Hemant Mehta, Eight Years as the Friendly Atheist

An excerpt from an interview with Hemant Mehta (aka, the Friendly Atheist):

”HM: I love how certain issues that are controversial everywhere else in the country, like marriage equality, comprehensive sex education, and science in schools, are almost non-issues within our community. Where can we improve? In many ways, we act like there’s an atheist orthodoxy everyone must follow. As the demographics shift and atheists increase in number, we have to realize we won’t always agree on every issue.

So how will be treat other atheists who happen to hold other controversial positions? There are atheists who are pro-life, Republican, gun owners, or home-schoolers. When I talk to them, they often tell me they feel unwelcome in both worlds—“I’m too atheist for the pro-life group, and too pro-life for the atheist group.” We have to ask ourselves: Are we united by our atheism or is it really more than that? Is it possible to be a rational thinker who holds contrary views on controversial issues? Will we allow ourselves to even have those sorts of debates or are they off-limits? Right now, those conversations are off-limits with many atheists and that’s a problem.”

Hemant admits to the Leftist, totalitarianism bent of Atheism, which cannot even accept the brother Atheists who don’t hew the Leftist line. Yet they still claim to be the tolerant, rational, and intellectual brotherhood. And even Hemant has shown his intolerance of the opinions of the Other, so the barriers are definitely up. For example, when he says the buzzword, “marriage equality” he doesn’t mean the marriage of just any individuals to each other, only homosexuals – the favored Victim group du jour.

Likewise “comprehensive sex education” doesn’t mean male/female sex taught to 12 year olds, it includes LGBTQLHFDOUHBF, the Kinseyan idea of morals-free sexual experimentation of all types, taught to preschoolers and up as normal sexual behaviors.

And “science” doesn’t mean physics or chemistry to Atheists, it means just one thing: the Truth of the True Story Of Evolution as Truly True Truth Because: Scientists, which he thinks annihilates religion and proves that Atheism IS the Truly True Origin Axiom which is to be installed as Truth in the minds of all government school children.

Hemant wants to be called the “Friendly Atheist”, when in fact there is no possibility of Atheism, as dogma, or Atheists, as dogmatics, being friendly with a differing worldview. No chance. None.

”CS: You’re speaking at Foundation Beyond Belief’s first conference next month. Why are you passionate about nontheistic charitable giving?

HM: Giving to charity is one of the ways that Christians are just flat-out better than atheists. But is it because they’re more generous or because churches make it really easy to give away money? I believe it’s the latter, and Foundation Beyond Belief offers atheists a simple way to donate to wonderful causes. It’s a group that really steps away from the “Does God exist?” question and asks instead: “Okay, we’re atheists. Now what?” I’m proud to have been with Foundation Beyond Belief since the beginning and I plan to be a donor for a long time to come.”

It will be interesting to see how the naturally totalitarian and self-focused Atheists respond to voluntary giving out of their own pockets, rather than increased taxes on everyone else. They are historically very tight with a buck, in fact, miserly.

In the second section of the interview, Mehta is asked how the negative stigma Atheists carry is to be reversed. His answer is essentially valueless: if we Atheists show that we are nice, then the stigma will go away.

That is not going to happen on a general basis, is it? The media-visible Atheists are aggressively nasty and abusive, and filled with visceral hatred. And there will always be that necessary document, Atheist Moral Principles: there is no such document, and there will never be one. Specific Atheists might be “nice” people, but that merely indicates that they either have adopted Christian moral principles without accepting the moral authority behind those principles, or that they just haven’t been caught yet.