Why It Sucks to be An Atheist

  

I’m not a big believer in “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but this picture is the exception that proves that rule.  Everything thing about Pete Hogsbreath typifies why it sucks to be a rational person in an insane asylum; aka the United States of Perverted Fantasies and Delusions.  From any perspective but right-wing Christianity, Hogsbreath is an angry face with tribal tattoos of a man full of insecurity, violence, irrational “personal belief,” and white entitlement.  In other words, an American Christian.  That kind of asshole has made living in this shithole country largely miserable and precarious for all of my 78 years. 

Lest you think I’m one of those mythical atheists who spends time trying to convince true believers of the error in their ways, I don’t give a shit what you believe. I just don’t want to hear any of your nonsense. And that is, clearly, too much to ask in an insanely superstitious, anti-science 21^st century America trying to turn the clock back to the 1890s.  There are no evangelical atheists, just people trying to get through their day and their lives without too much insanity.  While I have suffered every kind of holy spook nitwit at my doors, trying to convince me that my non-existent soul was going to “the bad place” if I didn’t ask some Big Kahuna for forgiveness and start paying my way into the Big Rock Candy Mountain regularly, I have never suffered such foolishness from a single atheist. 

I grew up in western Kansas, one of the most wholly irrational and superstitious places on the planet, surrounded by sanctimonious, hypocritical, intolerant, noisy Christians; including my family. My biological mother died, when I was nine years old and she was 34, and all of the religious explanations for her suffering and death made as much sense as a fairy tale full of magic and mythical cartoon characters. I have been an atheist since. You say “god works in mysterious ways” and I say “he’s a fairy tale or a lazy, vicious son-of-a-bitch, pick your poison.” 

Ms. Day and I grew up in the traditional Methodist Church, hers in central California and mine in western Kansas.  Other than the name, our experiences were very different, possibly because she was 2 years younger and considerably less observant.  I always marveled at the inconsistency between the story of Jesus tossing out the money changers and all of the commerce that went on between services in our church.  By the time I escaped that Sunday torture I probably saw at least twenty cars and dozens of pieces of farm equipment and tens of thousands of dollars in farm products sold in our church’s lobby.  More money changed hands in that church than anywhere else in my youthful presence. 

I remember my first outward demonstration of my lack of faith, almost like it was a few days ago. Our mother was not yet dead, but she had been in the hospital for several months and was clearly not coming home. My brother and I were latchkey kids, but our father wasn’t bright enough to give us a key. He was still living under the delusion that, somehow, his life would return to normal and he would be home when we came home and his wife would survive 1950’s Kansas “medicine.”  So, Larry and I were stuck by the back door when a thunderstorm hit. Long before Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz made it popular, Western Kansas was famous for spectacular thunderstorms, often including tornadoes and always with lots of lightning. Along with being a high school accounting teacher our father had been a high school basketball coach and we had a 12-foot tall, 6 inch diameter, metal cross embedded in the ground at the end of the driveway. The horizontal bars served as one end of a clothesline and the top of the pole anchored a basketball goal. Dad worked for a local agricultural manufacturing company, summers, and he’d had the company welders build this gigantic structure for our yard; along with a couple of metal toys in the backyard.

My brother has always been one of the sincerest, best-in-class Christians I’ve ever known.  Like supernatural believers back as far as recorded human history, he was convinced that loud storm was some kind of expression of anger from God. He was probably five or 6 at the time.  At 8 years old, I was convinced there were no gods, let alone one who was bored enough to bother with two little kids getting soaked on a back porch. I was also pretty pissed off at the idea that an all knowing, “compassionate god” would be allowing our mother to suffer horribly and die from liver cancer. So, as a demonstration of the non-existence, or disinterest, from this god, I climbed to the top of that metal pole in our driveway and shrieked like a banshee for Larry’s god to strike me dead if he existed. Since I’m here writing this piece 70 years later, obviously nothing happened.  I stopped the demonstration because Larry was terrified and I was soaked.  I don’t remember how we got inside or under cover that day. 

The one thing you can count on from American Christians is that they desperately need you to, at least, pretend to believe in their mythologies because, otherwise, their fragile hold on “faith” collapses. My 8-year-old demonstration of God’s nonexistence was my first and last outward attempt to prove a negative, at least on “The God” topic. In fact, until I moved to California almost 30 years later, the first place I had ever lived where not being religious carried no stigma, I avoided any kind of discussion about my lack of belief, even with my wife and family.  Outing yourself as a non-believer is the fastest way to be isolated, to lose your job or any position of trust, and to end up in violent confrontations in at least three quarters of these dis-United States. Since the chances that you might be making this confession to a sympathetic ear are close to nonexistent In the Midwest, there is no upside to that conversation. Like introversion and moderate autism, atheism is just one more moral and intellectual “defect” that needs to be kept in deep undercover in the United States.

 

Like religion in general, the prejudice against atheists in the United States is irrational and powerful.  A Federal Bureau of Prisons 2013 survey of 218,167 prisoners found that 0.07% of prisoners call themselves “atheists.”  A 2012 Pew survey found that “one in five U.S. adults identifies as ‘nonreligious,’” which is not anything like being self-aware and confident enough to be an “atheist.”  The FFR article, linked above, said that other important reasons for the low atheist prison population are “atheists tend to be well-educated and have above-average socioeconomic status.  That is a politically-correct way of saying atheists are typically smart and independent enough that they don’t need to commit crimes to survive.  Rational people desperately cling to the fact that, regarding religious orientation, “about 28% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated” and that number is climbing.  That is mostly useless information, because the same survey found that:

  Most “nones” believe in God or another higher power. But very few go to religious services regularly.

  Most “nones” say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. They are not uniformly anti-religious.

  Most “nones” reject the idea that science can explain everything. But they express more positive views of science than religiously affiliated Americans do.

That same survey found that only “17% of ‘nones’ identify as atheist, 20% say they are agnostic” and the rest are too mentally lazy to pick a side, very much like the 90M eligible voters who decided to sit out the 2024 national election.  As Chevy Chase said a long time ago, “agnostic, aka the lazy man's atheist" is not enough different from the “unaffiliated” 63% who chose “nothing in particular” as their religious orientation.  I recently heard someone say that the word “atheist” is derived from the Greek “átheos,”, meaning "godless" or "without god.”  That someone said he no longer accepted that term, since gods had nothing to do with him or his beliefs.  He calls himself a “rationalist” and I’m adopting that word for myself.  Ms. Day calls herself an “evolutionist” since she believes evolution is “the story of all stories.”  She is consistently fancier than me.