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I don't know how to explain to people that if you respond to "But Christmas is secular!" with "Christmas can't be secular!" you are making the same fundamental mistake the first person made.

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Some people will think my childhood must have been a wonder-less, data-driven wasteland, where all decisions were based on cold logic and the sky was just a God-shaped hole. I would however, like to set the record straight: I never felt the absence of religion in my life. My parents are two of the most moral and ethical people I’ve ever met. There was love everywhere, as well as stories and community and tradition, and we always, of course, celebrated Christmas.

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one of my father’s hindu colleagues was surprised that my family didn’t make everyone say a christian prayer before we sat down to eat dinner. we were like “….this is your house.” and she laughed and said that her christian friends “make” her pray all the time. like what the fuck. how fucking rude can you be to make the host pray to your god. you are in their fucking house.

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“Atheists/skeptics lead such joyless lives, it must be so sad to not believe in anything” fuck off fuck off fuck OFF I am so SICK of hearing this bullshit!

You know what I believe? I believe that 40,000 honeybees can work in eerie synchronicity to mathematically maximize hive space despite having brains smaller than a pinhead. I believe that the spider living in my sunflower who has used her webbing to draw the petals down around her for shelter is absolutely fascinating even though I’m very afraid of spiders and I can’t go near that plant anymore. I believe that the general concept of fireflies is one of the little joys that makes life so wonderful, and I believe that the feeling of a soft breeze on a warm summer day is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Every single one of those things brings me an incredible amount of joy, and not a single one of them requires me to have even an ounce of faith or superstition because those are all things I saw in my garden today.

So if you’re so caught up in your “spirituality” that you can’t even FATHOM that the rest of us have internal lives worth living, full of just as much joy and awe and wonder, I’m thinking maybe YOU’RE the one who should be pitied here.

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I just desperately wish more people on here realized that religious conservatives view atheists as morally bankrupt, deeply angry people with no sense of morals, because they think that only religion can grant you those morals.

And when you insist that atheists are uniquely influenced by the dominant religion of their area, that atheists are too “edgy”, that atheists and atheists alone need to “unpack” what they’ve learned from that religion in a way that no other religious minority does - you are saying the exact same thing.

So maybe you should unpack YOUR religious shit first.

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Plenty of people have outlined what’s fucked up about that “white male atheism is fundamentally different from Marginalized Atheism” post, but I just hit on the main reason it bothers me:

It positions religion as the human default, from which you are excused only if you’re sufficiently damaged. Like “I guess it’s okay if you’re shipping to cope” – if it’s just a consolation prize for being broken and pitiable, it’s not really okay at all. It’s okay if you can’t be religious because of trauma, but always remember that this is a personal flaw, a result of your damage, and that *healthy people* are religious.

Under this schematic, atheism isn’t simply another way to be human and think human thoughts. It’s a deviation from the “natural”, i.e. religious, state, and you’d better have a damn good reason for going against the grain. You think you can defect from normal society just because you *want* to? That’s just your white male privilege talking. Marginalized people have suffered enough to earn the right to defect, but you’re gonna shut up and praise God like a normal person.

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“Atheism isn’t ‘New Atheism’. There are so many people who aren’t cishet white men and who have experiences outside what you think of when you think of ‘Atheism’. People who have a lot of privilege have gotten to be the face of atheism because that’s how privilege works, but the majority of us are marginalized people whose race, gender, sexuality, etc. have shaped our relationship to religion and nonreligion, which you’ll miss if the only kind of atheist you acknowledge is a straight white cis man. Furthermore, that image of atheism that comes to your mind is affected by the anti-atheist sentiment that exists in our Christian-dominant culture, so if you don’t usually imagine atheists as having complex and sincere motivation for their beliefs, consider why.”

@argentconflagration

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Some people will think my childhood must have been a wonder-less, data-driven wasteland, where all decisions were based on cold logic and the sky was just a God-shaped hole. I would however, like to set the record straight: I never felt the absence of religion in my life. My parents are two of the most moral and ethical people I’ve ever met. There was love everywhere, as well as stories and community and tradition, and we always, of course, celebrated Christmas.

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Helpful tips for theists

❌ Culturally Christian: an identity label that should not be imposed automatically, often used to label others in a way that erases non-Christian identity*; popularized as an identity label in modern times by noted transphobe/misogynist/Christian hegemony enjoyer Richard Dawkins.

⚠️ Cultural Christianity: term used to describe the cultural proliferation of Christianity. Can be used in both erasive and non-erasive ways**; can often be replaced with a better term or descriptor (see the first sentence in this paragraph for an example).

