I often come across atheist blogs and sites that seem bent on “spreading the gospel of atheism” or denigrating other people’s faith. I wanted a more positive experience, something more personal that might explore the idea of living positively without religion.
In truth, I really wanted to delve deeper into the internal conversation I so often have when questioned about my atheism, and share the ideas that come from the conversation about living positively without religion.
The Atheist Me 
I like your ideas, but sooner or later believers will come to troll on your blog and in your life telling you that you can’t be an atheist because you are such a nice person and I’ll pray for you that God will guide you. How insulting is that? Even when you declare something to the world about yourself, i.e. the one who knows more about yourself, still people come and tell you that you don’t know about your own self and they know more about you! I call that an insult. I personally can’t tolerate this, so either I totally ignore the troll or simply reply with a logical insult.
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Hi Mike,
Though I can agree that having a person’s convictions dismissed and someone else giving their disapproval by saying things like “I’ll pray for you”, I honestly believe that the reactionary insult does more damage to moving towards mutual respect.
I consider myself a decent human being, a proud atheist and a fundamentalist humanist. I don’t particularly care what someone else believes, and get pretty annoyed when people try to coerce or force their belief systems onto me. Replying with a harsh remark tends to only engage this kind of thinking more, so I stay as close as possible to ignoring “their” disapproval.
My deepest wish and desire for humans, our society and the great sentience that we’re becoming, is to move past tolerance (which I see as a stop gap towards mutual respect) and actualise the acceptance of personal truth. For you an I, atheism is a personal truth, and we’re often confronted to explain this and validate it. I see this as an opportunity to express what our conviction means to us, to show that you can live a wonderful, fulfilling and good life without religion or belief in god/s.
This blog is where I hope to explore this more fully, so if a “troll” has to come along and engage with me and the many other fellow humans visiting, then I will reply. I will reply with the utmost respect I can muster, try to show them that there is no need for denigration of either of us. That together we can work together on building a world where real respect can exist and thrive.
I am glad to connect with you, and look forward to discussing and sharing our perspectives. Thanks for engaging with me 😀
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That is what I like about being an atheist, i.e. we don’t have to totally agree with each other about certain dogmas because Atheism is not a belief. I used to think and view things more or less the way you do, but experience and close encounters with religious fundamentalists change my mind.
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I like your blog. It’s a nice clean look. I also like your approach. I’ve had a lot of experience with fundamentalists, and I’d still like to work towards peace and respect. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I don’t.
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Attention fellow blogger:
You are about to receive a form letter (because I am too lazy to type individual emails for all 15 of you recipients), Before you dismiss this as spam or some kind of bad joke, hear me out.
You may know me. You may not. It doesn’t matter. YOU have been nominated for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award.
There are rules and stuff for accepting it, and they are a bit of a pain, but the sentiment is sincere. I only nominated bloggers I thought deserved it, bloggers I thought other people would want to read, bloggers who inspired me in some way.
You don’t have to accept, of course, but I hope you’ll enjoy knowing you inspired someone. You can find my post here: http://wp.me/s4SyV3-vib
All My Love,
Jennifer (aka Ms. Monsterful)
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Wow!
Thank you Jennifer. This made my day!
I accept your nomination.
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So glad I found you. You are most welcome.
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pssst!
Addendum to the above nomination: The old rules were awful. They have been changed. You’re welcome. http://wp.me/p4SyV3-zL
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Okay, so I’ve been reading around your blog for a little bit and I have to say that I admire your gentle approach to this. I plan to keep reading. Thank you for writing!
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