12:10pm May 4, 2014

@glintglimmergleam

youneedacat:

patternsmaybe:

youneedacat:

olive-baeddel-cuttlefish:

youneedacat:

patternsmaybe:

WRT white atheists:

It’s always about Jesus with them, too.

Like, white atheists, I am *not* interested in your feels about Jesus and how you’d like me to have the same ones.

(Note to Christian followers: I do not intend this as an attack on Christianity. Just on people who are unclear on the concept of the existence of other faiths).

I’ve noticed that a lot of white atheists do this thing where they say “God doesn’t exist” and then when questioned, you find out they’re talking only about the Christian god, sometimes they’ll talk about Jewish or Muslim but it’s almost always just Christian. They never take on other religions or even act like other religions have meanings. Sometimes they even use other religions as jokes — “haha that’s just like believing in Zeus” (hello, Hellenic pagans).

I don’t see why you find that so surprising; most white American atheists came from crappy Christian upbringings that they found painful and upsetting, and they respond in adulthood by carrying around an axe to grind against the abstract concept of Christianity. I put myself in this category; a shitty religious upbringing can mess you up, and we need a space to vent about it.

I have gotten better about keeping this away from my friends who don’t feel this way. I realize that it counterproductively drives a wedge between otherwise decent people, so I don’t bring it up unless I know I’m among other atheists, which unfortunately does not happen that often.

I don’t find it surprising, I find it irritating.

I don’t have a problem with them reacting against Christianity. People have the right to reject their own religion and feel however they want about it and vent about it and speak about it publicly.

I have a problem with the fact that they use the words “Christianity” and “religion” interchangeably, and ignore the existence of other faiths. Including when they’re *talking* to members of other faiths. Particularly when they’re talking about minority faiths that have been persecuted by Christians who think of Christianity and religion as interchangeable concepts.

Christian unbelievers who ignore the existence of other religions can be frightening, *particularly* when they bring their relationship with Christianity into their politics heavily. From the perspective of non-Christians, when Christian atheists aggressively promote Christian atheism, the Christian part is more important than the atheist part.

That’s the part I find irritating.

Is the thing where “religion” = Christianity. Or sometimes Judaism and/or Islam, but only rarely either of those. Never anything more.

And as someone who’d be considered closest to a pagan if anything, I also find it really annoying when Christian unbelievers use pagan faiths as a joke. Like as a “You wouldn’t believe in Apollo so why do you expect me to believe in Jesus?” thing, like belief in Apollo is so ludicrous that it can only be a punchline to a joke, or an absurdity. Basically pagans don’t even exist so the gods some of us worship are punchlines and rhetorical points, not anything to be respected. In fact they’re tools to try and make people not respect their own god.

Also some of them insist that Buddhism “isn’t a religion” and ignore places where Buddhism is absolutely a religion, and that there are Buddhist deities.

But this is when they consider these faiths at all, which is rare to begin with.

And those are the things I find irritating, not surprising. Just to clarify.

And even when they *mention* Judaism and Islam, they don’t normally acknowledge at all that they are in fact very substantially different from Christianity.

Also they tend not to even acknowledge variation in Christianity or the range of things Christians do in the name of Christianity.

Like, people who are staunchly anti-Christian *and* constantly making analogies to the civil rights movement really need to get a clue.

Oh yes that’s another thing they do, is they simplify Christianity as much as they possibly can. And usually the version of Christianity that they understand is, at best, the version of God that maybe a five-year-old believes – a man in the sky with a beard, that kind of thing. And they ignore the depth and breadth of Christian faiths and totally ignore Christian mystics and … etc. So even when they talk about Christianity, they aren’t getting it right most of the time, or they’re only speaking for a narrow segment of Christianity, and often a sort of “child’s version” of that segment.

There’s a whole lot of things they do.

Notes: