Antithesis Or Acceptable?

No doubt you know by now that I’m a raging, fire breathing atheist. I think religion is stupid and dangerous in some circumstances. Jesus worship is pathetic, and so is the idea of original sin-and the semantics surrounding the free will debate irritates the shit out of me too. I can’t stand the argument that I can’t be moral without God. And there is no way to find the first cause. You can’t find that shit in an antedated manuscript wherein the absence of an answer must be a very cross eternal creator who brought the universe into being. For me, that is way too simple. I’m going to have to say that “I don’t know and neither do you” is about how I feel. There’s too much chaos, randomness, and just plain brutality that a good God would eschew. One sin and the human race was cooked forever after.

Fuck God. What an asshole.

Now I just read an article that atheism doesn’t have to be diametrically opposed to religion. There’s some sophisticated arguments brought forth by two erstwhile authors struggle for and against religion to the very end:

“Man was happier before Christianity,” he wrote, “than after it”. But the alternative to Christianity, in modern times, was what he called “the barbarism of reason” – secular creeds like Jacobinism in revolutionary France, which aimed to remake the world by force. These political religions would be even more intolerant than Christianity, Leopardi believed, and if you consider the history of the 20th Century, he was surely right.

And another:

…he believed humankind would on the whole be better off if it renounced religion. But he didn’t deny that religion contained something of value. “Sometimes, of an early Sunday morning,” he wrote, “I would enter the old grey church to take the sacrament… And as I knelt with bowed head to partake of the beautiful, antique ritual I would try to conceive what inner secret the wild rumour held… I would feel half-inclined to believe also. Why not?”

As Powys saw it, the “wild rumour” of Christianity was like all religion – a response to the fact of mortality.

It’s a good article except for the final paragraph where the writer of the piece lands a jab aimed at what is called New Atheism. He calls us religious in our quest to make our presence known. Whatever, dude. You should pay attention to the fucking Christians who can’t stop themselves from proselytizing and want God to be part of everything we do as a society. When Christians stop bothering polite folks with their unctuous beliefs, chances are that the other religions and the nonbelievers will settle down and we can have a respectable, pluralistic democracy that includes all faiths and no faiths.

In the end, I couldn’t care less what you worship. Just don’t bug me with it. Because when you do, me and my fellow atheists have ways of upsetting your apple cart.