Atheists Versus Atheists

The recent Atheist meeting in Melbourne brought up quite a lot of conversation and controversy. Interestingly many articles in the opinion columns of newspapers weren't theists attacking atheists... but atheists attacking atheists.

Atheist attacking atheists? This usually happens very often but is, perhap surprisingly, not as complex an issue as it might appear.

On the surface it is quite straight forward, there are two camps of atheists: militant atheists and hippy atheists. Of course neither group would approve of being called either of those terms because those are the names the oposing group calls the other. Which I use here because it actually tells you exactly where the disagreement is coming from:

Militant atheists consider the threat from theists to be so serious that one should guard against them and work to actively thwart their expansion at every opportunity otherwise they could seize control of the country and unleash a reign of terror.

Hippy atheists consider theists to be generally very little threat and believe that that through better education the theists will disappear like an aspirin in water.

In other words: the argument is about "how dangerous are religious people?"

This is a very interesting question... when I think of all of the theists I know I am forced to say well... most of them are really harmless. Even the ones in the clergy are hardly extreme or authoritarian.

When I think of the theists in Iran, a country I know a great deal about, I'm forced to say that they are extremely dangerous to human wellbeing, dignity and world peace.

When I think about the theists in history I'm just going to repeat what I said about Iran.

So... I would consider myself in the militant atheist group because even though I know dozens, if not hundreds of theists who are gentle, wise, kind and just... those are all people from my culture. A culture that emphasises equality, respect, kindness, compassion, fairness and freedom of speech ahead of religious dogma. Theists from outside my culture are just pure destruction (spiritually, academically and physically) in human form.

So... I'm actually also quite sympathetic with the hippy atheists as well because all they have to do is say, "Look around you, do you see any evil theists?" well, while there are lots of annoying and bad theists in Australia, the evil theists are nonetheless so rare I can see why they wouldn't consider them a threat.

But here's the thing... I used to be a hippy atheist...

September 11, End of Faith and the events in Iran over the last 31 years have all convinced me to go militant.

But at the end of that day, this whole disagreement between two groups of atheists doesn't upset me at all. Simply because atheists don't kill, maim, rape or destroy in the name of atheism and these two groups of atheists are never going to exchange more then heated words with each other and well... that is the society we want after all: where everyone is free to voice their opinion without fear of being brutally silenced.

I believe that if a theist group attempted to seize power in Australia then all of the hippy atheists would jump to the militant atheist camp. I also believe that once theism is routed the militant theists will start pouring into the hippy theist camp en masse.