I am an atheist. Pardon me while I go back to my previous posts to see how many of them I prefaced with those words.
Only one other. Good, it's not trite yet. Anyway.
I'm a member of a lot of communities online, many of which have an atheist or socially liberal leaning, possibly a side-effect of my being an atheist and social liberal. It's all good fun, we poke fun at Rick Santorum (Really, it's not hard), we laugh at the fundies (Fred Phelps is comedy gold), and good times are had by all. If you've been around any internet communities like these, you know what I'm talking about. And sure, you have to account for about 30% of posts there (optimistically) being trolls, but once you learn to ignore them the internet can actually be a wonderful place for intellectual discussion.
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| Pictured: Not a wonderful place for intellectual discussion. |
But there's something that's always bothered me. It's present on Reddit, the comments on your local pot-smoking liberal news blog, and pretty much everwhere else.
An absolute hostility toward everything right-wing.
In truth, I can fully understand that when it comes to most social issues. When it comes to civil rights, Republicans are best ignored, or better yet chased out of the room with pitchforks. Republicans tend to be anti-separation of church and state, anti-gay, anti-abortion, etcetera, etcetera. None of this is news to anyone, and frankly I have no problem with those ideas being ripped on by the atheists I'm usually around. It's really hard to justify an abstinence education when you don't have a religious reason to think sex is evil.
But while protecting marriage by bashing gays seems to be the base of Republican politics nowadays, it's not the only thing they concern themselves with. The Republicans (And the others on the right, not to mention libertarians in the center) tend to take a very liberal view of the economy. (If you take offense to that use of the word "liberal," please look it up and then go take a long walk off a short pier.) And I take that point of view too. (I did find a good blog that combines atheism and a libertarian view of economics. But only one so far.)
Why is it that atheists have come to expect each other to subscribe to the same political views? It's reached a point of worrisome hostility toward any non-conformists on /r/Atheism (That's Reddit's atheism board if you didn't know) and reddit in general.
I'm not here to debate the merits of a liberal economic system. I happen to be a huge supporter of the free market, but I can accept alternate viewpoints. It just saddens me that attempting to oppose a big-government results in one being immediately lumped with the right-wingers who want to "Pray the Gay Away."
I'm not saying you should convert to my political ideology because you're an atheist, and frankly I'm not going to try very hard to convince you of it. But as a community, or perhaps as communities in general, could we stop equating it to social conservatism just because the Republicans espouse its merits? (To a vague extent anyway. The Republicans are very bad at actually implementing small government.) Even a blind squirrel gets a nut sometimes. And showing the levels of intolerance toward libertarians that I've seen on many boards is a good way to keep many atheists, who may be at a pivotal time coming to terms with their beliefs being shattered, from finding the camaraderie they need.
This is not the most collected post I've done, but it's being written at 2 AM, and half of the wordcount is in parenthetical statements anyway. I'll be back tomorrow with something more interesting.
Or a post about small, furry animals. Either way, something better.
~GK
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