There seems to be a prevailing line of thinking in the religious world that all atheists are out to get them. Not only that, atheists are mean and confrontational and they mock the beliefs of the religious. Of course, this sort of stereotyping, when turned around on the religious, is a source for their often claimed persecution. Just as in any group of people, there will be those that are guilty of a particular behavior one specifies as applying to everyone. In other words, there are most certainly atheists who are mean and disrespectful to other people and yes, some of them are religious. There are even atheists who single out religious people to be disrespectful and mean. The reverse is also most certainly true. This is just a fact of population and probability. Perhaps it is because I am sensitive to the subject or perhaps because I pay attention to it more, I see many religious people accuse any unbeliever of intolerance even if the unbeliever is merely discussing religion and offering their opinion. I do not, however, want to stereotype Christians or any other religious person, so I do want to say that while I feel this to be true of many religious people, it is most certainly not true of many others.

I have been thinking about this subject over the last few days, since getting back from The Reason Rally and the American Atheists Convention, both of which were held over the last weekend, with the convention being on Sunday and Monday after the Saturday rally. At the rally itself Richard Dawkins gave a speech in which he said that unbelievers should mock and ridicule the beliefs of religious people. This snippet, taken alone, would suggest that Dawkins is giving a clarion call to all of his puppets to go out and ridicule, mock and disrespect religious people. However, if one were to listen to the whole speech, one should be able to discern that this isn’t what was being said. Dawkins used a quote by Johann Hari: “I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs.” Dawkins was making a distinction between beliefs and the people who hold those beliefs, when he made his speech. He was making a larger point and that is that most people do not take their religion seriously and do not likely believe the more outlandish claims that religion espouses.

Dawkins was expressing his opinion that Christian belief should be mocked. That is different from mocking a person. A Christian doesn’t understand this often because he/she has so much invested in those beliefs that they think it is actually a part of them. But it isn’t. It is just another form of an opinion, however tied up it may be into culture and society and family and in their brain. It is just evolution.

If one holds the opinion that religious belief is harmful, than it is a duty to try to use methods that will reverse belief in others. It is much more of a kind and considerate thing to do, then to have a religion teach that gays are evil, that everyone that doesn’t accept the religion will be tortured forever, that women can’t control their own bodies, that children must be taught what to believe before they have a chance to think for themselves, that it is wrong to put a rubber on your dick, that it is wrong to eat pork, that it is wrong to masturbate, that it is wrong to say Goddamn it, etc.

If religion were not by nature a proselytizing entity, it is likely few unbelievers would pay it any attention. However, when religion seeks to impose itself, through politics and other methods, upon the rest of the population, it should not be a surprise when it is challenged. If religion moves from faith into the empirical world in the form of using their faith-based morality as the desired standard for everyone, then religion has opened itself up to being fair game for discussion in the public spectrum. I say “fair game” to distinguish it from an unprovoked “attack.” Many religious people try to claim that any discussion of religion that is critical or that points out the lack of logic being used, or points out the subjugation it seeks to impose, or the judgement and sometimes, yes, the hate, is an unjustified attack. The religious want to be able to say whatever they want and then cry “faith” when it is countered. As if faith is an impenetrable shield which also carries the added magical ability of immunity of rebuttal. It is time that unbelievers reject these tactics and to do so boldly. It is time that unbelievers stop allowing those who use religion to try to govern nations to stand up and say “enough.”

If someone holds a political ideology that is harmful, we may ridicule it. I do ridicule republicans who say gay people are immoral. But if it is a religious idea that tells us the same thing, them suddenly the person is mean who ridicules.

I say all of this in the hope that freethinkers, atheists, skeptics and other nonreligious people will begin to speak out with more frequency. Together, we have a chance to influence our politics like never before in our shared history. Below, I have posted the speech made by Dawkins at The Rally as well as they speech made the next day at the convention.