Atheist students in Denver get banned books after delivering food items and cash donations.
Books at the table included 'God is not Great', 'The God Delusion', and 'The Resurrection Myth'.
Not content to merely thrash religionists on the basis of a religious knowledge test, young Denver atheists have now manned a major food drive to deliver food to the hungry. The strategy of the Metro State Atheists is simple: allow fellow college students to drop off any food items or cash donations, then receive a free banned book in return. The banned books will include novels once put on assorted Catholic "condemned" lists, as well as top fare such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, Richard Dennett's Consciousness Explained, Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great, as well as Hugh Schonfeld's The Passover Plot, Sam Harris' The End of Faith, Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian, and others. In addition, other regional atheist groups are conducting a "fiction for fiction" exchange, where a person drops off a Bible and receives a novel in return - say like "The Messiah Paradigm", "A Case of Conscience" or Andrew Greeley's "The God Game" (fiction for fiction).
The latter coincides with "Banned Books Week" - the last one of September, during which hundreds of libraries and bookstores across the nation draw attention to all the hundreds of innocent books banned by reactionary religious Babbits during the past forty or so years. Books like The Last Temptation of Christ, Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, and the Phillip Pullman Dark Materials Trilogy (featuring The Golden Compass). To help with this year's events atheist authors Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett sent signed copies of their books to help.
The event at the Auraria campus has drawn rave reviews. According to student Anna Parsons:
"I think this is great! I'm a devout atheist, that's what I believe in!"
One of the organizers of the Metro State "books for food donations" event, Joel Guttormson noted that his preference is to trade food donations for food, rather than take bibles and give back fictional novels. According to Joel:
"I'd much rather try to change our (atheists) image by giving food to the homeless"
Well, good luck on that, Joel! But the sad and inescapable fact is that atheists comprise the least trusted minority in this country. This news arrived, in March of 2006, compliments of a University of Minnesota study by Penny Edgell, Associate Professor of Sociology, and co-authors, Doug Hartmann and Joseph Gerteis. Their study, based on a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, disclosed that atheists now occupy the bottom rung of social respect for minorities in American society. They’re now regarded as contemptuously as communists were in the 50s, and rated in social worth below Muslims, immigrants and homosexuals today.[1]
The study noted that a significant number of respondents associated atheism with an array of moral misbehavior, including criminality and materialist emphasis. In addition, the findings “seemed to rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good.”[2] This is nothing short of astounding given that as a nation and people, Americans are notorious for giving short shrift to the “common good” as evidenced by consistently voting for no-tax or tax cutting candidates, when they know damned well (or should!) the outcome will starve government of the resources needed to advance the needs of the vulnerable, such as the 53 million currently without any health insurance.
Even the idealistic Guttormson admits as much, asserting atheists "are no better than second class citizens" and "we're generally not trusted". The question, minus the usual bullshit about lacking morality, is WHY? Once you declare yourself an atheist, you are immediately the "enemy", and not much better than Osama Bin Laden or one of his cohorts.
Why is this? With atheism a whole new way of facing the cosmos is embraced, and it isn't for the fainthearted, the philosophical pussyfooters, the Perennial Pollyannas (who want "reality" spoonfed to them through happiness drops or drugs) or the phony self-righteous who have a congential need to believe they have a free ticket to heaven. Atheism shell shocks all these pretenders and poppets by relieving reality of supernatural managers, special designs and cosmic purpose.
The bald outcome is that only the most tough-minded rationalists and realists can confront such a purposeless universe and thrive in it. It isn't for those who whine they need their cosmic Daddy or an overarching purpose impressed onto them. For the remainder, fear and chaos threaten, and they’re mentally unable to come to terms with a universe minus a Cosmic Controller. Rather than examine the subtext for their own mental and psychological deficiency, they take it out on the “messenger”, i.e. the friendly neighborhood atheist! He's "immoral", a "vagabond" and "probably not much better than a child predator". Or so they believe - because they confuse an artificial god-ordained ethics with one forged within one's own conscience and tested against whether any act will advance or harm another's welfare.
Two factors drive this: 1) a brain architecture that favors an optimism dynamic and “hope” even when reality testifies to the contrary, and 2) a pernicious culture of “positivity” that reinforces this brain defect, recently highlighted by Barbara Ehrenreich.[3] As Ehrenreich notes, American mass culture is saturated by a saccharine “cult of positivity,” with children brainwashed from an early age that they can do anything, and adults brainwashed to believe if they just work hard and long enough they’ll become super millionaires like Donald Trump. That no one has slain the insipid “Horatio Alger” myth up to now is really a testament to America’s individualist hubris and false optimism.
What has this to do with atheism? Mainly that a culture of positivity will perceive the atheist as an agent of irreversible depression, pessimism and negativity! After all, what could be more of a downer than the notion that all the fun ends once one’s physical being expires? When you’re dead, you’re dead, and there’ll be no reruns or afterlives. Factor into this the brain’s natural tendency and drive for optimism at any cost, and you have a ready-made cultural and biological axis to deny and thwart atheism! The most expedient way to achieve this is by casting atheism in the most disreputable and inhuman terms possible, and the atheist as little short of a Satanic entity, if not the ugly bearer of mass depression.
Thus, every demoniacal image, claim of perversion and moral or ethical inadequacy is projected onto atheists by the cultural positivity clique. We are the “evil ones.” We’re the ones trying to “subvert” the grandiose scheme of the country as propounded by the Founders in the Constitution. In fact, that document was intended to prevent the state from establishing a religion and to protect the minority from the excesses of the majority.
Even Guttormson admits that he "gets hate mail every time my group does a public event"- all from God-fearing Christians. But here's the kicker: IF Christians are so damned "God-fearing" why do they find it necessary to flaunt their hate of those they don't understand? Could it be maybe they don't really believe the God of the New Testament is a God of love? Or perhaps they have a pathological fear that atheists may be right after all, and they're wasting their time with all this bible -reading and fulsome god-mongering because it all ends once you're dead.
Who knows? What we do know is this: the typical atheist knows way more about religion, and that extends to ALL beliefs, than his Christian counteparts. And that adds new twists to the question: Who are the most ignorant people when it comes to religious knowledge? And, as a corollary, if Americans know so very little about other religions, how can they be certain what they believe is right? The very presumption of one's unique certitude implies one as at least cursorily examined the claims of competitors. But if one can't even get half correct in a basic test, that assumption collapses of its own weight.
But perhaps the righteous believers have another advantage? Magic? Or maybe, magical brains!
[1] University of Minnesota News, March 31, 2006, “Atheists Identified as America’s Most Distrusted Minority", According to new U of M Study.”
[2] Ibid.
[3] Barbara Ehrenreich: “Pathologies of Hope” in Harpers, Feb., 2007.
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