Monopolizing Good

I find it fascinating that Christians in America have a monopoly on good. They hoard it. Because of at least one flaw, no other group can lay claim. With their silence, Muslim Americans praise terrorism. Atheists are rotten because without god in our life we have no way of knowing that it's wrong to murder and pillage. Jewish people are in second place, but that one flaw will always separate them.

America has come a long way in areas such as equal rights for women and minorities. While still not perfect, we're continually improving from eras during which unfathomable acts of cruelty were commonplace. Yet many in our country can't get over the antiquated notion that Christianity equals good and everything else equals bad.

Even if folks strictly learned goodness in Christian churches, they wouldn't have exclusive rights. Good is good. Good does not mean believing in certain words unrelated to moral action.

And a moral action isn't moral because a Methodist church is where a person was encouraged to take it.

In friendly debates, I have actually heard the faithful argue their god can't see acts of kindness committed by the non-faithful because a wall of disbelief blocks the deity's vision.

Not only does our good go unrecognized, the Pavlovian response to the "A-word" is one of fear.

Can you imagine the reaction to an event held specifically to raise funds that would later be used to spread atheism across the country? By most it would be compared to the Aryan Brotherhood renting out the local Holiday Inn, hiring a DJ and holding a dance contest to raise money that would later be used to tattoo toddlers so full of Nazi propaganda they could effectively be used as crawling billboards.

I know a lot of atheists and they're all great people. More atheists would mean more tolerance. An increase in atheists certainly wouldn't increase the rate of crime, yet many Americans would attempt to aggressively counter any planned expansion.

Though Christianity calls for discrimination of people who have done nothing wrong, I do not actively seek the tearing down of a single church and would not throw myself in front of a bulldozer clearing land on which the next mass center of worship is scheduled to be erected. Atheists call for the discrimination of no one, yet an attempt to grow the number of nonbelievers across America would undoubtedly be labeled "alarming to the fabric of our nation."

In a country with so many religious folks, I suppose it's only natural that nonjudgmental citizens are labeled ne'er-do-wells while those regularly instructed to look down upon the sinless have a monopoly on good.