It is a foolish simplification to call "atheists" self-righteous

Submitted by Max_Normal (United Kingdom), Jan 17, 2006 at 13:17

How dare you call rational people "Atheists" this is your term, not ours.

All of the thousands upon thousands of religions that have arisen since early man developed the ability to question and control were created for at least one of the following reasons:-

(a) The explaination of reality and "being".
(b) To undermine the fear of death with the promise of an afterlife.
(c) To control, educate and exploit the populace.
(d) To gain a self perceived superiority and power over people from other beliefs/non beliefs.
(e) To wield an occult power within the physical world (i.e. the prayers of Muslims, Jews, Christians, the spells of shamanic religions).

Now that we have on a large part a more intellectual or un-indoctrinated population in the world, now that we have science to unquestionably explain our presence in the universe, now that a large part of the world has democracy, we have evolved past the need for pagan belief systems.

How dare you call us self-righteous when we have the intelligence courage and wisdom to objectively question. We see that ALL religion is extremely damaging to the world highlighted by the current USA neo-conservative Christian regime and its oncoming conflict with the insane Islamofascist regime of Iran.
Even peaceful believers cause damage; to themselves by living a lie, and to others by trying to propagate their simple-minded beliefs, or by the passive support of dangerous fundamentalists from the same religion as themselves.

Unfortunately Islam fullfills all of this from (a) through to (e) very nicely

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".