Religious Liberals: Friend or Foe?
I’m starting to see a pattern in ‘liberal’ religious circles and I don’t like it one bit. Ministers, rabbis, pastors and what have you are coming out of the woodwork it seems and they have a common message.
Richard Dawkins is an extremist.
Richard Dawkins is an atheist fundamentalist.
Richard Dawkins is ‘this close’ to strapping dynamite to his chest.
And what has Professor Dawkins done to have these slanderous charges made? When you cut through all the rhetoric, his ‘crime’ is apparent. Dawkins is an outspoken unapologetic atheist that doesn’t couch his criticism of religion and its god in mealy-mouthed platitudes. He even wrote a book about it. A pro-atheist book that is still in the top ten bestsellers after four months.
One would expect this kind of rhetoric from the religious right. But the religious left? Perhaps it’s time we atheists remembered something:
The enemy of my enemy is NOT NECESSARILY my friend.
There is no doubt that the likes of Falwell are not allies, but I’m quickly beginning to think that religious liberals aren’t either due to their extreme portrayal of well-known atheists such as Dawkins and Harris. Allies do not call you “extremists”, “militant”, “fundamentalist” and imply that you’re a blithering idiot because you disagree with them on some point, small, big or imaginary. And lets be clear about it. These charges against Dawkins and by default any atheist that agrees with him, stem from the idea that the only good atheist is a silent atheist.
What kind of ally demands silence? What kind of ally goes off their rocker when silence is not rendered?
A fake one, that’s who. Fake allies are the ones that send out invitations to join stating “humanists and non-believers are welcome” and then prints an article that states that outspoken non-belief is another “extreme” end. Fake allies are the ones that put out articles suggesting a “compromise” that has non-believers ‘admitting’ that moral values come from religion in return for the religious liberals ceasing to publicly condemn us as amoral.
Fakes, each and every one. So fake in fact that I can say in complete honesty that I respect my aunt more. She’s a bigot and she hates me because I’m an atheist. She’ll probably never speak to me again and the fear she holds the others in will probably work to ensure they won’t either.
But, at least she’s honest about it. That’s a lot more than I can say about the typical religious liberal.
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