Looking for something to write about, going to the bottom looking for material, there is an article by one of Alternet's atheist-click-bait artists, C. J. Werleman
Fox News Is Really Freaked Out by Atheists
The network’s customer base is afraid, and nothing in the news business sells faster than fear.\
No, it's resentment, not fear. It is one of the current lines of atheism, that their opponents are motivated by fear when what they are motivated by is atheists insulting them and insisting everyone has to bend over backward to let them have everything their way. FOX and the right trade in resentment, something anyone who saw the political career of Richard Nixon should have understood, or would have if they bothered to hear what their opponents were saying, instead of believing what they hoped they were feeling.
The subtitle is really the most substantial part of the article, which begins with some CNN crap from S.E. Cupp claiming that the right is more welcoming of atheism than the left. I wish. I'd like nothing else but for atheism to find its place where it really belongs as it carries out its hate-talk campaign against the majority of humanity. But scribbling for a magazine that is nominally of the left, Werleman has to go through the campaign by FOX to associate atheism with the left. In that we can see one of the more disheartening aspects of politics today, the right is a lot smarter than the left when it comes to the opportunity that people who are insulted and, so, offended present.
In this case, atheists, in their very limited numbers, have done everything in their very limited powers to offend most people in the United States who are Christians or, at least, religious. The role that atheists play in their own unpopularity by being such jerks is really one of the most obvious of current phenomena, no one likes someone who is insulting them. That is especially the case when the insults are really not much above the elementary school level of calling people "stupid-heads" made by people who are so absolutely clueless that they really believe that insulting people is a good way to win them over to your side.
Really, my fellow liberals, those are the people we have taken in and allowed to represent the left, people who think that we will win people over to our side by conceitedly insulting them and, so, they will vote with us. Or, rather, those are the people who we have been taken in by.
It's not rocket science for the liars at FOX to make hay by appealing to people who have been insulted by "liberal" atheists, over and over again. It's not hard to take advantage of that, magnifying real slights, inventing slights when there are none, and inventing wars against holidays. Like virtually everything that comes from FOX, it is a lie, it is two-faced and it is a smoke screen for their real intentions, the establishment of corporate fascism in service to the richest people on Earth. It may be their biggest lie but, since it serves the purposes of atheists, it is the one lie that FOX tells that we are supposed to believe. And they don't have to win over a majority of the population to succeed, a narrow margin of victory in elections will do. The Republican right, appealing to people with a sense of grievance, have played that margin game a lot better than Democrats have. Certainly better than the left has in the past forty-six or so years.
Considering the enormous help that atheists have been for the Republican right over the decades, I'm all for S.E. Cupp leading them to their real home, the Republican party which also despises the majority of people as it games an effective margin of them to take and maintain the power of oligarchs. I'd love for atheists to become their problem instead of ours. Only I'm afraid that we're not going to do the smart thing and let those obnoxious jerks go, cutting them loose to lose on their own. Not while the up and coming organs of what passes as the online media of the left is servicing their hate speech, doing FOX's work for them.
One has only to read the comments at Salon, where the typical content is about how atheists live in the "real" world while believers straddle reality and fantasy, to see signs of contempt for all who are not "of the body."
ReplyDeleteAnd then bring this up as typical of atheists, and you get the "no true Scotsman" response; or just screaming about how atheists aren't like that at all, liar LIAR LIAR!!!
It's the most tiresome part of this discussion of something that isn't happening. Yes, church attendance is in decline; it was in decline in the '50's, after the post-war peak pumped up church attendance higher than it had been in the nation's history. Contrary to the fantasies of fundamentalists and the ignorance of everyone else, America has never been a notably church-going country, except as it aided and abetted political and social power, much as the Church in Europe sustained kingdoms (and was, in the case of Spain in particular, a very direct arm of the State). So the vaunted "decline" which proves atheists are on the rise, is really a return to status quo.
And atheists remain annoying and obnoxious. I don't give a wet snap if my neighbors go to church or sacrifice chickens or just read the NYT on Sunday morning. Atheists, however, are terribly concerned about believers and politics (apparently Jerry Falwell is still alive somewhere). But, like most people on the intertoobs, they'd rather bitch about it in comments than do anything about it at the ballot box. Rather than noting Sam Brownback is currently less popular than an STD, and the former pious governor of Virginia is charged with felonies and his even more pious Lt. Gov. is now a public non-entity, they look for the slightest reason to charge infamy and preach despair and disgust for all who don't think just as they do.
And, of course, no true atheist would ever disagree with them; which is when it's really going to be fun.