Radical Atheist

Theists are no more tolerant of those in disagreement with their perceptions than anyone else.

Theists may think they’re something special, beyond human. The rest of us see people as people. I’m a humanist atheist. I like my species. I think on average we’re fairly decent mammals. No matter how fancy you dress us up, we’re still all humans. If we could base our social behavior on the fact of our common humanity, there would be fewer things to be intolerant about.

Intolerance arises when one group of humans wants to be accepted as superior and separate from another group of humans. Religion is one of the many human belief systems that try to impose a false hierarchy on society.

Religions seek to artificially classify some people as blessed and the rest as heathens, and expect society to reflect their arbitrary classification system based on nothing more than their insistence that their interpretation of the wants and needs of the invisible and all powerful “Divine Whatever” are the most right.

Intolerance need not be tolerated.  It need not be legislated against or deposed by force.  Intolerance will decrease as humanity increases.  The more of us there are, the greater the need to be tolerant.

Religions stand in our way.  They need to be exposed as ancient, irrelevant attitudes that have outlived their usefulness and certainly don’t contribute anything of value to society that can’t be provided without all the supernatural and superstitious trappings.   Once religion has passed into irrelevance humans will still be capable of acts of extreme compassion as well as acts of extreme cruelty.  The only difference will be that acts of compassion will stem from our realization of our common humanity and acts of cruelty will have fewer reasons to occur.

Pat Condell on "Faith"

Print Friendly