Ten myths about atheists, debunked

Above us

It’s not just in Alcoholics Anonymous that atheists are treated with disrespect, although because of the religious underpinnings of the 12 Steps and the Big Book the problem is often more pronounced within the Fellowship. Much of that comes from a misunderstanding of atheists, as this article, which lists and debunks ten of the ugliest myths about atheists, so very well reports.

Atheists are moral, loving and multicultural.

By Amanda Marcotte
Originally published on April 14, 2015, on the AlterNet.

In a regular poll conducted by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell on American political attitudes, atheists recently lost their spot as as the most disliked group in America to the Tea Party. Still, number two is simply way too high in the unpopularity rankings for a group of people who just happen to spend Sunday mornings in bed instead of in church. Polling data shows that nearly half of Americans would disapprove if their child married an atheist and nearly 40 percent of Americans don’t see atheists as sharing their vision of American society, numbers that outstripped similar prejudices toward Muslims and African Americans.

Of course, the real reason atheists are so hated has little to do with jealousy for all their free time, but largely because most Americans are better acquainted with myths than with the realities of atheists’ lives. Unfortunately, atheists often have these myths tossed in their faces, usually by believers who would rather talk about what they heard atheists are like rather than uncomfortable subjects such as the lack of proof for any gods.

These myths do more than hurt atheists. They also harm the basic religious freedoms of all Americans, regardless of their beliefs. Religious freedom and tolerance don’t mean much if they can’t be expanded to include those without religion. With that in mind, here’s 10 of the ugliest myths about atheists, debunked:

1) There are no atheists in foxholes. There are many variations on this myth, but the basic idea behind it is that atheism is a luxury of the problem-free, and as soon as they feel fear or weakness, atheists will run straight into the arms of religion. This myth irritates atheists, because it tries to make a virtue out of preying on people’s weaknesses in order to sell them a lie. If you heard a marketer brag that he targets people who’ve been diagnosed with terminal illnesses because they’re easier targets, or a guy say he likes to cruise funerals because grieving women are easier to pick up, you’d think that person had no morals at all. But targeting people in moments of weakness to sell them religion is regarded as a normal and even virtuous strategy for proselytizing.

Beyond concerns about manipulation are the concerns about accuracy. Believers argue religion offers unique comforts to people in fear or pain, but what many atheists realize is that religion often provokes more anxiety and fear than it soothes. If we accept that God is all-powerful, as many religions claim, then it’s like being in an abusive relationship that can’t be escaped for eternity; a relationship with a God who will throw us into hell for not fearing him and who allows horrors like the Holocaust to happen. Many religious teachings aren’t actually thatsoothing at all if you take a step back and look at them clearly. For atheists, believing that evil is more an accident of nature than something imposed on us by an inscrutable supernatural being is the far greater comfort than any prayer could be.

2) Atheists are just angry with God. Atheists often point out the logical inconsistencies of many religious beliefs—such as the belief both that God is all-good and all-powerful, but he somehow also allows evil to exist—and believers use that to conclude that atheists are angry with God. We aren’t. You can’t be angry with a being that you don’t believe exists. I’m no angrier with God than I am angry with Zeus or the aliens that keep kidnapping drunks sleeping in their cars. Anger with religions for promoting false beliefs isn’t the same thing as being angry at the being that believers invented.

But I also have to quarrel with the very notion that a person’s arguments can be dismissed because of anger. Smugly accusing someone of anger doesn’t do anything to discount the content of the argument. I’d argue that people who see vile behavior in the name of religion and don’t get angry are the ones who have something wrong with them.

3) Atheists are aggressive and rude. This myth has been around in various forms for a long time, but it really took off after the rise of “New Atheism,” which focuses its energy on disproving religious claims instead of merely pleading for tolerance of atheists. This myth only persists because belief is unconsciously privileged over atheism, causing people to believe it’s somehow ruder for an atheist to say, “I don’t believe in God and here’s why” than for a believer to intrude in your personal space with pamphlets, attack people when they’re feeling low with religious claims, knock on your door to proselytize, or force your children to recite religious language in school. Objectively speaking, believers commit transgressions against good manners far more than atheists. But atheist arguments tend to disturb believers more than arguments for God disturb atheists, so atheists get an unfair reputation for being rude, even when they are merely outspoken or unapologetic.

