Hello all, I am just wondering why people who are agnostic and athests are so angry and feel the need to bash any religion, primary the Christian faith, in order to feel contempt? I am in a field of work that encompasses mostly young people (engineering field) and a lot of people who do not know I am religious tend to randomly attack the Christian religion (they leave the other ones alone, and I do now know why Christianity bears the brunt). They feel it is a culture to not be religion versus a personal belief. I am just wondering why this is so? I never let them know I am religious or allow it to get a reaction out of me because I simply do not want to sit there and argue non-stop. I usually try to change the subject if they are talking to me. These are people who grew up in just regular households. I just cannot get what makes them so angry or feel the need to attack Christianity.
Well, there’s lots of little reasons. First, the (American) culture allows and indeed encourages contempt for religions, or at least for Christianity. Man is in fact a social animal, and the masses of men go with the flow, so there ya go. Certain other religions, especially Judaism and Islam, are protected because they’re minorities and therefore “high-status” in the liberal worldview. Very rarely will you find an atheist who is equally critical of all religions.
Second, most of their experiences are with Protestants, who, let’s face it, are not the most theologically sound, often have very questionable beliefs, and are not the most competent at articulating and defending a coherent theological worldview. Most lay Catholics aren’t, either, mind you, but bear in mind that Catholicism has a much richer philosophical tradition than Protestantism does, and Protestantism grew largely out of a rejection of that tradition.
Third, they tend to be highly intelligent, and atheism is typically associated with other belief systems (i.e., liberalism) that justify social rule by intellectual elites, so there’s probably a natural self-interest component as well. Liberalism compounds the issue further because it entails (contrary to the liberals’ constant assertion that their worldview is free of dubious metaphysical baggage) a particular metaphysical view of things, including what I’ve called here before “epistemic weakness,” the idea that man can possess no sure knowledge of the good. Christianity, especially Catholicism, is flatly incompatible with that belief. So liberalism/atheism and Christianity are simply incompatible; liberals intuit this (because they tend to be smarter on average) and act accordingly. Christians, on the other hand, don’t, and so they get clobbered by trying to be nice to them all the time. We often see this in action here on these forums. The highest good in the liberal worldview is freedom. Of course, we don’t share that view. We don’t even share his definition of freedom. So he hates us because we’re “anti-freedom.” And so on.
Part of it is tactical. Because we try to be nice to them all the time, they suspect we’re weaklings, so they get more aggressive. That’s just natural. People respect powerfulness, confidence, and aggression, and they feel contempt for weakness, timidity, and cowardice. That’s why bullies tend to be popular and they pick up on the quiet, nerdy kids. That’s just how it is. The solution is to stop coddling them (by which I mean the atheists) all the time and call them out for their ignorance and impiety when they indulge in it. I used to try to do this at CAF, but apparently, being harsh with an atheist is the only thing that will actually get Catholics angry at you, so I stopped.
I suspect a certain degree of atheists’ contempt is tinged with arrogance. I have never yet met a belligerently hostile atheist who really fully understood Christianity. Oftentimes they have trouble separating Catholic beliefs from Protestant ones; often they don’t understand that they use certain words (like “love” and “judgment”) in a different way than we do, because their understandings of those words are informed by their zeitgeist and ours goes back several millennia. They don’t seem to be very aware of the philosophical tradition in Catholicism (which, again, stands to reason since most of their interactions have probably been with Protestants). There’s this belief, and I have heard this sentiment stated explicitly by more than one atheist, that they don’t need to know what they’re talking about because they already know it’s garbage. (The first time I heard this was an atheist asking me why, since the Church had “deinvented” purgatory, it couldn’t “deinvent” anything else. Of course the Church never “deinvented” purgatory. He was thinking of limbo, which the Church didn’t “deinvent” because it never “invented” it in the first place. It simply declined to rule on the issue dogmatically. I pointed out his twofold error to him and his response was something to the effect of “So what?”). There’s at least one famous atheist (the Eucharistic desecrator, PZ Meyers) who actually accuses Christians of logical fallacy when they point out that an atheist doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Meyers calls it the “Courtier’s Reply.”
I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all that springs to mind at the moment. Bear in mind these are just my experiences and they’re limited exclusively to American Catholics, so I’m not sure how well they generalize to the broader population of them.
EDIT: Also, I don’t think I’ve ever met an “angry agnostic.” Come to think of it, I’m not sure I know any agnostics at all. I used to be one, but even then I was never angry. I was certainly angry when I was a leftist atheist, though, for most of the reasons mentioned above.
In fact, he is a pretty easy going guy.
