Why Is an Atheist High School Student Getting Vicious Death Threats?
Her state representative has called the student "evil" and she has been threatened with violence, rape and death. What gives?
A complex issue turned into dumbth by a poorly-written article.
First, and well-duh-obviously, there's no excuse for the vitriolic assault on this child. Monstrous.
As an out-of-the-closet religious minority I was verbally assaulted and put up with death-threats from "born again Christans" as a teen (never Catholics, though, something it took me decades to realize).
Since then, as a critic and author working the "god-beat", writing on religious topics, most of my abuse and death-threats come from atheists, and, to a lesser extent, New Agers. But overwhelmingly it's the atheists who want to send me to the hell neither they nor I believe in.
(Historically, humans are very good at punishing those with differing opinions, and no culture of opinion has ever been more _efficient_ at punishing non-conformists than atheism.)
What bothered me about the article most (aside from the obviously horrific recounting of the abuse suffered by this child) was this paragraph:
"Religion, unlike any other belief system or social structure, is based on a belief in that which cannot be seen, felt, heard, touched, or otherwise detected by any normal or reliable means. It is based on ideas that have no good evidence to support them, and that by definition can't have good evidence to support them."
That's a painfully ignorant straw-man fallacy. Hell, mathematics is based on "that which cannot be seen, felt, heard, touched, or otherwise detected by any normal or reliable means". Show me a zero. Show me quantum foam. But underpinning these "unseen, unfelt, unheard" phenomena is a disciplined, rational pursuit of logical examination. So too is authentic, religious experience. Those who pioneered logic in the West were, by today's standards, religious.
Now, I personally don't subscribe to the majority of religious *conclusions* arrived at by the highly trained and razor sharp minds of Augustine and Aquinas. But that doesn't mean that they weren't employing fierce intellects and constructing logical argument. Religion - real, historic, religion, not this fringe anti-dinosaur silliness - is not based on "huh, this sounds kinda cool, I guess I'll believe that" but rather it's based on MILLENNIA of inquiry, debate, reason, history, testing, and discipline. Which is how you end up with the father of the scientific method being a monk, and Copernicus a priest, and Newton a deeply religious figure.
The author of this article exploits the terror of this girl's experience in order to engage in unfounded anti-religious bigotry, and that exploitation is no less shameful than the vicious morloks who pursued her in the first place.
