I don’t fit the mold

15. July 2006 by Frank.

I’ve been reading atheist blogs for a few years now, trying to get a feel for the mindset of people who have given up on religion. While I have found quite a few former ministers and other religious fanatics who found freedom from religion, I’ve also noticed some very common elements tied in with politics. In some cases, the politics seem to be of far greater concern than the religion.

Basically, there’s an amazing amount of consensus that you must be a liberal in order to be a good atheist. You must hate President Bush, all his policies, the war in Iraq, the Republicans, the conservatives, the Fundies, Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and anyone who agrees with anything any of them say.

Personally, I’m not very political. It doesn’t matter which side is in office, I am in the class of people who will get screwed by their policies and agendas.

With the exceptions of the extreme left and extreme right, there’s probably good from both sides in that great big middle grey area. Which incidently is where most real world people are actually located. Unfortunately, a vast number of those people are either lemmings or sheep and are controlled by whoever or whatever they listen to. So it seems you can’t escape politics being tied in with religion.

But religion itself is of much greater interest to me.

Another thing I’ve noticed in those that concentrate mainly on the religious matters is an antagonism with fundamentalists in particular. While there are several very intelligent, very reasonable atheist sites that present their arguments in a civil manner, there seem to be far more that use all kinds of vitriolic hostility against religious folks. I’m not sure why they bother since calling someone some foul-mouthed variations of “clueless idiots” is not going to influence any of them to give any consideration to anything they (the atheists) have to say.

Nevertheless, I enjoy both kinds of presentations when done well with interesting viewpoints and arguments. I will be setting up some links soon but just to get started and to demonstrate the difference let me direct you to these two very interesting but radically different sites:

Ebon Musings

God is for Suckers

I’ll let you guess which is which kind of attitude.

What I present here isn’t going to quite fit the mold of these other types. I’m functioning on a much more personal level because of the effects of a stroke. I was not looking to leave my faith, I did not think there was a better or even different way. I had no intentions of giving up my religion. I was doing everything in my power to live by faith at the time, I was preaching and teaching, I was completely into being a man of God.

A few moments of oxygen deprivation changed all of that.

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