Violent fundies
We never wanted this to be an “atheist blog” or a “skeptical blog” or a “political blog,” or anything in particular like that. But I tend to go through phases in what I read and get excited about, and holding out for an assortment of post ideas sometimes means that I don’t post anything. In an effort to get back into the swing of things, I’m declaring this week Atheist Week here at It’s the Thought that Counts, and I’ll have one post on atheism and associated issues every day until I get it out of my system.
Let’s begin with a discussion of this ad from Answers in Genesis. (Thanks, Hemant… I think.)
Complete transcript of the voiceover: “If you don’t matter to God, you don’t matter to anyone.” Yep, that’s the word on the street from Answers in Genesis. (Motto: “believing it. defending it. proclaiming it.”) It’s not a new ad, but I guess it’s cropped up again.
I want to believe that the point of the ad is something like, if you don’t realize how much God loves you, you’ll feel unloved by the world and lash out with violence. I mean, I object to that message, but it’s a lot less horrible than the alternative, the easier interpretation: God hates you, so we have no problem with telling this child to shoot you in the face. (Crusades, anyone?)
I don’t take comfort in the idea that a man was gruesomely killed, in some sense by his own father, thousands of years ago in order to save me from eternal punishment and torment which his father set up for us in the first place. There’s no part of that that makes me feel particularly loved. I also resent the implication that I should be grateful and worship the people or entities responsible for such a monstrous plan, executed well before my birth and without my consent or even interest. But I thought that, at the very least, the explanation we’d associated with it was that God loves everyone, and that all you have to do to be saved is to acknowledge the love God already has for you. A weird explanation, to be sure; an emotionally scarring explanation, I think. But it was at least, at the end of the day, a desperate and sad attempt to reach out and be kind to others.
Answers in Genesis betrays the real message when they make this ad. That gun isn’t aimed at a vague someone; the child isn’t committing random acts of violence. Your impulse when viewing the ad isn’t to reach out to that boy and maybe tell him about Christ’s love so he doesn’t hurt a stranger. That gun is pointed at you. Your impulse is to be frightened for your life. AiG is saying that their God only cares about people who already worship him in the right ways, and that if God doesn’t care about you, you don’t deserve even the most basic of human courtesies from anyone else.
Fundamentalist Christians (as well as many not-so-fundamentalist ones) ask how it is possible to be moral without the rules given to you by a supernatural being and without the threat of eternal damnation as well as the promise of eternal reward. The typical atheist response is to point out that it’s the Christians who admit that without religion, they would be unable to stop themselves from stealing, raping, and murdering, yet somehow atheists manage without a problem. That’s troubling enough. But here, AiG is admitting that even their fabulous religion that teaches them to love their neighbors and turn the other cheek wouldn’t stop them from murdering us.
Do you see now why I have such a problem with the term apologetic?
Comments
Leave a Reply