Throughout American history, many groups have been victims of varying degrees of prejudice, up to and including outright hatred from the majority. Many of these prejudices have come a long way toward disappearing over the years. Most people are unaware, for example, that Chinese people were the victims of much discrimination, prejudice, and violence in the Old West. Once blacks began to fight for civil rights, they made incredible progress in a short amount of time. Women were eventually given the vote and, despite the never-passed Equal Rights Amendment, they haven't far to go to be on equal footing with men. Those who practice an "alternative" form of sexuality or relationship paradigm are still widely condemned, especially given the frequent verbal lashings of the radical religious right, but acceptance is becoming more and more widespread.
The increase in acceptance of these and other groups is pretty clear and definitely something that should please us. But there is one large group of people in our nation for whom the light of acceptance is still faint in the distance. This group has no well-known celebrity promoting tolerance for it. There is no widely-recognized symbol to proclaim members as being "out." There are no parades to proclaim their pride.
Chances are virtually 100% that you have an acquaintance who belongs to this group, especially one who has not "come out." You'd never know to look at them. There are no tell-tale physical traits that will give them away: not their skin, not their accent, not their choice of mate. They hold down the same sorts of jobs as you or I.
And yet, they are misunderstood, maligned, even hated, by more people than any other single minority. They were among those gathered for execution by Hitler. They are condemned by religious and political leaders the world over. They're not embraced as members of the Boy Scouts of America or the Veterans of Foreign Wars. And their very right to United States citizenship was questioned by then Vice-President, George Bush.
The people to whom I'm referring are atheists.
More accurately, the group includes freethinkers in general: atheists, agnostics, humanists, rationalists, skeptics, and so on. Anyone who does not adhere to religious dogma, basically. But "atheist" is the name that shocks, the ideology that makes skin crawl, more than any of the others.
There is a perception of atheists that isn't very flattering. The late Madalyn Murray O'Hair was probably our most "notorious" atheist. Many people probably envision O'Hair when they think of atheists, giving them the impression that we're all a bit sour and crotchety, not to mention pugnacious.
Ms. O'Hair was reviled even when I was a child. Her crime? She wanted to remove "In God We Trust" from our money and "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Never mind that neither of these expressions were originally included in these familiar places. "In God We Trust" has been on and off our coinage since 1863, but has been permanent on our paper currency only since 1957. As for "under God," it was added to the Pledge in 1954, during the height of McCarthyism. (The Communists ostensibly being atheistic, we had to voice our non-atheism, lest we be found similar to them in any way.) These were not time-honored words O'Hair was attempting to erase, merely then-recent breaches in the wall of separation between church and state that she was trying to repair. In other words, she was despised for trying to defend the First Amendment to our Constitution.
In general, the attitude toward O'Hair is the same attitude that most atheists find themselves having to deal with. Is it any wonder that atheists have yet to come out of the closet in such vast numbers, the way, for instance, homosexuals have done?
Like homosexuals, atheists are vilified almost exclusively by the deeply religious. To be fair, many religious people have a "live and let live" philosophy regarding homosexuality, and many also feel that it's okay not to believe in God, that it is a personal choice and nobody else's business. But atheists have been ridiculed by the majority for a long, long time.
The truth is, atheists are afraid to admit their atheism, much of the time. In one way, they are more fortunate than those with non-mainstream sexual lifestyles, since the differences are only ideological. Atheists can blend into the crowd more easily. But that fact doesn't make it any easier to keep thoughts private, to watch this country become more and more opposed to the very existence of atheists.
Throughout history, the atheist has been persecuted. Blasphemy laws were commonplace for centuries, many of them carrying punishments of death. There are cases of children being taken from atheist parents, who were not considered capable of raising children. Until after the Civil War, atheists were not even allowed to testify in U.S. courts of law.
Freethinkers today are afraid of losing friends, even families, due to the difference of belief. They are afraid of being ostracized at work, possibly even losing their jobs. Because these things do happen. Just as "gay bashing" is real, "atheist bashing" is, too. Many atheists can relate accounts of being harassed, ridiculed, and worse. They have been the recipients of rude telephone calls, letters, and e-mail bombs. They have been verbally and physically threatened, all because they do not believe in a god. And some have, sadly, been killed. How can they be blamed for fearing for their safety, if not their lives?
But why are atheists so hated? Just what have they done that warrants such prejudice? What crimes have they committed that would merit the revocation of their citizenship?