✅ Christian Culture: the practices and beliefs of Christians and Christianity.

✅ Christian Hegemony: the cultural domination and prioritization of Christian culture over non-Christian cultures, often as a result of Christian beliefs and practices.

Theists and religious people of all stripes do, in fact, have societal privilege over non-theists and the non-religious in most parts of the world. When discussing Christian hegemony and its effects, effort should be taken to not exclude us, whether explicitly or implicitly, from the conversation. Very often, the language we use to talk about Christian hegemony is itself theistically hegemonic in nature, prioritizing and privileging theistic belief over non-belief as being inherently more valuable, powerful, or important. It isn't.

Annotations under the cut, and don't be a clown in the replies and reblogs.

*This functions as part of a cultural pattern of theists gaslighting or just not believing non-theists are actually non-theists. Prioritization of Christian ties or influence works to erase non-religious or non-theistic experiences.

**Often becomes erasive when used in conjunction with "Cultural Christian" as an exonym.

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The Joy of Secular Christmas

Nonreligious people pretty much do what everyone else does. We don’t go to church. But Christmas is much more than going to church.

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In the last few weeks I've gotten some interesting questions and read some interesting things about the atheist perspective and, being the kind of person I am, I thought other people might find some of my thoughts and answers interesting. This is kind of a LONG RANT (TM), but it's a bit more scattershot than usual.

Fair warning, though, this is written entirely from the perspective of an atheist and I haven't softened anything to make it sound better to religious people, read at your own risk. In no particular order, here goes.

FAITH VS RELIGION

First off, I want to make a distinction between faith and religion because it's important to understanding the rest of this. There's some overlap, but for the most part, religion is an organized system of belief while faith is a belief internal to a single person.

The most important thing I want you to recognize from this is that an atheist may not have religion (after all, what's there to organize around?), but I have as much faith in what I believe as any religious person. An agnostic, someone who says "I do believe in God" is a person without faith, but an atheist, a person who says "I believe there is no God" is a person of faith, though not a person of religion.

Keep all of that in mind when reading the rest of this.

WHAT DOES RELIGION LOOK LIKE FROM OUTSIDE?

The specific question I got, from someone who's on their own journey of faith and was curious, was "does any religion look more or less ridiculous to an atheist?" and the short answer is "no". To be perfectly honest, all metaphysical beliefs and all religious rituals and chants look fairly ridiculous from my point of view, but none of them are particularly more ridiculous than any others.

To me, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, and all of the other thousands or even millions of different religious systems out there are almost indistinguishable to me. Once you take away the specific symbols and trappings, they all come down to the same basic thing. And, sure, they believe different metaphysical things, but I assure you that your familiar metaphysical belief is no less impossible, insane, or ridiculous from the outside than those other people's strange and unfamiliar metaphysical belief.

The slightly longer answer, however, is that there is one form of religion that does look more ridiculous to me as an atheist. It's the religion that demands things of people that don't follow it. Look, you can believe whatever you want and practice whatever you want in your own mind, we all have a right to our own thoughts and beliefs, but it takes a special kind of crazy to think, despite the fact that you can't prove any of these things, that your personal beliefs are so important that they should be forced upon other people.

So, yeah, don't worry about whether this belief or that belief is too crazy, they're all crazy to me, but no more than any other. The only time you've crossed the line is when you become so crazy that you decide you're the universe's main character and everyone else has to do what you say.

THE ANGRY ATHEIST

We've all met that guy, heck, I've been that guy, the angry atheist who loves getting in "debates" and discussions about religion, the guy who sounds like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher.

I'll level with you, there is pretty much no atheist who hasn't, at some point, been the angry atheist. You probably would be the angry "insert-religion-here" too if you lived in a society where your system of belief wasn't just a minority or disrespected, but actively despised by most of the people around you.

If you're not atheist, I don't expect you to understand the depth of it because they don't do it to you, but lots of religious people are absolutely awful to atheists, and I have a particular point of comparison because I'm also Jewish (not religiously, but that rarely matters). People, Christians mostly where I live and where I grew up, are so much more accepting of a Jew or any other religious minority than an atheist, and I think it's because a Jew doesn't threaten the very idea of religion. Ultimately, a Jew believes in something metaphysical, and that's enough; an atheist rejects the very concept. You have no idea the number of times I've heard religious people tell me that other religions are wrong, but an atheist is worse because no one can be moral without religion (more on that later). No one cared that I was a Jew growing up, at least, not that much, but multiple times in grade school I would have my entire class spend upwards of a half hour trying to convert me, the atheist; all of them against me. You either get good at arguing and debating or you crumble.

