Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
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A religion is exactly what atheism is not.
If you’ll forgive me for pimping myself, I wrote just last night about how I didn’t choose to be an atheist.
this particular bleat by theists is one of the most annoying and the most deceitful. Nothing like trying to outright lie when a dictionary is right there to contradict you.
I think I’ve said it before around here somewhere, but… I really don’t get this one. Apart from that it’s stupid and just plain wrong, I don’t get why they think this is a good retort. I mean it still reflects back badly on them. When atheists say that we think that it’s not good to believe things on faith alone, they retort with “HA, but so do you, you believe things on faith too!”
So… isn’t this just an admission then that it isn’t good? They are not trying to convince us that faith is a good thing with this argument, they agree that it’s bad but that we do this bad thing too, right? That’s what it seems to apply.
‘Yeah, but- but, so did you!!!’ is not a very good answer to the claim ‘You did a stupid thing!’ 🙂
That should of course be ‘That’s what it seems to IMPLY’
I dislike the believers
claims that atheism is “just another religion”. They are trying to make their irrational faith equivalent to our rational position either by claiming that their faith is as rational as a lack of faith or that a lack of faith is just as bonkers as believing in a cosmic Jewish zombie. Well they aren’t the same, not by a long stretch.
At best atheism is a sceptical position to a claim made regarding gods. It is a “That doesn’t sound right, can you back your assertion up?” response and not even a claim in its own right. I think it comes from an assumption that atheism is the positive stance “There is no God” rather than the negative stance “I don’t believe in gods”. With a claim that “There is no God” they burden of proof falls upon the claimant and without evidence it does become an equivalent position to the “God exists” position. That isn’t what atheism says though.
Damn right. It’s another arrogant theist assumption that they know exactly what atheism is, without actually consulting the atheists themselves. Atheism is to religion as bald is to hair colour.