Every now and again something happens that brings joy into the heart of a nonreligious activist: a bigot is proven as the hypocritical fool he/she is.  Even better when this person is supposed to be a pillar or morality in the religious community, such as Pastor Chris Fox of North Carolina’s Kendalls Baptist Church.  He was caught and then admitted to posting inflammatory rhetoric on the atheist blog unreasonablefaith while claiming to be an atheist.  It was immediately clear that he was no atheist, as his posts consisted of the most stereotypical caricature of the “immoral atheist.”

For instance:

If a man wants to make a women his b****, so be it? So what if you don’t like it, what if I do?

If I want to do something, and my conscience is cool with it, then I can do it. If it’s feed a homeless person, so be it. If it’s kill my neighbor, so be it. I am not bound to any morals.

The preceding comment is so transparently written by someone trying to make atheists look bad I actually laughed a little when I first read it. Pastor Fox only hurt his cause.  Contrary to his original purpose, he proved the point that the stereotypical claims anti-atheist bigots make about the general character of atheists is a lie perpetuated only by the religious that see us as a threat.  If we really thought this way he wouldn’t have to lie and post such comments, would he?  He could just point to one of us.  He couldn’t, because he presumably knows that the truth is that we are no less moral than anyone else, religious or not.

Pastor Fox seems to have forgotten the ninth commandment,  “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20.13)¹?  He also has certainly not read Proverbs recently:

Six things the lord hates;
Seven are an abomination to Him:
A haughty bearing,
A lying tongue
Hands that shed innocent blood,
A mind that hatches evil plots,
Feet quick to run to evil,
A false witness testifying lies,
And one who incites brother to quarrel. (6.16-20)

I think claiming to be someone you’re not certainly falls into the category of hatching evil plots.  This is one of those times it certainly helps me as an activist for atheist rights to be a scholar of religion.  What is better when attacked by religious bigots than to throw their own scripture in their faces after they are exposed as the hypocrites they are.  And people questioned the usefulness of my degree!

The Secular Coalition for America now has the article [.PDF] on their website.

It seems good and fair, until you get to the disgusting  ending.  Paul Starobin ends the article by, to start, repeating the lie constantly stated by anti-atheist bigots: that atheists are “arrogant”, claiming to know all.  This is ludicrous when it is in fact the religious who claim to have divine, incontrovertible knowledge.  When taken at face value, religion causes thinking to stop when looking at the origin of the universe and life with the conversation stopper “god did it.”

Atheists, meanwhile, understand that there is still a lot we have yet to learn, of which we can only learn through the logic, reasoning, and evidence of science.  Starobin attempts to prove his point with an uninformed claim about Darwin so ridiculous I can’t even bring myself to repeat it here.  You can read it for yourself in the article.  Basically, though, he attempts to (badly) refute a claim that atheists supposedly make about what Darwin said.  The problem is that atheists never make such a claim.  In fact, such a claim is exactly contrary to the way atheists who support science generally think.  He can’t find any legitimate criticism of the atheists, so he resorts to ad hominem attacks.

Furthering his ad hominem criticisms, he claims that we have “disdain for the religious as captives to superstitions that only a cretin could accept.”  This is a disgusting bigoted comment straight out of the anti-atheist quotebook.  Even more importantly, it isn’t true.  I have heard atheists levy some criticism on the religious, but I have never heard any atheist who is a good person call someone a “cretin” or anything close, simply due to the fact that they are religious.  We would have to think a lot of people are cretins!

Furthermore, I seriously doubt Mr. Starobin ever heard a single atheist he interviewed ever use such an insulting word when referring to religious people.  It came from his mind, no one else – from the bigotry ingrained in him by our culture that he, despite the strong points of the rest of the article, cannot avoid.  Once again, we see the double standard: that it is okay for others to criticize atheists, as Starobin does in his ending, yet if atheists criticize others we are arrogant and insulting.
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