Atheists: Like Those Mean Girls in High School, in a Way
Over at the LJ community

nebris reposts an article called An increasingly outspoken community of atheists and agnostics is getting fed up with being marginalized, ignored and insulted. It's mainly about Dawkins's and Hitchens's success with their books about atheism and how it gave a lot of Americans the guts to own up to the fact that they're atheists (apparently atheism is next to communism in the good ol' USA).

It's a direct success when

roseross replies, in the first comment:
Militant atheists are the only group other than the Dominionists who scare me because they are so intolerant of others' spiritual beliefs. They insult people who believe differently than they do. They insist that ALL will some day believe as they do, because they're the only people who have it right. They often feel using the government to enforce their worldview is a good idea. In short, the only way to tell the difference between a militant atheist and a Dominionist is which creed they intend all of us to adhere to. For our own good, of course.
People call her on her bovine excrement, but she insists:
Can't count the number of times I've heard militant atheists long for religion to be made illegal. After all, from their point of view, spiritual beliefs are all childish delusions and it would be doing a favor to take the purple unicorns away from the silly people who have not reached the lofty state of atheism on their own. They seem to have no idea why any of that would be insulting to others, or perhaps they just don't care since the insulted folks are just braindead religious folks in the first place.
But why wank when you can have an orgy?

bobdole asks:
The only other group? So militant atheists scare you in this regard but militant Muslims, for example, do not?
The definitions of the words creed and faith need clarification. Religious scientists get their feelings hurt. People get flashbacks of being outraged. The Constitution is invoked. And much, much more for who is willing to rake through the tl;dr and the "quote-marks."
And will somebody think of the non-Abrahamicists?

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	limyaael 2007-06-24 08:15 pm UTC (link)
	My students are 17-19, and, because they're so used to researching on the Net, tend to have a condition in which they are allergic to a very specific thing. The thing is "going to the goddamn library." (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	greenling 2007-06-25 02:28 am UTC (link)
	But that's what JSTOR and Google Scholar are for! Gods know I wouldn't know half the stuff I do if it weren't for ~~roleplaying forums on~~ the internet. Tsk, students. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

limyaael
2007-06-25 02:56 am UTC (link)

Ah, but for them, "resarching on the Net" amounts to "grabbing the first three items that look vaguely related off Google." I even attempted to introduce them to the wonders of JSTOR and using Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" on scholarly works our library doesn't have (not that there are very many of those; it's a research library with 1.2 million books), and still I receive papers with, at most, government documents cited.

Usually incorrectly.

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