How's that headline? Do I have everybody's attention now? Good. Because a headline like that should get your attention. Would anybody tolerate "Gay Bashing Week" or "Woman Bashing Week?" The very idea is ludicrous. Yet, Dinesh D'Souza can print an article entitled "Atheist Bashing Week" and hardly anybody bats an eyelash. There's certainly not public outrage and condemnation for such blatant bigotry. He was just joking, you say? Even in all of our stunts here at the RRS, which are regularly criticized by atheists (often quite vehemently), we've only dared to tell people that their god doesn't exist or encourage others to say so and post it to YouTube. Even the mind disorder controversy doesn't encourage physical harm or even allude to it. If we haven't had "Christian Bashing Week," you can bet it's because we find the notion repugnant, even in jest.

Not all Christians are supercilious, of course. Many are content to live and let live, and some even grant that science (despite its lack of supernatural entities) does some good. But Christianity as an organized, evangelizing movement has been on the offensive lately. Witness the new wave of evangelicals and their leaders such as Rick Warren, Lee Strobel, and William Lane Craig with their aggressive stance against scientific materialism and their bestselling books attempting to refute science. So, assuming you're an atheist, what do you say to the theist who asks, "You don't (chuckle) believe in a god (snicker)?"

Anybody familiar with the original article will see that the preceding paragraph is the same paragraph as the opening to "How to Respond to a Supercilious Atheist" by Alan Roebuck. By changing a few words, the same attack can be launched right back at him, and the rest of the article isn't much better. It appears to be a primer in projection. After all, when in doubt, just accuse them of being just like you.

Atheists and others who buck the established religious systems have suffered from a bit of a PR problem since the beginning of recorded history. There are countless stories of the heretics, the blasphemers, and the impious being imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Atheism wasn't even a prerequisite; Socrates was sentenced to death for only believing in one of the gods in the Greek Pantheon. The official charge: impiety. Why is it that this stigma has taken root so firmly within the minds of human beings? Why has this trend persisted for millennia?

A response to Peter Bowden’s "God, Atheism, and Human Needs"

The idea that human beings universally need some form of mythological belief has been one of the mainstays of the defenders of faith for centuries. They claim that even if god doesn’t exist or religion causes violence and hatred, it’s acceptable because it makes some people feel better about the harsh realities of life. This is a multi-pronged deceptive ploy used to abdicate themselves from any responsibility for those actions and to keep people thinking that their assertion is correct.

...hypocrisy; cognitive dissonance; higher rates of STD infection, teen pregnancy, abortion, and poverty; mass societal dysfunction; early mortality; homicide; and, in rare cases, delusions and psychosis. Is Living Under the Influence (of religion) less dangerous than Driving Under the Influence?

In the news recently, we had the case of Eunice Spry, a British woman who systematically tortured her adopted and foster children because of her religious convictions. She did pleasant things like forcing the children to eat their own vomit for being greedy, and making a child with nighttime enuresis (bed-wetting) at the age of 4 wear a sign reminding everybody that she was an evil attention-seeker. It doesn't stop there, either. She also prevented a teenaged girl who was injured in a car accident and temporarily confined to a wheelchair from walking in order to collect more compensation money, despite the fact that the prognosis was she would regain ability to walk within 6 months. After moving out, they children submitted to medical examinations which showed evidence of internal scarring due to Eunice's punishment of choice-forcing the children to vomit and then eat it.