Interesting opinion about why Christians want Atheists to stay quiet about their non-belief, or better yet lie about it.

Courtesy of Salon:

 Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. It’s a bad idea, and can’t stand up on its own. But it can, and does, perpetuate itself through social consent. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that asking questions about religion is sinful, and that trusting religion without evidence is virtuous. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that joy and meaning and morality can only be found in religion, and that leaving religion will automatically result in a desperate, amoral, pointless life. It perpetuates itself through religious communities and support systems that make believing in religion — or pretending to believe in religion — a necessity to function and indeed survive. It perpetuates itself through parents and other authority figures teaching it to children, whose brains are hard-wired to believe what they’re told. 

Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. But the simple act of coming out as an atheist denies it this consent. Even if atheists never debate believers or try to persuade them out of their beliefs; even if all we ever do is say out loud, “Actually, I’m an atheist,” we’re still denying our consent. And that throws a monkey wrench into religion’s engine. 

There’s a reason that rates of atheism have been going up as use of the Internet goes up. (According to the MIT Technology Review, the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use — and while correlation certainly doesn’t prove causation, this analysis factors out pretty much every other possible causation.) The Internet has created a massive worldwide forum for atheists to argue about religion, to give evidence against religion, to ask for evidence and arguments supporting religion and point out how ridiculously weak they are. But the Internet has also created a massive, worldwide forum for atheists to simply, you know, exist. 

What’s more, this denial of consent has a snowball effect. As more atheists come out of the closet, more people will question religion and eventually leave it. And as they leave religion and come out about their atheism, another wave of people will question and abandon religion … and so on, and so on, and so on. 

It’s easy to ignore one person saying that the emperor has no clothes. It’s a lot harder to ignore 10 people saying it — and it’s harder still to ignore a hundred, or a thousand. 

So if you want to ignore the emperor’s nakedness, it’s not enough to just ignore it. You have to get other people to shut up about it. If you want religion to keep perpetuating itself, you have to get people to go along with it. You have to get people to fake it. 

You have to get people to lie.

Very true indeed. In fact I have seen this same thing happen right here on this blog.

Usually it arrives in a form similar to this:

"Gyphen I really enjoy your reporting on Sarah Palin (That bitch!) but I really wish you would stop attacking religion. I am sure that you realize that many of your visitors are religious, and it just makes us very uncomfortable. If you don't stop we will be forced to stop coming here every day."

If you think about this it is really quite arrogant of them. Especially since I started the Immoral Minority to talk about politics, current affairs, and, yes, religion.

It would be tantamount to going to somebody's house and saying, "I loved the casserole, and your house is quite lovely, but please stop talking about your children, or I will never come here again."

However as this article so eloquently explains, it is not that it bothers certain people that I talk about it here so much, as it is that they are afraid others are listening.

And of course, they are.