Atheist Meme of the Day: Atheists Aren't Angry At God

Today's Atheist Meme of the Day. Pass this on; or don't; or edit it as you see fit; or make up your own. Enjoy!

Atheists are not angry at God. Any more than we're angry at Zeus, unicorns, or the Tooth Fairy. Many atheists are angry about brutality, oppression, and fraud committed in the name of religion -- but we're not angry at God. We don't believe in God. You can't be angry at something you don't think exists. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

Comments

[Erp]

I suspect a small percentage of self-described atheists may fall into the 'angry with God' definition. Otherwise I can't quite understand the Pew Forum's finding (page 27) that 6% of atheists in the US believe in a personal god. Note that a person who has been brought up believing that being angry with God makes you an atheist may, when angry with God, consider themselves atheist.

The same report btw found that 1% of self-described Christians didn't believe in a god or higher power.

[Maria]

Note that a person who has been brought up believing that being angry with God makes you an atheist may, when angry with God, consider themselves atheist.

That might explain those theists who claim they were once atheists while not actually exhibiting any understanding of what an atheist is. They just had a fall-out with god and they have now kissed and made up.

[Joshua Zelinsky]

It might also be explained by people just not knowing what words mean or just being utterly confused. There's a fair bit of evidence that a large fraction of the population is confused in these ways. For example, in the US if you ask questions of the form "Did Dinosaurs live millions of years ago?" and "Did God create the world a few thousand years ago?" (or questions close in phrasing to those), then you generally get around 70% for the first and around 40-50% for the second, which means that there are probably a lot of people out there who have deeply confused worldviews. Similarly, if you look at the GSS data, people who don't believe in God but don't accept evolution have a much smaller vocabulary on average than people outside that category (even people who believe in a young Earth which have a statiscially signficiantly smaller vocab than the general pop.) (relevant GSS variable for people wanting to verify this is WORDSUM)