Quote:
Originally Posted by Clarste
Atheism is still very unaccepted culturally. In an era where the United States has just elected our first black president, there's still extremely few politicians in the entire country who will publicly admit to being atheist. Basically, the public doesn't trust them. Hence the comparison to calling yourself gay in front of homophobes; it's just asking to get attacked or at the very least shunned. Its one of those prejudices that you don't hear much about. Obviously the scale of it depends on where you live though. I don't think many people would care where I live, but I don't exactly bring it up in conversation...
The reasoning behind the dislike of atheism comes from the idea that religion = morality. Some people assume that without a god to tell you what's good or bad, atheists must be amoral hedonists who will do anything without hesitation to satisfy their desires. Personally, I feel like this attitude says a lot more about the person thinking it than the atheist. Does that mean that they, without the threat of hell or whatever, would be an amoral hedonist? That they need some carrot and stick reward to be moral? That's kind of scary actually.
Anyway, atheists generally have some secular philosophy of morality, of which there are an absurd number to choose from (the philosophy of secular morality has been discussed since ~500 BC at the very least; the Greeks even had a simple "proof" that morality must exist prior to God). The most basic of course is "treat others in the way you'd like to be treated" or some derivation of that.
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That was a good explanation and I agree with you but my original post was in regards to "how you define an atheist," to which I said "if you say 'I don't believe in God' it probably means you are atheist." It had nothing to do with atheists being looked down upon or whatever, it was my thoughts on the definition.