Mad As Hell, Not Gonna Take It Anymore...

Any idea what this lovely collection of humanity has in common? They were all participants at a "Holocaust Denial" Conference. I cannot fathom the level of hate and bigotry that it must take to come to this belief. I sometimes wonder if they truly don't believe or if they are merely taking a pose for political reasons. Regardless they are very proud and public with this stance. How would you feel if these very vocal deniers were gaining ground in their beliefs - encouraging other Holocaust Deniers to come forward, join them in discrediting this "enormous fraud?"

In light of how I began this post, what follows may seem to some to be overly harsh and an unfair comparison.

I posted the following quote from The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View by Richard Tarnas:

"On the intellectual level, religion no longer tends to be understood reductively as a psychologically or culturally determined belief in nonexistent realities, or explained away as an accident of biology, but is recognized as a fundamental human activity in which every society and individual symbolically interprets and engages the ultimate nature of being."

When I came across that quote last night while finishing the book, I stopped mid-page to post it as a Facebook status update. It seemed to sum up my thoughts on religion - not "organized religion," not "church," not "faith" - but pure religion, and why it continues to be essential to humanity in all it's forms. In turn, it clicked for me why I am so bothered by fundamentalist atheists or rabid anti-theists as I prefer to call them (in the hopes of separating them from the more tolerant atheists and agnostics).


With greater frequency and louder and more shrill voices, the growing mob of anti-theists out there are making their voices heard. The first batch of comments posted were all incredibly bigoted, negative comments about religion from otherwise intelligent friendly people. This vocal fundamentalism that believes religion must be destroyed and eliminated is dangerous and should no longer be tolerated.

As I sat there reading these angry, hate filled comments on my Facebook wall, I realized that I was finished with allowing these individuals to pollute my space with their horrid rhetoric. If I learned that a friend was a Holocaust denier, would I bite my tongue and pretend that what they were saying was just a matter of opinion?

I had decided to read Tarnas' book to get a better handle on how we got to where we are in the 21st century. The relationship between the metaphysical and the empirical is a dance that has been going on for two millenia and the music is still playing. These rabid anti-theists who so vocally seek to destroy religion are chained to the biblical literalism and Christian fundamentalism they so vociferously hate.

Karen Armstrong said it best in the introduction to her new book, "Atheism is...parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image."

When I was in boot camp many years ago, an ordained Baptist minister in my company took time one Sunday afternoon to explain why Roman Catholicism was evil and why I would be going to Hell. That is religious intolerance. Muslims and Christians continue to kill each other in Nigeria. That is religious intolerance. Anti-theists fund public media campaigns to attack the beliefs of the faithful. That is religious intolerance.

From this day forward, this blog will no longer provide space for rabid anti-theists. I will no longer enable what is a violent, determined bigotry - no different in spirit than the Klan. I deny them the right to wear the mantle of Rationalism. They are using Rationalism in their own fundamentalist culture war.

As Tarnas says,

"Science too, while no longer enjoying the same degree of sovereignty it possessed during the modern era, continues to retain allegiance for the unrivaled pragmatic power of its conceptions and the penetrating rigor of its method. Because the earlier knowledge claims of modern science have been relativized by both philosophy of science and the concrete consequences of scientific and technological advance, that allegiance is no longer uncritical, yet in these new circumstances science itself has seemingly been freed up to explore new and less-constricted approaches to understanding the world. It is true that individuals who subscribe to an allegedly unified and self-evident "scientific world view" of the modern type are seen as having failed to engage the larger intellectual challenge of the age--thereby receiving the same judgment in the postmodern era that the ingenuous religious person received from science in the modern era. In virtually all contemporary disciplines, it is recognized that the prodigious complexity, subtlety, and multivalence of reality far transcend the grasp of any one intellectual approach, and that only a committed openness to the interplay of many perspectives can meet the extraordinary challenges of the postmodern era."

Far too many of these atheists are as blind in their faith in science as biblical literalists are in their faith in the Bible. Waving a copy of Darwin's Origin of the Species and thumping on its cover for good effect is no different than doing the same with the Bible. Putting a fish with legs logo on your car is no different than the original fish logo. If your beliefs only have weight by railing against someone else's beliefs, then you have no belief. You are empty. You are a fraud.