Almost every atheist, really as a matter of survival, will become the angry atheist for at least some period as a way to survive this. Going on the offense is a really good way to throw the hate off balance and it can feel good to push hate right back. It took me a while to get past the angry atheist phase and part of it, at least for me, was finding Christopher Hitchens who, while also an obnoxious atheist like Dawkins and Maher, rooted his critique in a powerful morality. These days I'm probably a good deal less obnoxious than Hitchens was, but that's where it started, with an example that wasn't just about "beating" the religious.

So, while I disagree with the angry atheist and the way they approach society, and, if I'm in a position to do so, I'll try to guide them out of it if only because anger is even more toxic for the person experiencing it than it is for the target, I understand it and I certainly don't blame them. If you're a religious person and you encounter this angry atheist, I'd only ask that you treat them with a bit of sympathy; society is regularly far worse to them than they are to you even if you never get to see it.

SOCIAL NORMS

In a bit of a line with the previous topic, you should also realize how heavily societal norms and standards of politeness are slanted toward religious people. To give you an example of this, take the following:

I've been in situations where I've had some kind of personal loss and someone will say "I'm praying for you", "they're in heaven now", or something to that effect. And, look, it's not the kind of social faux pas that's bad enough for me to call out and make a scene about, but why would someone say that to someone who they know is non-religious? I know the intent behind it, but prayers literally do not mean anything to me, heaven doesn't exist to me, and people know that.

Ultimately, it may not be meant that way, but it really comes across as a power move. The atheist may be the one who's suffered a loss and is grieving, but the religious person still has the societal power to force the situation to conform to their beliefs. If an atheist calls them out on it and/or rejects their prayers or well-wishes, then they become the bad guy for not respecting the other person's beliefs because society values religious beliefs over those of an atheist.

And, look, I'm not saying that religious people are evil for doing this; clearly I'm friends with a good many of them and, most of the time, I can take "I'm praying for you" in exactly the way that it's meant, because it's almost always meant well. But, just as racism tends to express itself not through single, overt acts, but through hundreds of individually small actions (normally called "microaggressions"), the prejudice against atheism is similar and, just as most people committing racial microaggressions are unaware they are doing so because they live in a society where white supremacy is normalized, religious people are also mostly unaware of how what they're doing comes across because religious supremacy is so ingrained in our society.

If you've done this, I'm not saying this to make you feel guilty about it or even to make you stop. Like I said, I know it's meant well and, ultimately, it's not your fault; we live in a society where the atheist perspective is hidden from you so there's really been no way for you to even know how what you're saying comes across. The only thing I would ask is, in the future, if you have an atheist or atheists in your life that you consider to be friends or loved ones, they'll appreciate it if, especially in a vulnerable situation, you think just a bit more about what how what you're saying sounds to them and say something that is comforting to them and not just to you.

FINDING FAITH

Most people don't have faith. Let's start there. I've had religious and theological discussions with all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons, as much for understanding as debate or conversion, and what I can tell you is that most people never think deeply enough about what they truly believe to have actual faith. They have religion.

You see, most people are born into some kind of religious framework. Their parents start taking them to church or some kind of religious observance at an early age and the path of least resistance is to just keep doing whatever that is. Questioning religion or rocking the boat can lead to social stigma, damaged relationships, and sometimes even financial destitution, so for most people it's simply not worth doing to the point where they don't even consider it. They just go through the motions and don't worry too much about it because there's simply no good reason to.

There are some people who will still go through the difficult process of finding faith in that situation, but I've found that most people who truly have faith are the ones who have questioned and often even broken away from what they were brought up with. Specific to atheists, almost none of us were raised atheist. It wasn't a particularly difficult rejection for me because my family wasn't particularly dogmatic about it, but I wasn't raised atheist either; I figured out what I believed, I found my faith, when I started questioning all of the things that I was brought up with and all of the things that others around me believed. Ultimately, I accepted a lot of it in terms of the moral system I follow, but I rejected all of the metaphysical.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people who turn to atheism for reasons like rebellion or to fit in with a (usually small) group, but most adult atheists you see out there are people who have gone through a journey and found faith; it's not a default option for the vast majority of us.

