Political Acceptance of Atheism
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July 11, 2015 at 12:50 pm #354
Now that LGBT crowd has achieved their huge victory with the SCOTUS. Is it finally time for atheists to be out and proud too?
July 11, 2015 at 3:04 pm #368Note: this reply assumes a United States context.
I know many people are saying yes, and have been for years (in other words, they weren’t waiting for this SCOTUS decision, in the least). Really the two situations don’t depend on each other, though they are similar in form; both groups have been (and still are) treated with contempt, contempt that has at times turned deadly. Given that the enemy of both groups is the same bunch of knuckleheads, there’s a tendency to put links there that don’t belong. The two causes are allied but not congruent.
Apparently the numbers of people willing to just declare they don’t belong to a church has been increasing by leaps and bounds; I’m hearing numbers pushing 40 percent now. How much of that is actual atheism, as opposed to Xians turned off by the fact that with churches comes politics, or mystics and deists, or just something not Xian, is harder to pin down but the last number I read was approximately 7 percent actual atheists (I expect that number to grow). I don’t know the percentages of LGBT (Back when I first noticed LGBT issues being talked about a lot, I heard claims anywhere from 2 percent to ten percent, both extremes being politically convenient for someone) but it ought to be within a factor of three of the atheist number.
July 11, 2015 at 10:42 pm #398@steveinco, I agree that the two issues are not congruent. What I see or feel is… there may be, at this particular moment, a crack in the theocratic political armor that might be make it possible for some advancement in the broader acceptance of atheists in american culture and politics.
July 12, 2015 at 2:45 am #414@guest1, I don’t disagree whit that conclusion. We see atheism, or at least not being in a church, on the rise in the US. The young in particular have got to be extremely worrisome to Xian leaders (they might have to get off their fucking sanctimonious asses and get real jobs instead of being bloodsucking parasites–wait, did I say that out loud?) and I expect a lot of proselytization effort aimed at them.
Ironically I think it’s likely many rejected religion because of the obvious injustices of the anti LGBT stance that US religions happen to have. If that’s true a reformed, not-so-obviously-anti-LGBT version of Xianity could arise and “capture” many of these people.
The non-LGBT side of the phenomenon comes in with the rise of the New Atheists, and that in turn has at least some of its power in the events of 9/11. Despite the attempts of our then-leadership to dissasociate that act from its religious motives (and many on the left do so as well, to Sam Harris’s [among other’s] recurring befuddlement), many people have got to understand the hazard of dogmatic adherence to an ancient text, who did not before.
July 12, 2015 at 4:23 pm #498Interestingly, up here in Vermont, all the Lutherian and Episcopalian churches had huge rainbow flags draped from their entrances the day after the SCOTUS ruling. Obviously they’d have had to have them ready, and they are aiming at inclusiveness. I was impressed.
Note the Catholic Pope Cuddles is still unable to react to the 21st Century. As other religions begin to embrace LGBT communities, the holier-than-thou religions clutching to hate mentality look rather anal by comparison.
July 12, 2015 at 5:14 pm #515@strega I’m a bit perplexed by the acceptance of LGBT and other seemingly contrary social issues in these left leaning versions of christianity. How do they reconcile the conflicts within their divine texts and dogma?
July 12, 2015 at 5:56 pm #522Clearly many churches don’t read the whole friggin’ book. And this is a good thing, because if all Xians read the whole book and abided by it, this would be a truly horrible place to live.
The book itself gives them “outs.” They’ll point out that Christ “fulfilled” the laws (so somehow, they are now inoperative) but then somehow, only some of them were fulfilled. They get to pick and choose according to their own prejuces.
Even the most conservative sects play the pick-and-choose game; they don’t follow ALL of Leviticus (and many of us make a hobby of calling them on the stuff they choose to ignore, like stoning unruly kids for disrespecting their parents) but they sure do seem to love the “kill the faggots” verse, without fail.
July 13, 2015 at 1:56 am #565@guest1. Apparently they wear nylon, eat shellfish, get divorced and cure hangovers with bacon sandwiches. LGBT wasn’t a big stretch 🙂
July 13, 2015 at 2:27 am #568I am still chicken shit. In my current situation there is too much to lose. I am over my initial anger stage after deconversion….and working to once again become tolerant of the deluded. I did tell one friend and he jokes I’ll have to wear a funny hat for the first couple of hundred years after I die.
July 13, 2015 at 9:45 pm #613@robert I understand being ‘Chicken Shit’, maybe I should have been a bit more so myself. I’ve taken some pretty hard punches as a result of being open about my atheism.
July 15, 2015 at 3:23 am #685It will take a sea change in public attitude.
Gays are way ahead of atheists in the mind of the general public.
July 17, 2017 at 5:33 pm #3625I am a member of the LGBTQ community, and while yes, a lot of folks see marriage equality as the holy grail, it really isn’t. We can still be fired, evicted from/denied housing, denied basic public services in 29 states, all for being LGBTQ. Up that number to 34 states if you happen to be transgender or gender non conforming. Also, there are no hate crimes laws that protect us, even though we are the most likely group to be victims of crimes motivated by anti-LGBTQ hate. So…yeah, glad we can get married now and all of that, but that might not even be safe. All it will take is for Trump to appoint one more SCOTUS justice for that to be in jeopardy.
So, please don’t imply that our fight is done on a legal level. It isn’t – not be a long shot.
July 18, 2017 at 10:20 am #3632Yeah, there’s no connection, and, the parties that every rational person would like to see drop their prejudices, never seem to equate their bigotry, with, well, bigotry in the first place….and, therefore, never seem to equate the way they treated blacks or other minorities (“If we let blacks and whites marry, what’s next, people and monkeys being allowed to get married too?”) – With they way they continue to treat any other group that they were told their book says are not their equals.
So, atheists and LBGT, and, even many members of other minorities, are still discriminated against…some more openly than others, depending upon the circumstances.
Just as atheists fare better out of the bible belt, so do LBGT’s, minorities, etc.  Blacks came north to escape the South’s bigotry, to a degree at least, albeit the LGBTs do not have as clear a demarcation of where they can be accepted as having simple human rights…as religion is more pervasive and distributed, and, its tenets are still socially acceptable in most locations, because the idea that religious “rights” to discriminate against others, means that their beliefs cannot be questioned, as if heresy/blasphemy laws were now incorporated into, ironically, political correctness.
All it would take for MOST bigotry to evaporate over time would be a loss of religious fervor over the control of other’s behaviors.
The second that religion’s grip on other’s behaviors was gone, a mere agreement that you cannot demand that others adopt your own beliefs, active bigotry and discrimination are gone.
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