When I say that I’m an anti-theist, a lot of people think that means I hate people who believe in God. This might be due to the semantics of the word “anti” and “theist” may equal, in some minds, “against theists.”
This is not the case, however. I do not hate Christians. I hate what Christians believe.
There are some who say that this is impossible — that the mentality here is as errant as the adage, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” But I think that’s, fundamentally, a false equivalency. In saying I’m a “sinner,” the “love the sinner, hate the sin” maxim indicates that I’m evil to my core — I’m a sinner who, on some fundamental level, deserves eternity in torment. It is only through the grace of God that I can be saved. Far from merely saying that I’m wrong, or that my beliefs are harmful, most Christians will say that I, personally, deserve eternity in torment.
To be completely fair, most Christians will hasten to add that they, also, deserve eternal punishment. I think that doesn’t let them off the hook, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere. But, just the same, any way you slice it, that is a personal insult to my core.
In contrast, in saying I hate what Christians believe, not their status as people, what I’m telling the Christian is that they are fundamentally wrong about the existence of God, and that belief in this existence is harmful. Not that they are fundamentally bad people, but that they are wrong.
To make the difference clear, let me show you an example.
If someone is building a bridge and the dimensions are drastically off, you might let that person know, “I don’t like your measurements.” Now, others may not think that your dislike is overpronounced. Still others may think you’re wrong. But when you’ve done your calculations carefully and found that building the bridge would result in the literal wrecking of thousands of lives due to major flaws in its engineering, you have a right — no, an obligation — to speak up.
You may voice your position stridently. You may urge people to see it. You may scream it, at times, at the top of your lungs, if people seem focused on ignoring it. You may be outspoken against “compromises” that you think will still be disastrous. And all that does not necessarily mean that you hate the person who came up with the plans to build the bridge.
You just think they’re wrong.
The whole game changes, however, when, in addition to saying the person is wrong, you start saying that the person who miscalculated the bridge plans is a bad, evil person who deserves eternity in torment. That’s hating the person. That’s when it gets personal. That’s why “hate the sin, love the sinner” is different from “hate the Christianity, love the Christian.” In the first case, you’re still calling the person a sinner, deserving of eternal hellfire. It’s a personal insult. In the second, you’re not necessarily insulting the individual personally; you’re just saying that the ideology they hold happens to be wrong. For my part, although I will say that a Christian is wrong, I will never, ever, ever say anything remotely close to implying that a Christian deserves eternity in hellfire.
Part of the reason that I don’t think most fundamentalist Christians are bad, terrible people is that I have fundamentalist family members and friends. Heck, I used to be a fundamentalist myself — and though I have made a 180 degree turn, I cannot say that, back then, I was a bad, terrible person. I was horrendously wrong, ignorant, and prejudiced, yes. But I did care about people — and I think a lot of fundamentalists do. I was just really, really wrong. Like I was, many fundamentalists are just trapped or tricked or just misled into having faith in a God that isn’t there.
This viewpoint causes me to clash with atheists who are more open to religion and with progressive Christians, who often seem to imply that there is something fundamentally bad about the psyche of a fundamentalist.
Now, I know that there are some fundamentalists who are just obnoxious people, and I know that from the outside looking in, they all look like obnoxious people sometimes. And yes, most of them seem clearly hypocritical. But I also think that they are more honest, oftentimes, about what the Bible actually says than progressive Christians. For example, I do not think the main reason many of them are against homosexuality is that they are just bad people who want to twist the Bible into saying that homosexuality is bad — as the progressive Christians often seem to claim. No, the Bible actually says that, fairly clearly, it seems — for example, the Old Testament seems to out-and-out say, in most translations, that homosexuals should be stoned to death.
By the way, this is why I did not find progressive Christianity a believable option for me. It seemed, honestly, that many of them were twisting Bible verses or simply making it up as they went along — and then using what they came up with to convince other people to do decent things based on “faith” in the God they had molded. My big beef with this is that it used the very faith that is a problem in the first place — the very divorcing from reality that is the bedrock of so many fundamentalists acting against the best interests of the real world, in spite of their often not-so-evil intentions — and seeks ways to continue to validate it. In validating this divorce from reality by highlighting God, it insulates the concepts of God and faith — which seem to be the real problems — from criticism. And fundamentalists are caught in the middle: they are told to follow God and have faith, but when they try to do it honestly, following the Bible and church tradition as faithfully as they can, they are told that they are bad people (when they often, frankly, seem to be the ones most honest about what’s in the Bible and in church tradition).
This status of being caught in the middle creates a disturbing wall between fundamentalists and the rest of humanity. And I think that this insulated wall is why Fundamentalist Christianity — in spite of all its criticism from progressive Christians, many atheists, and society in general — is holding up far stronger than any other Christian affiliation.
Again, I do not think the innate “badness” of fundamentalists is the real enemy. The real problem is that these Christians do not realize that God does not exist and that faith is a bad idea. And that’s why I’m an antitheist — not just in respect to Christianity, but in respect to god-centered religion in general, because they all seem to be sourced in a god who doesn’t exist who, nevertheless, you have to have faith in. I think the concept of God is fundamentally wrong, does a lot of damage, and that this honest position is superior to one that ignores the God “virus” at the center of religion’s harm in order to deal with the disturbing “symptoms” of bad behavior — an inaccurate focus that is often based on the assumption that fundamentalists are generally terrible people.
This does not mean that I think getting rid of God will automatically create a better world, of course. But I do think that we have to deconstruct the unquestioned authority of god and the blindness of faith if we are going to have a chance at seeing each other and existence as it is, as opposed to what a lie tells us it is. And in seeing the world in this honest, rational way, I think that we can develop solutions to the problems that we face that work, and that we can work with people and existence as it actually is so that our best intentions actually become beautiful realities in the real world instead of our worst nightmares — so those looking to help don’t, in the midst of their honesty and sincerity — actually hurt.
There’s a lot more to say about this, but hopefully that clarifies some things.
Thanks for reading.