AT The Orthosphere, Kristor explores the ill humor and petulance of atheists he has known. Given that they seem settled in their views and have thought about them a great deal, why do they seem angry? He gives a small example:

The tiniest thing will provoke their outrage. The current hatred of Tim Tebow is a good example. But it can get incredibly picayune. A member of my congregation went directly from Mass to a tennis match a few weeks ago. One of her friends, seeing how she was dressed, whispered to her, “Did you come straight from church?” My friend nodded yes. They settled in to watch the match. Two days later she attended another match with the same group of women, and one of them volunteered angrily, out of nowhere, looking straight at my friend, that she strongly objected to Christians who pushed their faith on others. Think of that: nice clothes, and a nod, nothing more, and the rage was in full flow. The mere existence of a Christian is an intolerable insult to such people, and they hate Christians passionately.

                                               — Comments —

Dana writes:

Atheists are angry because that is WHY they are atheists, they don’t “not believe in God,” they are mad at him.

I am a skeptical materialist, not an atheist—I simply discount the possibility of supernatural explanations. If something occurs that can’t be tested so as to be explained by natural means, it’s dubious at worst and irrelevant at best. I have no emotions towards it. If it were to happen right in front of me, I would doubt my experience of it, not the nauralistic explanation. Key point is, at no point in my life was I ever a theist or supernaturalist so I did NOT come by my beliefs out of the conscious REJECTION of my childhood beliefs.

“Atheists” on the other hand, have a character flaw in which at some point as children or youth they suffered a narcissistic wound or a seeming injustice at the hand of organized religion, either they felt overwhelming shame over masturbation, or somehow the religion they were brought up in thwarted their desire and not being “outlaws” by nature, they knuckled under with guilt and shame which fermented into rage when they became adults and found that while they were now allowed to do whatever they wanted, the negative associations from childhood with that thing never went away. Instead of just leaving their religions, forgetting about God and being gay or whatever God stopped them from doing, the whole WORLD has to change to accommodate them because THEY weren’t allowed to do whatever it was they wanted and they are mad. Another cause of this rage is an non-nuanced, literal understanding of theodicy that makes it impossible for them to understand how bad things can happen in a world where God is “good” and omnipotent. Perhaps a beloved pet died, or worse a parent, or they are of a liberal temperament from the outset and can’t square their religions conception of God with the suffering they see in the world. It is a childish stamping of the feet at the big parent in the sky for not making everything right.

You will find “atheists” are ardently religious, either they accept all manner of non-Western spiritualist gobbledygook in an ostentatious show of rejecting their patrimony, or the become the great worshippers of “Ideas” often replacing his fellow man’s “eternal soul” with the “spirit of Man” and dealing with him no differently than a religious zealot seeking to convert and tend to flocks.

Laura writes:

Perhaps you are not angry because you are content with intellectual incoherence. I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but some of what you say does not make sense. You say you can process all natural events without seeking any explanation in the “supernatural.” I’m not sure then how you can explain ideas – even the word ‘philosophy,’ for instance – since they are supernatural in the sense that they can’t have originated in material processes.

Also, you say that the inability of an atheist to process the death of, say, a parent without a supernatural explanation is childish. Then most of humanity is childish.

Dana writes:

You wrote: “Also, you say that the inability of an atheist to process the death of, say, a parent without a supernatural explanation is childish. Then most of humanity is childish” at what point specifically did I say “the inability to process the death of a parent WITHOUT A SUPERNATURAL EXPLANATION is childish”?

Either I am the worst writer in the word or you can’t read—I’m willing to entertain the former as a possibility but it looks like you did not read one word I said in that missive, at least based on your reaction. it seems to me you read I was a non theist and assumed hostility, when in fact I am defending faith against the angry atheist.

The Atheist is stamping his foot over his OWN INABILITY TO SQUARE the notion that bad things happen to good people or that the death of a loved one occurs with HIS OWN LITERAL AND CHILDISH MISunderstanding of the religion within which he was raised and consequently becomes filled with rage—HIS understanding of HIS own religion is defective and he has bad character. he BECOMES an angry “atheist” out of this inability to understand the religion in which he was raised. note i at no time said that the RELIGIOUS BELIEF was childish, nor did I say the religious belief itself was non-nuanced and literal, but the dull angry atheists UNDERSTANDING of it is.

