The ATHEISM Thread

[J. R. Scherer]

In a way, I feel bad for people who rely on an imaginary being to give their lives meaning. I feel worse about how they constantly try to impose that reliance on the rest of us, though.

Religion is Dumbo's magic feather. These people truly believe that they need it in order to to "fly" (i.e., be happy, live morally, go to heaven, etc.) Until they realize that they don't need their feather to fly, they're truly confounded as to how other elephants can be zooming about without a magic feather, or any magical assistance whatsoever for that matter.

And some of them have never even heard of "atheism" until they stumbled on the show on their TV. Lots of calls start with "So you don't believe in nothin'?"

I hear this so often (verbatim, usually) when I tell people that I'm not a believer when they bring up religion. Strictly speaking, it's correct since it's a double negative, but these people almost universally have such difficulty in understanding that a person can believe in love, truth, justice, and any number of abstract ideas without also believing in the supernatural, most specifically their own personal idea of the Christian deity.