, unfortunately, I didn't have to wait long to experience my first direct run-in with the way that people who don't specifically view themselves as atheists think about those who do.
I didn't even get the chance to finish summarizing the article before my friends started making fun of atheists. "There are organizations for atheists? What do they do, get together and talk about what they don't believe in? *snicker*" "It takes just as much faith to say you don't believe in God as it does to say you do." "Atheists are all just agnostics with a chip on their shoulder." I was stunned and deeply hurt. I was expecting my friends to agree with me that it was dumb to not take free water from a group of people just because they were atheists, and here they were displaying the exact same prejudices as the people in the park. I kept my cool and tried to refute their arguments, telling them that most atheists don't believe in god because of a lack of evidence, they don't generally say "There is NO god." I explained to them that the word agnostic was a description of the strength of someone's atheism or theism, not a valid position on the existence or non-existence of a deity in and of itself. And I explained that groups of atheists generally exist in response to the rising voice of religious conservatism in this country, so they are there for support against religious encroachment on their rights, not to "talk about what they don't believe in." But the one thing that I couldn't bring myself to say (to my deep shame) was that I was an atheist and very happy to be one.
I have been reading blogs about atheism for a long time trying to prepare myself for a confrontation like this, but I expected it to come from members of my extended family, who are all very religious and whose opinion about me and my life choices matters to me not one bit. I never expected it to come from my friends, who were people that I thought understood me and whose opinion of me matters to me quite a lot. It hurt me even more because I'm pretty sure that they didn't know that their ridicule hurt me as badly as it did, but I couldn't bring myself to tell them. But there was a silver lining to this depressing incident. I found myself being supremely grateful to the atheist blogosphere, even more grateful than I was before this happened, because I realized that they serve a far greater purpose in my life than I could have imagined.
Up until this point, I have always felt a little silly reading so many atheist blogs. My husband is also an atheist, but he doesn't read any overtly atheist blogs because religion was never as big a part of his life as it used to be in mine. I had always thought that feeling the need to read so much about atheism when I wasn't surrounded by extreme religiosity was a sign of weakness in my decision to stop believing in god, and I kept hoping that a time would come when I was strong enough in my convictions and arguments for being an atheist that I wouldn't need the support of people I had never met before any more. Now, though, I hope that time never comes. I have seen that even the minds of the moderately to agnostically religious have been poisoned against the word "atheist." I see that the greatest challenge I will face as an atheist is not standing up in the face of people whose minds I don't expect to change, but standing up to people whose opinion of me actually matters to me. I have seen that even though I know all the arguments, the hardest part is saying "I think," instead of "Atheists think."
So, Ebonmuse, Possummomma, Hemant Mehta, Dale McGowan, Chanson, Greta Christina, Ed Brayton, PZ Myers, and all the other atheist bloggers out there whom I have yet to discover, I want to thank you. You guys are my support group, my daily reminder that friends can have many faces and that I am not alone in my need to surround myself with like-minded people, even if it's only in a virtual space. I am a quiet person, but some day I may leave a comment on your blog, or listen to you speak at a conference, and your influence on the world and mine will grow a little larger. It is true that the only thing that brings atheists together is something we all lack, but when religion has the ability to have such a great impact on our lives, and on the lives of people we care about, we owe it to everyone to organize and make ourselves heard, no matter how isolated we as individuals may feel.
