Comment on article: It is interesting to me how fragile the whole structure of religion seems to be in most of these exchanges. In spite of repeated mantras of the strength of religion and belief in God a lot of religious people seem to respond with anger and aggression in response to those who express their unbelief. Real strength and stability would not feel the need to defend itself by a mere refusal to participate. As I have heard more than once, people are never so dangerous as when they are defending their God. This has been proven true continually in human history.
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Christianity’s faith-based freakout: Why atheism makes believers so uncomfortable
Rather than respecting the right of atheists to disbelieve, christians are constantly forcing them to fake it
By Greta Christina, April 28, 2014Why do so many religious believers want atheists to lie about our atheism?
It seems backward. Believers are always telling atheists that we need religion for morality; that we have to believe because without religion, people would have no reason not to murder and steal and lie. And yet, all too often, they ask us to lie. When atheists come out of the closet and tell the people in our lives that we don’t believe in God, all too often the reaction is to try to shove us back in.
In some cases, they simply want us to keep our mouths shut: when the topic of religion comes up, they want us to tell the lie of omission. But much of the time, they actually ask us to lie outright. They ask us to lie to other family members. They ask us to attend church or other religious services. They sometimes even ask us to perform important religious rituals, like funerals or confirmations, where we’re not just lying to the people around us, but to the god they supposedly believe in.
Why would they do this?
When I was doing research for my new guidebook, “Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why,” I was shocked at how often this happens. I read over 400 “coming out atheist” stories to write this book, and in the stories I read, this theme came up again and again and again.
You see it a lot with parents and children. When kids and teenagers tell their parents that they’re atheists, parents often respond by insisting that their kids keep up a religious charade. [snipped]
Parents don’t just pressure their atheist kids to keep up the facade, either. They often force them into it. [snipped]
This doesn’t just mean making kids sit through church, either. Stories of kids and teenagers being forced to go through confirmations and other important religious rituals are ridiculously common. [snipped] Now, here’s the thing: Confirmation is one of the most serious rituals in religion. It’s the ritual in which children accept adult responsibility for their purported soul, and declare their adult commitment to their religion. The whole point is that they’re finally making a free choice about participating in religion, instead of just going along with their family. Yet parents and clergy still pressure kids into this ritual, or even force them into it. Even when they know it’s a lie.
But this isn’t just a parent/kid dynamic. It happens with adults as well. It happens between spouses; in the workplace; in adult families and communities; between parents and adult children. [snipped]
And pressure to pray in the U.S. military abounds. Including official orders to pray. [snipped]
If believers were sincerely concerned about atheists’ immortal souls, I’d understand why they might argue with us, show us their concerns and fears, even try with all their might to convince us that we’re wrong. But why would they ask us to lie? Why would they ask us to pretend to be religious? And why would they ask us to lie, not only in small ways to our friends and families and communities, but in important rituals to the god they believe in?
I’ve been thinking about these stories for a long time. Ever since I started working on my guide, this phenomenon has troubled me. It’s troubled me morally — it’s such a messed-up thing to do. And it’s troubled me intellectually. It’s such backward, self-contradictory behavior. Why would people do it?
I think a few factors play into this. As I wrote in the book: “For many families, being religious is less about spiritual beliefs, and more about family identity. More than anything else, going to religious services is a family togetherness activity, or even a family duty. [snipped] And some believers may think that participating in religious rituals will somehow draw atheists back into belief.
But I think there’s something else going on here, something more powerful than either of these.
They don’t want to hear that the emperor has no clothes.
And if too many people start saying that the emperor has no clothes, they’ll have a harder time convincing themselves that he does.
Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. It’s a bad idea, and can’t stand up on its own. But it can, and does, perpetuate itself through social consent. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that asking questions about religion is sinful, and that trusting religion without evidence is virtuous. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that joy and meaning and morality can only be found in religion, and that leaving religion will automatically result in a desperate, amoral, pointless life. It perpetuates itself through religious communities and support systems that make believing in religion — or pretending to believe in religion — a necessity to function and indeed survive. It perpetuates itself through parents and other authority figures teaching it to children, whose brains are hard-wired to believe what they’re told.
Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. But the simple act of coming out as an atheist denies it this consent. Even if atheists never debate believers or try to persuade them out of their beliefs; even if all we ever do is say out loud, “Actually, I’m an atheist,” we’re still denying our consent. And that throws a monkey wrench into religion’s engine.
There’s a reason that rates of atheism have been going up as use of the Internet goes up. (According to the MIT Technology Review, the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use — and while correlation certainly doesn’t prove causation, this analysis factors out pretty much every other possible causation.) The Internet has created a massive worldwide forum for atheists to argue about religion, to give evidence against religion, to ask for evidence and arguments supporting religion and point out how ridiculously weak they are. But the Internet has also created a massive, worldwide forum for atheists to simply, you know, exist.
In my research for “Coming Out Atheist,” I read numerous stories of atheists who had stayed religious for years — simply because everyone around them was religious, and they never considered the possibility that someone could be non-religious. But this is becoming less and less common. It’s getting harder and harder to keep atheism a secret. If you’re a teenager in a tiny town in the Bible Belt, you can now find out about atheists. You can talk with atheists. You can argue with atheists. You can learn what atheists think and why they think it. And you can simply learn that atheists exist, and are basically good people who love life and find great meaning in it. And that, just by itself, just by denying consent to your religion, stands a good chance of putting a serious dent in it.
What’s more, this denial of consent has a snowball effect. As more atheists come out of the closet, more people will question religion and eventually leave it. And as they leave religion and come out about their atheism, another wave of people will question and abandon religion … and so on, and so on, and so on.
It’s easy to ignore one person saying that the emperor has no clothes. It’s a lot harder to ignore 10 people saying it — and it’s harder still to ignore a hundred, or a thousand.
So if you want to ignore the emperor’s nakedness, it’s not enough to just ignore it. You have to get other people to shut up about it. If you want religion to keep perpetuating itself, you have to get people to go along with it. You have to get people to fake it.
You have to get people to lie.
And that’s what explains this weird phenomenon, this phenomenon of religious believers telling atheists, openly and explicitly, to lie about our atheism. This phenomenon is Exhibit A in just how essential social consent is to keeping religion propped up. It shows just how shaky the foundations of religion are — when people openly state that they would rather have us pretend to believe than be honest. It shows just how shaky believers’ hold on religion is, when they tell us that we need religion to be moral, but then ask us, openly and explicitly and without any apparent shame, to lie.
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