An Attempt To Explain How Horribly Disappointed I've Been By Many Of The Atheists I've Met And Heard About

Not all of them. And I'm sure that some of the atheists I've met, or read, or seen on TV, I don't know they're atheists, because they don't talk about being atheists all day long every day. This is also not including the atheists who don't admit that they're atheists, and call themselves something else which means exactly the same thing, like non-believers or skeptics. Presumably because they're embarrassed by the yokels who are the subjects of this post, and would rather not be associated with them.

I'm an atheist. However, my impression is that everybody has their mental weak spots -- certainly including me. If all I know about person A is that he or she believes in the rapture and all I know about person B is that he or she doesn't trust anyone who believes in the rapture, I tend to think that B is very likely a judgmental douchebag and I probably won't like them, and chances are I might get along with A just fine.

And I'm sorry that A still hasn't recovered from the trauma of his or her fundamentalist Christian or conservative Catholic upbringing. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.

Just now when I googled "tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner" to make sure I quoted and spelled it correctly, I came across "tout comprendre c'est rien pardonner," speaking of judgmental douchebags.

And yes, I certainly am a judgmental douchebag myself, but I'm aware of it.

Where was I? Ah yes -- stupid, obnoxious, smug, knuckle-dragging atheists who think that they're smart because they're atheists. Not to mention a few atheists who are actually quite bright in some areas -- Richard Dawkins, for example -- but who still turn on the stupid full-blast when the subject is religion.

It's their one-category mentality which is the major cause of their disappointing nature, I think, and which has lead some to call them "fundamentalist atheists." Just as obnoxious fundies -- and not all fundamentalist believers are of this obnoxious type -- divide the world up into the saved and the evil, New Atheists divide the world up into the atheists and the stupid. In order to maintain such simplistic, black-and-white impressions of humanity, both of these groups of obnoxious twits have to ignore a lot of the things which most of us see, because they're everywhere: the fundies have to ignore the believers who are horrible people and the atheists who are wonderful and kind and good, and the New Atheists have to ignore the stupid atheists and the brilliant believers. Perhaps the need to maintain these simplistic illusions is the major reason why both groups are so remarkably weak in the knowledge of history.

There simply is so much more to people than whether or not they believe in God. If you narrow it down to that and judge people just according to that, you miss the great majority of remarkable things about most people. And it makes you very unpleasant, whether you're a believer or an atheist. Who was Bertrand Russell's best friend? TS Eliot, who was not merely Christian, but extremely Christian. (Come to think of it, that's naturally a point in Eliot's favor as well. Although there's no denying that he wrote well now and then, I've come to have a horror of Eliot because of some of the tendencies which seem to have been associated with his traditionalist religious belief.)