4) Atheism is a white dude thing. It’s easy if atheism makes you uncomfortable to write off atheism as the hobbyhorse of a tiny minority of men with overly high opinions of their own intelligence. That men such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins get most of the media attention devoted to atheism only reinforces this myth. If you scratch the surface, however, you’ll see that the ranks of outspoken atheists have far more women that the media would let on. Atheist blogger Jen McCreight grew so tired of this myth that she compiled an extensive list of prominent female atheists such as Susan Jacoby, Rebecca Watson and Lori Lipman Brown. Greta Christina followed up with a list of prominent atheists of color, such as Debbie Goddard, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Hemant Mehta. Women are specially targeted for religious oppression around the world, so of course, many of us will be open to arguments against the legitimacy of religion.

5) Atheism is just a faith like any other. You occasionally see agnostics trot this one out, as well. The idea is that arguments for and against the existence of any gods have equal value, but it’s simply not true. The logical position toward an extraordinary, supernatural claim is skepticism until proof is offered, and so far none of the thousands of gods that have been claimed to exist throughout history have lifted a finger to prove themselves. In fact, most believers grasp this for themselves; they automatically disbelieve all religious claims except their own, barring actual proof that never produces itself. Atheists just do religious people one better, and make no exceptions for a religion because it happens to be the one we were raised in or convinced by friends to convert to.

I always flinch in embarrassment for the believer who trots out, “Atheism is just another kind of faith,” because it’s a tacit admission that taking claims on faith is a silly thing to do. When you’ve succumbed to arguing that the opposition is just as misguided as you are, it’s time to take a step back and rethink your attitudes.

6) Atheists don’t have a moral code. Atheist are routinely asked how people will know not to rape and murder without religion telling them not to do it, especially a religion that backs up the orders with threats of hell. Believers, listen to me carefully when I say this: When you use this argument, you terrify atheists. We hear you saying that the only thing standing between you and Ted Bundy is a flimsy belief in a supernatural being made up by pre-literate people trying to figure out where the rain came from. This is not very reassuring if you’re trying to argue from a position of moral superiority.

If anything, atheism correlates to better behavior on average. Atheists are under-represented in prison, for instance, and more religious nations have higher rates of violent crime,teen pregnancy, early adult mortality and even abortion. But setting the numbers aside, we can see that even religious people generally believe that morality exists outside of religion. After all, most religious people condemn people who commit acts of evil in the name of religion. If religiosity were the measure of morality, terrorists who murder in the name of God would be more moral than atheists who pay their taxes and give to charity. You’ll find few believers agreeing that a murderous terrorist for God is a better person than a nonviolent atheist, showing that believers grasp that morality doesn’t come from religion, but that we can measure religious claims against our pre-existing understanding of morality.

7) Atheist lives are bleak and lack meaning. Those in the atheist activist community find this one particularly insipid, because we so often deal with people who suffered religious abuse and were only able to find peace by abandoning religion. There’s really no reason to believe that happiness and fulfillment come from a supernatural place, or else believers would have no need for fulfilling work, loving families, friends, and hobbies, since their spiritual beliefs would suffice. Most atheists actually find our lack of belief in a supernatural being makes it easier to fill our lives with meaning and joy. Since we don’t believe in an afterlife, many of us find ourselves more motivated to make the most out of the time we do have instead of looking to the next life to make us happy.

8) Atheists are hedonists who don’t understand the true meaning of love. As an open reproductive rights supporter, I’ve certainly faced my share of believers accusing me of being an atheist so I can simply indulge my sexual appetites and avoid some abstract true meaning of love. It is true that one of the benefits of being an atheist is that you’re no longer crippled by religious phobias that assume that sexual fulfillment and real love are mutually exclusive, but that certainly doesn’t mean atheists don’t feel genuine love. I suspect some Christians enjoy making high-minded claims about feeling deeper love because they know there’s no way to measure their claims. But the higher divorce rates in more religious states don’t bode well for claims that sexual purity and Christianity make love deeper and truer.

9) Atheists have no way to cope after losing loved ones without the belief in an afterlife. The belief that religion has sole ownership over death is so ingrained that it often causes believers to behave in inappropriate ways toward grieving atheists, using the occasion of a loved one’s death to try to coax us into taking up religion. Some believers who do this are openly predatory, but some mean well, and simply can’t imagine how atheists cope without telling ourselves pretty stories about an afterlife. Atheists have every right to be skeptical of the argument that belief in the afterlife quiets the pain of grief. After all, many religions teach that the dead person could be burning forever in hell, which can cause far more anxiety than relief.