Reread this in light of the above restatement “Another cause of this rage is an non-nuanced, literal understanding of theodicy that makes it impossible for them to understand how bad things can happen in a world where God is “good” and omnipotent. Perhaps a beloved pet died, or worse a parent, or they are of a liberal temperament from the outset and can’t square their religions conception of God with the suffering they see in the world. It is a childish stamping of the feet at the big parent in the sky for not making everything right. “

“Supernatural” means not subject to the laws of nature or to purely naturalistic explanations, it doesn’t merely mean non-corporeal nor “thing we haven’t been able to explain satisfactorily as of yet”. The brain’s function creating of thoughts, memories and ideas are not supernatural, nor are the ideas themselves, unless you believe that ideas are not a concatenation of words but have some sort of external existence once conceived of like Platonic forms hanging around in the ether. There is nothing “incoherent” about being a materialist skeptic unless you believe thoughts and ideas aren’t material, ideas and thoughts exist in the same material form in the brain that memories do. If you believe thoughts are supernatural rather than biological relics of how the brain functions then we simply don’t share another of a million fundamental first premises about the nature of reality.

Laura writes:

I realize you were explaining a neurotic reacton by an atheist against faith and were in that sense defending theism. I was merely pointing to the incoherence of some of what you said.

I did not talk about thoughts being supernatural. Thoughts occur in the brain and are facilitiated by natural processes. I referred to “ideas.” The notion of philosophy, the idea itself, has no origin in matter, anymore than the trees outside my door originate in the pane of window through which I see them.

You are right that there is nothing incoherent about being a skeptic, but as I read your words you were not just a skeptic but had decided that there is no need to resort to supernature to explain anything.

By the way, I did not mean to suggest that you in any way should be angry.

Jesse Powell writes:

As an atheist myself I might have some useful things to say on this subject.

I’ll start out by saying that not all atheists are angry; I’m sure some are and the ones that are the most angry at theists are probably the ones theists notice the most but that doesn’t mean it is typical for atheists to be angry at theists.

In my experience theists are quick to make all kinds of negative assumptions about atheists such as it being impossible for an atheist to have any kind of moral value system, that they just want to live in sin without the punishment or guilt, and that they’re going to hell if they don’t believe. These kinds of attacks can make an atheist feel defensive and offended by the arrogance of the Christian. The thinking of the atheist might respond “How dare you claim to be morally superior to me just because you believe in the magical fairy tale of the God in the sky! Since when did stupidity and superstition become a badge of honor?”

In reality though I think what is most typical is for atheists to simply ignore theists, to hardly even be aware of their existence and then when the atheist does run into a Christian who is open about their religious faith the Christian just seems kind of foreign and strange to the atheist and then perturbs the atheist’s world view a bit making the atheist wonder why it is that there are Christians in the world; stirring up the question “Where does religion come from?”

I would guess that the atheist that got irate at the Christian merely for wearing her clothes from Church to a tennis match was thinking to themselves, “So, you’re a Christian are you? How dare you pretend that you’re better than me! How dare you condemn me to hell just because I don’t blindly believe in your nonsense! How dare you claim the right to tell me what to do! Your make believe God doesn’t give you any right to claim that you’re better than me!”

There are also some atheists who have a kind of utopian idea that if religion just went away the world would be a much better place as man would then be ruled by rationality and reason instead of “backward superstition” and all the irrationality that religion entails. In this view of the world Christians irrationally clinging to their religion are getting in the way of the utopian “age of reason” that is almost within the grasp of modern man if only people would just drop the false and enslaving comforts of religion. This view tends to see all human progress and growing personal freedom as being the result of religion’s weakening influence. The age of religion is the “dark ages” where stupidity enforced by Catholic tyranny prevailed.

My experience with Christianity has a different history than what is typical of the “angry atheist”. The most significant point is that I found that those who agreed with me culturally and on moral issues were overwhelming Christians themselves even though I personally wasn’t a Christian. This was very strange to me and baffled me at first. What strange circumstance led me to be an atheist surrounded by a sea of Christians? The explanation that currently makes the most sense to me is that both Christians and atheists form their world views based on looking at and trying to understand external reality. Since both atheists and Christians are responding to the same external reality of the actual material world this is what leads atheists and Christians to naturally agree with each other on cultural and moral issues. The reason why this doesn’t play out in modern politics is simply because of the pathologies currently at work in the culture.

I can understand where atheist hostility to Christianity comes from but at the same time I think that atheists and Christians are natural allies in terms of cultural and moral views. Atheists and Christians will disagree about the nature of God and the source of order by definition but they can work together in the secular realm of how society should be ordered.

I will further add that most atheists today are atheists for cultural reasons; that they indeed seek to escape from the judgments and restrictions of religion. These atheists should indeed seek and find God and leave the atheist camp; they are not meant to be atheists. The atheists that remain need to develop a sense and understanding of the externally imposed moral order that all are obligated to obey whether they believe in God or not.

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