Why Are Atheists So Angry?

not believing in Santa has not destroyed adults' enjoyment of the holidays.

Not believing in Poseidon has not destroyed enjoyment of the oceans.

Truth be told, even the most religious of us are experienced atheists when it comes to someone else's God(s).

Mr. Riccards seems to conclude that belief in the hereafter and any theology is better for the individual, society and world than rational skepticism. History and current events do not support that claim.

It isn't atheism that is a clear and present danger to our world.

Civilization is now threatened by religious dogmatists forcing their faith-based "realities" and their Armageddons onto others through extremism, belief without evidence, religious law and modern weaponry.

Mr. Riccards has too much time on his hands if he is concerned about irritated atheists writing books.

The pope keeps informing the world that humankind cannot exist without hope, a hope based on faith, but few are listening.  

Many more of us than you may believe are able to have hope based on faith in ourselves and our fellow humans.  The orthodox pronouncements of an out-of-touch patriarchal bureaucrat (and let's face it, that's what the pope is), provide little inspiration.

They want us to not only share their belief that there is no God, no soul, no afterlife, but also to be stoically happy about it.  They use science as an ally, but they get incredibly belligerent with scientists (including the head of the gnome project) who believe in God. 

I for one, am keenly interested in this "Gnome Project".  While I would never object to tax dollars being spent on unicorn breeding, I think this goes a little too far. :)

First, though I disagree with Dr. Riccards' belief that morality cannot exist without belief in the supernatural, I find posts that consider politics and metaphysics in one fell swoop to be refreshing. I'm currently reading Robert Penn Warren's 'All the King's Men'; certainly, Warren sees metaphysics and politics as inevitably intertwined.

Riccards seemingly includes 'atheism' as one large monolith of beliefs -- a generalized "they" who are either angry or intolerant -- when I can't help but wonder whether a more supple defintion of atheism might be called for. Perhaps atheism should not necessarily be limited to the idea of denying the existence of the divine but also the absence of belief rather than the simple negation of a certain belief. This may be a fine line, however, since agnosticism seemingly has this lack of belief already covered.

The atheist books that Riccards is referring to must inevitably include Christopher Hitchens' latest work (Hitchens himself is a bit of a neocon on foreign policy but liberal on most other issues). I'm not sure why atheism's entrance into the public forum and its slight ascendancy in American culture, despite the latter's puritanism, is a threat to Riccards or any other theists. The works that he cites on language and literary theory, presumably Foucault and poststructuralism, are concerned how truth claims are produced by a culture for a particular place and time and how language is as much about absence and slippage as it is about presence ("trace," to Derrida); surely, this type of methodology and approach can be applied to Christian theology and its sacred texts in particular.

Theists should be able to believe freely in whatever deity(ies) they choose, but when their beliefs are contradicted by science and objective, empirical investigations, those beliefs must be amended; this, of course, includes claims of Creationism and the Earth's age made by some fundamentalists.  

I find it disturbing how polarized the world has become in the past several years, but even more so in this country.  However, its not due to religion or the lack thereof, as is so easy and cliche to assume.  It is due to the trading of liberty for security. The lack of liberty in Afganistan aided the rise of Osama bin Ladin.  And the fear of  9-11 happening again here, fooled us and our legislators into giving up our liberties at home in order to minimize risk from abroad.   If we protect the universal right to liberty above all,  for ourselves and our communities, all our varying beliefs or unbeliefs will be protected. 

The title question of this piece, “Why are atheists so angry?” presupposes two things. First, that all that all members of a certain class of people identified by the queror as atheists are angry people; and second, that atheists are the only spectrum of the religious belief system who ever displays anger in any social interaction. The falsity of both presumptions is so blatantly self-evident that no evidence should be needed to point them out. Those who identify themselves as Christians and other devout believers in God are quite capable of expressing anger themselves when their beliefs are questioned. If you doubt this, try going to a Christian discussion board and making posts that deny the existence of God and maintaining that the Holy Bible is load of nonsense. If you fail to get angry responses, I’ll be surprised. And since every human being experiences anger, and it is normal human behavior to feel and express it in some form on a regular basis, I’m not sure exactly how one person can understandably employ the term “angry” to especially identify another in such a generalized fashion. Those persons who are identified by the devout majority as “atheists” (and it is important to note that believers categorize anyone who does not subscribe to an organized religion as an “atheist” with depraved indifference to whether or not that person may actually profess a belief in a personal God or the possibility of one) certainly have a reason to feel indignation and a certain measure of outrage. Non-believers in America live in a culture in which their beliefs are marginalized, misrepresented and stereotyped. The media at large portray religious belief as a positive thing and presume that the public at large believes in some form of the God of the Judeo-Christian mythos. A shining example of this in the essay above is the idea that religious belief is somehow a necessary foundation for individual moral behavior and moral society, a manifesto that is oft-echoed by political and civic leaders. In the general American population at large, 65 per cent identify themselves as Christians, while less than a third claim no organized religious belief. In America’s prison population, the number of Christians jump to ninety per cent while the percentages of non-believers dwindles to less than one. If the assertation that religion was a necessary ingredient for morality were true, wouldn’t these statistics be reversed? The question “Why are atheists so angry?” is really, then, nothing more than an indirect ad hominem attack on the atheist. Labeling one’s opponent as “angry” implies that they are irrational or not in their right mind, and therefore no one should pay attention to anything they have to say. It’s a lot easier for the believer than to actually confront the arguments and viewpoints of the non-believer that challenge the believer’s own faith and which the believer might have difficulty defending with logic and reason. In this light, the question “Why are atheists so angry?” can be seen for what it really is – the believer’s projection of their own anger at having their beliefs questioned.