Us South Africans could teach you yanks how to braai (sorry, barbeque) and some of the most conservative are also the best at it.
And we are pretty left leaning as a whole country. I mean, I am fucking hard-left liberal and even I could show you around a barbeque… with my right hand tied behind my back!
We have some far right groups but they are aging out. Who wants to join the AWB (our right wing Nazi-adjacent movement) these days? They are a sad joke. And their former leader famously could not even ride a horse, let alone make a braai.
It’s widely believed - worldwide, not just in the US - that atheists are more likely to be serial killers. Just one example of how atheists are considered evil.
As for it not being a badge of shame, I note that atheists have been thoroughly beaten into silence; I barely hear people even mention the word anymore. It’s treated like homosexuality in the 50s or even earlier; something innately evil that most people outright try to pretend doesn’t exist. “The crime that dares not speak its name”.
Heck, on another board full of leftists - actual Communists - it was amazing to me that you could see literally hundreds of pages of talk about the theory, practice and history of Communism and be lucky to find a single mention of the official atheism of Communism, historically. People would defend Stalin’s mass killings and famines, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward and the resulting deaths; but they wouldn’t even talk about atheism, much less defend it.
After all, Stalin and Mao merely killed millions of people; atheists don’t believe in God, which is much worse.
Maybe you would murder people over an internet disagreement, or at least send them to a reeducation camp. Normal, well adjusted adult human beings are capable of disagreement without resorting to murder, though.
Seriously dude, if that’s really how you think, you’re in severe need of touching grass. Or therapy.
Even atheists tend to demonize atheists, according to the polls. And you’d do it because you’re the Genocide Guy. You calling me a fanatic who wants to kill everyone who disagrees with him is just you projecting your own attitudes onto me.
I think if you ever get over your crippling fear of other human beings and realize they don’t all want to kill you for being an atheist - and then you get over your crippling fear of being around women for fear that they’ll accuse you of rape (you’re the idiot who said you should record every sexual encounter with a woman in case she pretends there was no consent after the fact, aren’t you?) - then maybe you’ll be able to be a happy member of society rather than a miserable misanthrope who can’t wait for the nuclear apocalypse because life among other people is so difficult.
@Der_Trihs , maybe it would be hard for you to move to a more secular country like the UK (I sure hope so), but it wouldn’t be hard to move to a coastal city where no one cares if you believe in 30 gods or none. And then when religion comes up, try mentioning you are an atheist rather than avoiding the subject. Once you find most people around you don’t actually care, you won’t feel so bad about it.
I have to figure that after a while, a persecution complex gets to be a thing of comfort, like a psychic security blanket. Don’t take that away from a person!
Why should anyone care about convincing you of that?
I’m really sick and tired of conservatives throwing around “bias” like it’s a pre-existing flaw in any conversation. If we’re talking about flat-earth beliefs, the conversation ought to be biased against the flat-earth ideology. This doesn’t at all mean that people are irrationally opposing new beliefs or new information, it’s because the information is in fact not new, it’s well-trodden ground. It doesn’t deserve a new hearing just because a new person has drifted into the conversation.
Sure there will be people who say “the reason I lost this debate isn’t because my ideals were flawed, it’s because I was drowned out by all the opposing voices”. People who think that being outnumbered in itself is evidence of unfair bias, which is evidence that a belief is unpopular, which is evidence that it’s being unfairly suppressed, which is evidence that people are afraid to the truth.
Obsession with bias is in itself evidence of a kind of conspiracy thinking, and shouldn’t be dignified with any kind of reasoned response. Bias in itself is neither good nor bad, it’s just a possible signal that some information_might_ be overweighted in some particular direction, and not a determination that it’s overweighted in an invalid direction.
Right-wingers are biased against reality. This board is biased in favor of reality. It’s not a sign of persecution or unfairness.
I’ve been out as an atheist in both US and UK contexts, and there is a very real difference. I don’t think the US as a whole is as anti-atheist as some other posters indicate, but it’s much more so than the UK.
But that’s not an issue for tourists, right? We were thinking of coming to visit again, provided Trump doesn’t start arresting visitors at the boarder or something equally crazy.
I doubt being an atheist would matter as a tourist, but they are in fact arresting people at the border. I wouldn’t visit the US right now if I lived outside of it.
From everything I’ve been seeing, the US has been following in the footsteps of European countries with declining religiosity. Like maybe they aren’t actual atheists, but I heard regular attendance at churches and other places of worship has fallen dramatically in the last few decades. So I’m surprised to see someone bring up atheism as an issue now.
