I have never really thought about it until I really read and heard a lot of what Richard Dawkins has to say. Crazy how that happens... it takes someone else to make me see things a different way.

I was watching a video of a question-answer session he had on Youtube the other day which really got me thinking. He stated in there (somewhere) that atheists are really one of the last major groups in the United States still facing serious discrimination and degradation due to their beliefs or lack thereof. The really sad part of that sentence is that to be an atheist in this country means that you must be "in the closet" in a lot of respects.

As soon as you say you are an Atheist, you are accused of one of a few things: 1) pushing your non-beliefs on others, even though you just stated your "title". 2) "Your so damn ignorant why don't you read a book" and 3) "You just hate everything."

Why? I think people are genuinely uneducated about true atheism. I don't "hate" everything. I disagree with a LOT of things, but I don't "hate" what I disagree with. It takes disagreements to push and challenge our barriers. So, in a way, I thank those disagreements for keeping my mind active.

It's not a fact of me "hating" anything. It's a simple fact that I firmly believe that religion hurts more than it helps. I can promise you that I can count up a hell of a lot more wars and killings done in the name of religion/God than I can for the name of non-belief or atheism.

It seems to me, the more I look at this the more skewed it looks to me. Why are the religious people put on a pedestal, when most of the wars and killings that are famous today have been done in the name of religion? Why are the atheists pushed into closets as ignorant fools? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

And why on earth are such a large number of non-believers in America so afraid to say that they are non believers? That isn't right either. In a land that proclaims tolerance to every lifestyle, Richard Dawkins has it right: homosexuals and atheists are the last major groups undergoing major discrimination.

The saddest part? No one even talks about the Atheists cause.

Perhaps it's time someone raises attention to it.

"In Rationality"

--Sarah--

Food for Thought:

Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing "Does not!" [email protected]