T he war that's coming between the fundamentalist Christians and the hard-core Atheists probably won't be the most violent of the holy wars. But it has the potential to be the most annoying. Well, I'm going to try to stop it.

So I'm running into this guy basically everywhere I go:

Not that exact guy. People like him. I recognize the type, I had to spend the whole first half of my life around the Christian version of those guys, people who worked it into every conversation. But now I'm running into these really aggressive, sort of evangelical atheists. Ever since 9/11/2001, in fact. The exact day a whole lot of atheists decided this religion thing had to go before it killed us all.

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These things never end well.

But I think we've got more common ground than we admit. For instance, both my atheist and Christian friends (I seem to have an equal number of both these days) tell me they agree with the following statement:

Celebrating the death of somebody you disagreed with pretty much makes you a dick.

I doubt anybody reading this has ever waved a snarky sign at a funeral, so I think we're pretty much all in the same boat still. See? Common ground.

So how about this: I'm going to throw out a few of these statements - things I think we have to agree on if we want to avoid disaster - and you can read until you see something you disagree with. We'll see how long we can make it last.

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Why? Because something's brewing. I wander around my local Barnes & Noble and they've got a whole special table set aside:



I go home, log into one of my favorite forums and one guy's got this as his avatar:

And another dude has this:

So I retreat to my own forums, and find out turbo evangelist Jerry Falwell had died that day. The reaction?

I mean, that thing I said I said earlier about not celebrating the death of somebody you disagree with... that still counts for a bitter, uncompromising old fart like Falwell, right? We're civilized people. We can celebrate him changing his mind, or even celebrate him being made to look like a fool in public.

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But you start cheering his death, you've walked away from the one single baseline every remotely moral person has ever agreed on: the value of human life. And I know we all agree on that, because we can all think of people we could've otherwise stabbed and gotten away with it.

And sure, there may be a few of my atheists out there saying that what Falwell was spewing was so hateful, that it surely inspired some murders (of homosexuals or abortion doctors or whatever) and that he thus deserved death on those grounds.

But you don't want to live by that rule; you'll wind up in a world where gangsta rappers and video game programmers and political commentators and novelists are considered worthy of death just because some fans claimed their work inspired them to kill. That's the sort of thing a nut from the other side would say. Right?

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No, people got to have the right to express themselves, good, bad and ugly. Falwell had a family. Friends. He was a human being. You cheer over his corpse and you're just acting like a pecker.

And that's another thing both sides agree on, that we hate this modern trend toward peckerfication. So let's see what else we agree on...

(NOTE: Per international regulations governing all online religious debate, we are required to insert on each page humorous and inflammatory image macros such as the one below. To prove my objectivity, these have been carefully chosen as to be equally offensive to all belief systems. -MGMT )

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Can Christians and atheists both agree that...



1. You Can Do Terrible Things in the Name of Either One