I also don't want you to think I'm saying that only atheists have faith, I've met plenty of religious people who have faith as well and it's something brilliant when you do find it (meeting such a person was also a big part me no longer being an angry atheist). The point is more that, as a percentage, far more atheists than religious people have true faith; it's easy to be religious, but why would one put up with all the problems that being atheist brings if you didn't truly believe it?

ATHEIST MORALITY

So this is the last one and it's a bit of an important one. You see, as I mentioned in the section about angry atheists, much of the prejudice against atheists I've experienced has been justified by the idea that atheists, because we reject the idea of God and the metaphysical, cannot be moral. Specifically, there is an idea in religion that morality can only come from a metaphysical source.

Now, I can't speak for all atheists here. As I mentioned before, there's nothing about atheism that lends itself to organization, so this is just me speaking. That said, I can tell you that those people are 100% wrong here, not least because many of them were genuinely awful people who used their own religion and its metaphysically justified rules as an excuse to be immoral themselves.

Personally, I consider myself to be generally Utilitarian in my moral beliefs. It's much more complicated than this, but in simple terms Utilitarianism is a belief that what maximizes the well-being, happiness, and pleasure of all people and what minimizes harm, pain, and unhappiness, is moral. One could summarize it as "the greatest good for the greatest number" if one were being particularly simplistic about it.

Why do I believe that? Simple, I live in a society and that society benefits me, I'd even say it benefits me greatly. Having studied some political theory, it's clear that societies where everyone is better off make do a better job of actually making people, even those at the top, better off and are more stable and consistent in the long run, so it makes sense that I should want to live in such a society. Ultimately, though, societies are made up of people, they're not things of their own, so a society is a reflection of the actions of the people who live in it.

In other words, if I want to live in a society that makes people (like me!) better off, I need to act in a way that makes that society more likely. Now, I obviously don't control anyone other than myself, but if I do what's right, then I can find other people who also do what's right and we can become a community. It's not guaranteed, but that's how anything worth having starts and, if we all continue this long enough, we build what we want to live in. I live my life morally because it's the only way that what I want can come about and, if I cheat, I'll know that I'm damaging the future I hope to build.

After doing this for a long time, though, one of the biggest benefits I've found, though, is that I like myself when I'm moral. That's important because I have to live with me!

No metaphysics required, my morality not only provides me with a rational (to me at least) reason to act morally, it ultimately subjects me to a judge that will see everything I do and never lapses: me. Those who are religious will say that an all-knowing God being their ultimate judge is a stronger motivation to be moral but, to quote Thomas Huxley from Evolution and Ethics, "Every day, we see firm believers in the hell of the theologians commit acts by which, as they believe when cool, they risk eternal punishment; while they hold back from those which are opposed to the sympathies of their associates."

Ultimately, I think that every system of morality is either personal or social (usually some combination of both). Even if you believe in God, gods, or other forms spirituality, none of us understand perfectly their nature or the nature of the universe, so we're all just doing what feels right to us or our community. Atheism doesn't preclude morality any more than religion guarantees it and I've found/developed a moral system that works for me without any need for the metaphysical.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

One of the things I've come to realize over the years is that the concept of atheist is truly alien to people of religion. Yes, they find other religions strange and unfamiliar, but the basic shape of the worldview makes sense to them. Atheism is alien and frightening to many.

Hopefully this gave you a bit of insight into what's going on there. If you have any other questions about atheism or the atheist experience, feel free to ask, I'm more than happy to share.

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The thing about secular christmas discourse is that it ignores or doesn't recognize that the reason secular christmas exists is because of the inherently violent exclusion of non-believers from christian community. Of course the people you kicked out of your group for no good reason are going to take the stuff they found valuable and good with them when they leave; of course they're going to be bitchy and defensive when you go "no that's mine" as if putting up decorations and giving gifts and spending time with loved ones is exclusive to believers. Christianity has stolen enough from it's exitors.

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I know I just restating the point of that post but respecting religious freedom will sometimes require you to respect someone's belief that religious beliefs are categorically untrue, and there are a lot of people who are unable to handle this, and even more people who think they agree with this but haven't really grappled with what it means.

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Because I'm annoyed at people condescending to me about this on a different platform: atheism is not the opposite of religion, it's the opposite of theism. Yes, many religions are theistic, but there are nontheistic religions and even some traditionally theistic religions that don't require belief in any gods. You can be religious and an atheist. You can be a theist and not associated with any religion. The words atheist and theist describe someone's answer to ONE question: do you believe god(s) exist? They do not describe their relationship with religion. Yes, atheists are frequently non religious and theists are frequently religious. That doesn't make these words interchangeable. They are describing different things.