I imagine the nothingness of death is much like the nothingness that existed before birth. Believing in the afterlife seems to have more to do with the egos of the living than concerns about the dead, and by letting go of the need to make the end of someone else’s life about your own fears of death, many atheists can focus on working through the grief in a healthy way. So please, believers, don’t use the death of loved ones as an opportunity to proselytize.

10) Atheists are out to destroy Christmas. It’s September and so this myth is relatively quiet, but it tends to come out every year after Halloween, to accompany Christmas decorations going up. For Fox News, ratcheting fears about a “war on Christmas” has replaced caroling as the annual holiday ritual. It’s all very silly. Atheists don’t oppose ritual or holidays. Most atheists in America tend to see Christmas as a mostly secular holiday celebrating family that can be turned into a completely secular holiday with a few minor tweaks. Even the few atheists who don’t celebrate Christmas at all certainly have no plan to make war on the holiday, beyond simply requesting that the government obey the First Amendment by not promoting Christianity above other beliefs, no matter what time of year.

In my experience, non-believers have some of the best Christmas celebrations around. You can get a tree and decorate it in punk rock style, or put up a pro-atheist sign in your yard surrounded by festive Christmas decorations. My family tends to prefer all-night poker games for Christmas instead of going to Christmas mass–all the family togetherness, but with less boredom. Or you can choose to have “Christmas” in July and save yourself the expense and headaches of holiday travel.

Debunking these myths about atheists in print can only do so much to quell believer fears about the supposed atheist menace. Even better would be for believers to find themselves an atheist, and instead of simply attacking them with these myths in an effort to frustrate them into submission, instead get to know them better. You might find they’re basically like everyone else, except more rested on Sundays and less afraid that invisible beings are judging them for masturbating.


Thanks to John M. for sharing this with us. John has written several articles for AA Agnostica including My 10 Favourite Recovery Websites. In late 2011, he was one of the founders of a freethinkers AA group in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) called “Widening Our Gateway”. The name of the group is based on Bill Wilson’s observation that atheists and agnostics “widened our gateway so that all who suffer might pass through, regardless of their belief or lack of belief”.  The group was “suspended from any involvement at Toronto Intergroup” by a vote of 27 to 17 on April 24, 2012.


15 Responses

  1. Russ H says:

    I like this one. Thanks Amanda (via John)! The thing is, these 10 popular misconceptions did not arise in a vacuum. This piece mentions Richard Dawkins who is so easy to love but also so prone to unpleasant arrogance. We atheists do sometimes become aggressively rational and exacerbatingly empirical. Just as it would be nice if our faith-based brethren would back off from their proselytizing the same applies to us. There is a common ground shared by all human beings. I keep thinking it should be possible to traverse my atheist path without abandoning that common ground. Easier said than done but well worth the attempt, maybe?

  2. life-j says:

    Good article.
    GB Trudeau came up with a concept he calls Situational Science: It’s about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts.

    • Russ H says:

      Literally LOL, life-j!!!

    • Chris G says:

      Similarly, there is an old aphorism: Any argument has three sides – yours, mine, and the truth. While cute, it vastly oversimplifies any discussion based on evidence, or in this case a complete lack of evidence. I much prefer: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

  3. Bill G. says:

    Like the article. But being agnostic I come from the view point, I don’t know and you don’t either. What I really don’t like is closing a meeting with the Lord’s Prayer. This is really an insult to a open AA program. Bill G.

    • life-j says:

      I call myself an agnostic too. for me it is a term of convenience. As in I don’t know and you don’t either. If I called myself an atheist, which I guess I am, then I would draw more arguments where I would be goaded to prove there is no god, while the god people would offer all kinds of proof that there is. That kind of stuff was cool after midnight on a really good drunk in my 20s, but few things would bore me more now, so better that we just don’t know, or that I don’t anyway. The god people still know, of course.

      • Russ H says:

        life-j –

        It’s one thing to assert that you don’t know. It something quite different to assert that no one else knows either. Since you already admit that you don’t know, isn’t it possible that among the things you don’t know is whether or not someone else does know? After all to say to another person “you don’t know either” implies that you do know that they don’t know. Which I rather suspect you really don’t know at all.