One possibility is that they are a convenient scapegoat. Atheists seem to be blamed for every problem known to man. The religious right would have you believe that our country's ills are entirely the fault of godlessness. Further, they would have you believe that our country was founded by Christians, for Christians, as a Christian nation. Facts seem to escape them, such as that our country was founded by a variety of people, including atheists. Our first four Presidents, in fact, were not Christians. The United States was meant to be for everyone, including atheists. And it was never, ever meant to be a "Christian nation," any more than it was meant to be a Muslim nation, a Jewish nation, or an atheist nation.
In fact, if one pays even moderately close attention to what they're saying, one will find that the religious right is mistaken about a lot of things regarding our country, its laws, and its origins.
Despite this, they are very effective in making atheists out to be the ultimate villains. Disobeying the word of God is bad enough, but to deny that God even exists? Horrors!
Atheists, they would have you believe, are evil incarnate, out to ruin the entire world and turn it over to Satan. After all, if you're not on God's side, you're automatically on Satan's, right? (Many theists, in fact, believe that atheism and Satanism are effectively the same thing.) They would have you believe that atheists want to destroy Christians, brainwash their children against God, and who knows what else? These things are collectively known as the "atheist conspiracy."
Of course, there is no atheist conspiracy. Freethinkers have better things to do with their time.
What sorts of things? The same as most people. They have careers, support causes, raise families, educate their children. They read and write, paint and perform. They are no different than anyone else, with the exception of their belief systems, or lack thereof. But it is this one crucial difference that means the world to those who spread the bigotry against them.
Yes, it's true that many atheists think our world would be a better place without religion. It's not hard to see how they can come to that conclusion, though, given the amount of negativism spread by religion throughout history. But the fact is, most atheists don't care what other people believe, so long as those beliefs don't cause any harm to others. Unfortunately, the beliefs of certain religious groups do cause harm.
One particular form of this harm is the perpetuation of lies about certain segments of the population, including atheists, of course. The "conspiracy" mentioned above is effectively slander. And it doesn't stop there. The religious "right" also says that atheists have no morals. They seem to feel that morality is only possible if you are religious. Pure rubbish, of course, but this is what they say. They blame crime on this lack of morality, despite the fact that most criminals are religious. They even go so far as to say that atheism has been responsible for more deaths than religion, pointing to the atheistic regime of Stalin as proof. Never mind that Stalin's atrocities were the result of a lust for power and control, and not to advance the "cause" of atheism. Many of them also include Hitler in their name blame game, conveniently ignoring the fact that Hitler was Catholic, and the Nazi's genocide was, in his eyes, divinely inspired. They also conveniently ignore the fact that the sum total of those killed in non-religious wars and atrocities doesn't come close to equaling the number killed in the name of one God or another throughout history.
These lies spread about freethinkers serve to turn anyone who will listen against them. These are propaganda tactics, and the religious right is very good at using them. The fact is, if one lies about something, but says it often enough, and with enough conviction, people will eventually begin to believe the lie is the truth. But that doesn't make it so.
Reference was made earlier to the views of our former President, George Bush, regarding atheism and citizenship. Mr. Bush's statement was made during a 1988 press conference. When asked how he planned to capture the votes of atheists in the coming election, Bush stated that he was "pretty weak in the atheist community." When pressed to comment further, he said, "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
There are three very sad facts about his statement. The first is that Mr. Bush obviously saw nothing wrong with voicing such an opinion, despite the fact that he was obliged to support our Constitution, including the First Amendment, which pertains just as much to atheists as it does to Christians. The second is that, when he was later called on the carpet for his statements, he did not retract them or apologize for them in any way. And the third is that his sentiment seems to be shared by government in general, if not the American populace in general.
Conservative estimates state that approximately 10% of the American population is of a freethinking mentality. This would mean that you could take representative samples of people from across the nation, and one in ten would be non-religious in one form or another.
Like most forms of discrimination, the heart of the matter is ignorance. White people used to feel that black people were inferior on many fronts. Only when blacks showed whites that they weren't did that attitude begin to change. Ditto for men versus women. Homosexuals used to be categorized uniformly as perverts, child molesters, and whores. But once the straights began to realize that they already knew and respected people who were gay, these labels began to peel away.
Maybe that's all it would take for the negativism surrounding atheism to finally disappear, or at least reduce. Perhaps if people could contact that one person in ten, if they could get to know their friendly neighborhood atheist, they'd realize that we are as warm, loving, funny, intelligent, and kind as they are themselves.
