Quick: without thinking too hard about it, describe the typical atheist. Chances are, the person you’ve just described is an outspoken, Grade-A asshole with a chip on his shoulder the size of Manitoba, a perpetual sourpuss who hates holidays, writes letters to Congress trying to get the word “god” removed from dollar bills, public buildings and legal documents, and who throws cigarette butts out the window as he passes by children playing wholesome games at church picnics. And you just know that he has ties to some sort of anarchist group that wants to overthrow the government and ban the church. Why is he so angry? WHY IS HE SO ANGRY?
Of course, this is all malarkey. The typical atheist is the typical human being. He or she is exactly the same as anyone else in the community except for the fact that god doesn’t play any role in their daily lives, aside from presenting the occasional speed bump (I’ll touch on that next week). For all intents and purposes, the atheist is *gulp* just like you.
The big problem here is that the atheists who make themselves heard tend to be the lunatic fringe elements of the atheist community. You know the type: quick to challenge you on any issue even tangentially related to religion, and immediately dismissive of any talk of god or spirituality. Trust me, a lot of atheists don’t like these guys either. They’re probably correct in most of their arguments, but they’re just so confrontational and absolute in their beliefs. And they’re jerks.
The things is, every group of people has an equivalent faction, whether it be religious, political, social, whatever. And in most cases, that faction is the loudest of the bunch and colors other people’s perception of the group as a whole. It might be surprising or even shocking for a Christian to learn that most non-Christians, when asked to describe the typical Christian, will probably describe a Grade-A asshole with a chip on his shoulder the size of Manitoba; a perpetual sourpuss who hates other religions’ holidays, writes letters to Congress trying to get the word “God” (capital G!) added to every building, song, and document, and who wants to impose fundamentalist Christian views on everyone across the land. And if you don’t like it, you can GET OUT and go back to NoGodistan or Jewistan or Islamistan or some other heathen country.
Sound familiar? I’m willing to bet that this “typical” Christian is far removed from any real Christians you know, just as that “typical” atheist you imagined earlier is far removed from most real atheists. Sure, in both cases these folks actually exist (to terrifying degrees even), but their representation in the overall population is total out of whack with their perceived population as derived from their outspokenness. Just as the majority of Christians are good, honest people just living their lives, so too are the majority of atheists.
With that in mind, don’t these outspoken atheists owe it to themselves and the rest of the community to be more outspoken and drown out the voices of the crazies? I suppose you could make an argument for that case, but there’s a good reason that most of us tend to shy away from talking about this aspect of our lives, as I will discuss in my next entry.
