Accommodating the religious

Some atheist writers try not to upset those who are religious. There seems to be this idea that religion is wrong but believers are just poor slobs who, well, believe. So we shouldn't pick on them. This is nonsense.

Mind you, if the person concerned is less than 16 years old, I say fine to this proposition. Let's leave the kiddies alone. But everyone else who believes in god is, in my book, culpable. They do wrong by believing in god. They are failed human beings.

When we were lesser beings and didn't have our current mental faculties (I'm speaking of our evolutionary ancestors here), the idea of gods must have cropped up for the first time. Sure it was fuzzy but I'll bet it was there. Pre-human primates invented god.

Once these nascent minds reached a point where they could think about the world, they undoubtedly tried to come up with explanations for the things they saw. And this line of thought brought them to the idea of gods. They made it up and then they believed it. Probably all sorts of primates were religious -- and more power to them. In their own way, they were trying to think. It's kinda cute.

But these days there is no reason to believe in gods. We have science now and it explains the world. Everything follows the laws of the universe. There remain questions in need of answers, but eventually science will find those answers. That's what science does.

Science explains reality clearly and verifiably -- the latter because it is based on observations that confirm or deny hypotheses. Scientists don't just invent reasons for things; they test their ideas and only add them to the body of scientific knowledge if the ideas hold water. In other words, science is the opposite of religion.

If someone believes in god -- and I doubt anyone really does -- this only means the person hasn't taken his brain out for a test drive. For instance, if you don't believe in evolution it's because you haven't looked into it, haven't studied it. The evidence is there for all who care to examine it. So a lack of "belief" in evolution only means the person has been derelict in his duty to understand the world. And make no mistake: I consider it every human's duty to understand the world the best he can.

So if you believe in god without evidence, without one single aspect of the world confirming or even hinting that there might be such a thing, you're a fool. You may as well believe in fairies and flying unicorns because they have the same amount of "evidence" behind them. In other words they're made up, just like the idea of god was made up by cavemen and possibly earlier primates.

I see no reason to cater to religious people. I regularly tell them to their faces that I do not respect them. If a priest is in my vicinity I make a point of telling him that some of us realize that his job is to spread lies to children. I tell him he is a member of a reprehensible profession. I don't sit back; I don't accommodate. There's no reason to cater to religious nonsense.

Why should we respect people who don't use their brains? We shouldn't. Accommodationism is for twits.

PS: If you think I'm totally wrong, which is your right, you'll probably enjoy this post, which says I'm both wrong and rude. By way of background, I am a Gnu Atheist though I don't use the term. He's describing me and people like me in the post. He's a Christian, which I think is what really makes him mad. He's trying to protect his shaky turf.