{"id":734,"date":"2008-02-11T17:07:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-11T22:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/2008\/02\/the-bias-against-atheists.html"},"modified":"2008-02-11T17:07:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-11T22:07:00","slug":"bias-against-atheists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2008\/02\/bias-against-atheists.html","title":{"rendered":"The Bias Against Atheists"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an exceptionally well written piece, discussing the bias against atheists in the US<\/a>. It’s not approaching it from the “atheists as victims ” angle, but rather just exposing current attitudes and their relationship to historical attitudes about other minorities. Good food for thought.<\/p>\n

The author touches on the point that atheists are misunderstood. I think this is understated. In part it’s fueled by the reality that most people don’t know any atheists. (In reality, they probably do, but as the article states, many of them stay well closeted.) Much as gays, blacks, and other minorities required some everyday exposure to the population in general before they began to gain acceptance, the same is true of atheists.<\/p>\n

But a larger difficulty is that while there is a natural attempt to define us, there is little cohesive about us. We are a very diverse group, only loosely held together by our lack of faith. It’s hard to define a group by the lack of something. It’s like trying to profile people who don’t drive SUVs. It might be because they are rabid tree-huggers, but it might be because they can’t afford one, don’t have a place to park it, or any of a dozen other reasons. There is no atheist culture. Because of that, I think it will be all the harder for people to know and accept us as a group.<\/p>\n

Maybe the place to start is to accept us as individuals, including accepting and allowing us to openly assert our personal convictions. Maybe you could even ask us about our views of the world. Most of us are actually eager to share (not preach), but we don’t because it seems to make you so darned uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

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Brought to you by Tim…
\n-Read the whole blog here-<\/a><\/span><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an exceptionally well written piece, discussing the bias against atheists in the US. It’s not approaching it from<\/p>\n

Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}