Because I’m an atheist?
OK, I’ll step up and claim responsibility for denouncing Stalin, and Pol Pot, and other genocidal lunatics who extended their own atheism into unacceptable actions. I won’t try to persuade anyone that lunatic atheists should not be considered atheists at all, but only as lunatics, and I will accept that this is where atheism goes wrong, when it forces itself onto believers in a harsh and unyielding manners.
Doing so will make me consider my own beliefs, and where I need to temper them in the service of being tolerant to others.
Personally, this isn’t hard, mainly because as strong as my atheism is, I don’t see any point in trying to persuade people to embrace atheism, or any system of thought at all. I think atheism will prevail, but only gradually, several generations from now at the soonest, and probably not until many, many generations from now, when people will look at religion at go, “Wow! Primitive humans actually believed in that nonsense? Unbelievable.” So why try to force my beliefs (or lack thereof) on you?
But by the same token, I think it is the responsibility of all believers to denounce every religious belief-system more extreme than theirs. I’m tired of Christians (for example) telling me how they personally don’t believe in gay-hatred, anti-evolutionary thinking, xenophobic literalist fundamentalism, so I should give them a free pass. Bullshit. Such Christians have, in my view, a positive affirmative responsibility to denounce and actively criticize any hateful group calling itself “Christian” WAY before they do the same to atheists.
Instead, it’s all too often the other way around. “Well, they may have some small issues here or there, but since they believe in Christ, or read the Bible, or acknowledge God’s power, or whatever, I’ll give them a pass.”
Why do they think so? In my view, it’s because they recognize how close they are, personally, to sharing such exterme beliefs. Usually, they have friends or family members who are part of the ignorant, hatred-spewing crowd, so to denounce them means to denounce these friends and family–they may even themselves have broken away from such beliefs but can’t bring themselves to act with hostility towards the extremists whom they’ve broken with.
Atheists on the other hand are strange and frightening and threatening to them personally. If atheists are right, then they have wasted a lot of time and energy devoted to–well, nothing. All their hours attending church, thinking about and fearing God, scrutizing the Bible–wasted. This is why I think so many religionists are so offended by atheists–it’s not that atheists are particularly rude, or obnoxious, or strident, but that they exist. The possibility of atheism is a huge slap in believers’ faces, representing wasted years and wasted lives, of believers’ and believers’ friends and family. I think a lot of this anger that I see from believers expended in my direction, and NOT towards the people who might have brought them up in lies, is personal rather than political, in the sense I’m using those words. This anger has very little to do with the specific beliefs I hold or denounce, but simply results from the sense that I CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT ABOUT ANYTHING, because if I were, that says terrible things about the values they’ve been brought up in, whether they’ve denounced them or not.
So–atheists are the primary target of believers, despite the pointlessness of such targeting, while believers give other believers a free pass.