    • bob_mcc says:

      Militant Agnostic, I don’t know and you don’t either. I just fit in AA with no belief in a HP. Made it work including the steps. The delisting in Toronto drew a line that I no longer wish to accept; and now describe myself as atheist.

      Because confusion is generated by chapter four, referring to yourself as an agnostic belittles your position too: you have not prayed enough, seen enough, or read the literature enough. But it will happen. Labeling as an atheist draws a line that I am not like you and you can not deny that.

      However if there is a open minded conversation on the topic I am agnostic and mostly rely on skepticism and reason.

      • Bill G. says:

        Well to date nobody has showed me any evidence as in scientific terms to the answer of God being or not being. I find those that have belief in both directions. To date I find both to be in the realm of possibilities. Either way I don’t plan on taking a drink today.

  4. Tommy H says:

    Classic straw-man . . . .

  5. John S says:

    This was interesting to read. I’m an atheist and I guess I would be described as a hard atheist in that I am extremely sure there are no gods, like 99.9999% sure. There is no more reason for me to believe in a god than there is any other human created myth.

    It’s not been that long really, maybe a few years since I realized that I’m an atheist and accepted the fact and became comfortable with it and increasingly I am “coming out”, mostly within AA and it gets easier.

    I am torn as to whether or not I should be confrontational or maybe I debate just how confrontational I should be. I’ve been doing some service work lately which I enjoy and I believe in and want to support AA, and to do that I need to be part of AA. In the past I would not join in the Lord’s Prayer at the end of District or Central Office meetings, but I find that I don’t like putting myself outside the circle and feeling apart from instead of a part of the fellowship. Also when I stand outside the circle, it makes people less likely to work with me.

    I want to make a contribution to AA and yes I want to change it and I know there will be times that fighting and confrontation will be necessary and other times I need to be more conciliatory. The main thing that I want to achieve is to make AA more open to more people and I feel that the more dogmatic we become, the more people we turn off. I can talk to people within the fellowship about this and find support even among believers.

    However there are some serious and dangerous subgroups within AA like the Clancy cults and there are still people in AA who are discouraging people from taking psychiatric medications and this is something that I am willing to fight against. I believe that because the cultists are so radical that I need to fight them with radicalism. Those are people with whom I would not only stand outside the prayer circle but I would let them know that I disagree. It’s not in my nature to be confrontational but I will learn to be that way when necessary.

    So I understand now the so-called militant atheists and why they take the position they do. Atheists can be marginalized if they don’t speak up and the dogmatists and fundamentalists arre very aggressive and people are more likely to tolerate them.

  6. John S. says:

    My thoughts on identifying as an atheist rather than an agnostic is there is a difference in not knowing something that is impossible to know and not knowing something that could be known and there is done likelihood of being true.

    Example: I do not know if life exists elsewhere in the universe other than earth and I don’t know if intelligent life and civilizations exist on other planets and in other galaxies. However the size of the universe and the planets outside the solar system would lead me to believe that yes life could and may exist outside of earth.

    I also do not know whether or not a God exists but I do know that human beings have made up a number of gods and there has never been any evidence they exist. All evidence points to gods as myths created by ancient people in an effort to make sense of things. So I am comfortable not having a belief in a deity. I also am comfortable lacking belief in many other things I don’t know exist like leprechauns, unicorns, demons, Angels, demigods and gods.

  7. Jeb B. says:

    Since I abandoned the dualistic worldview of religions many years ago, I no longer participate to talking to, praying to an imaginary entity of any kind. If and when I participate in the serenity prayer in any way, I always begin it with “May I find serenity…” Since the power is in the group, at meetings I will always use the plural “We.”

    As far as the LP from Matthew and Mark, I simply leave the room, and at times for the benefit of the newcomer explain why. Bill also seemed to making it pretty clear that what he calls prayer is really talking to one’s self or innermost self, “…saying to myself throughout the day, ‘Thy will be done.'”

    With all of the misunderstandings of both atheist and agnostic labels, I prefer to call myself a monist, underlining the reality of the oneness of all that is. Of course this is the personal worldview that the process of the steps has helped me to achieve, liberating me from the dualistic “spiritual make-believe” Bill also speaks of in trying to speak for AA as a whole.

  8. kevin b says:

    I’ll be reading and commenting on these as the night goes by…implicit in #1, of course, is the idea that one is “rewarded” by the deity by escaping the foxhole but only in exchange for devotion of some sort…that has always seemed (at least to me) to be a very cruel form of emotional blackmail.

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