I was thinking of this because of the balloon cartoon. It doesn’t specifically reference atheism, but it does credit an evidence-based worldview with creating what it perceives as social ills – including homosexuality.
You can kill atheists – especially in places like Saudi Arabia. You can kill gay people right here in the USA, and have some cultural support even if you lack legal sanction. But you can’t kill either of those things in the population as a whole. It’s impossible. If every last atheist and every last gay person was wiped out in a generation, the behaviors, the ideas would pop back into existence.
It’s because being gay is a natural thing a certain number of people will always experience the first time they feel sexual attraction, being an atheist is often based on thoughts and feelings that arise in an individual with no outside influence. The first time you tell a kid to pray, the first time you ask them to believe in Noah’s Ark or that the entire vast unfathomable universe was created for paltry humanity, you invite comparison and contrast between the child’s experience of reality and the flimsy fantasy you’re pushing. Sometimes, indoctrination will fail.
In that way, homosexuality and atheism are a bit different. Homosexuality requires sexual instinct, which is a natural phenomenon. It doesn’t arise as opposition to nature, but is natural itself. An evidence-based worldview is likewise natural, but the expression of it found in atheism can only arise as an opposite reaction to theism.
As long as you push xtianity or islam or whatever, you are the cause of atheism. You made us. Thanks. Now fuck off with your tyrannical wet dreams and social fascism. You can pop my balloon but another then will inflate – out of the heart of your castle. An endless supply of gay balloons, getting the fuck out of your shitty homes, flying away to leave you alone.
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Please don’t give the RW any more ideas!
Good article! However, I disagree with the idea that atheism (or the evidence-based worldview found in atheism) exists only as a reaction to theism. (Though I agree that religions are great recruiters!) I hold that someone raised entirely without the clutter of religion would be, by definition, an atheist. A subtle point, maybe, but I don’t wish to be described by reference to what I am not!
I like the way the Christian castle has left homosexual behaviour as a balloon up there along with familybreak-upand eutahnasia. They don’t look like they’re doing a very good job and odd that they haven’t got any balloons flying themselves! I also like this deconstruction of another even sillier but more fun version of the castles and balloons graphic (is graphic the right word?) here :
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/11/30/the-creation-museums-upcoming-exhibit-will-make-ken-ham-look-like-an-idiot/
via Hemant Mehta’s blog.
@rcurtis505
I see it more as “if there was no idea of deities everyone would be atheist (soft atheist), but nobody would think about it or identify as atheist”.
RI – It’s too late! I’m the wurst.
Rcurt – Carlos is right. I recognize in my article that an evidence-based world view does not have to be a reaction, tried to be clear I meant the specifically atheist expression of that is the part that requires theism. But I don’t think I was very clear about my terms in the article, and my answer here, in review, isn’t really helping. I am not the best writer among my peers here. 😛
Stevo – I can’t believe that comic, with all its oddities, has multiple versions spanning decades. WtF, creationists?
Carlos- Thanks for the comment.
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