Thank you, Christians

If you follow the atheist blogosphere at all, you’ve probably seen the story about the American Atheists’ lawsuit to keep a cross out of the official 9/11 museum, ostensibly, because the museum is being created with government money. I’m not going to weigh in on that so much, partially because I really haven’t had time to think about it, and partially because I’ve been known to be rather wishy-washy when it comes to cross memorials in the past.

Instead, I’m going to comment on comments — specifically, comments left by our loving and peaceful Christ followers on the Fox News Facebook page after Fox broadcast the story.

These are just a few that I grabbed off the American Atheist website, and to be fair, whoever is in charge of the Fox News Facebook has been scrambling to scrub the page clean of these comments, but they just weren’t fast enough in this case.

I’m sure plenty of other bloggers have weighed in on this topic, and I really don’t have much else to add other than to say, thank you, to these followers of Jesus.

Thank you for confirming what many atheists think (or at least what I think), about you and your religion. The peace and love of Christ you profess on Sunday is nothing more than a thin veneer used to hide your hate, bigotry and lust for violence. If I may paraphrase your Christ, you truly are nothing more than whitewashed tombs, pretty on the outside, but inside full of everything unclean.

Thank you for reminding us that, even as we just watched in horror the aftermath of an attempted crusade, that we still have very much to fear from the religions of peace right here in America.

And please, spare me the No True Christian argument, okay? I’m not interested in watching your mental gymnastics while you try to whitewash every act of violence committed by men of piety through the centuries in the name of your particular guy in the sky.

And finally, here’s a message to all of those who posted the death threats, for those who will post in the future, and for those who will eventually act on their hate:

I get it. You want us gone. Well guess what? I want you gone. I want  your religion eradicated off the face of the earth, and not just Christianity, all of them (except for maybe the Jainists, they seem pretty laid back.)

But here’s the difference. You want us gone by way of guns, bombs, knives, stones, swords and whatever else you can get your mitts on. I want you gone by way of enlightenment. I want people to become better educated and to think and inquire to the point that they shed their faith because they have a better understanding of the world around them.

I want children to be raised with inquisitive minds that constantly seek truth and knowledge as opposed to having dogma and superstition imposed on them from birth.

Now I’m not so naieve to think that all of the violence in the world would stop if religion ceased to exist. However, I do think that it would be one less justification used for why we brutalize our fellow humans. And the more we can whittle down that list of justifications, the closer we’ll get to a peaceful coexistence.