Why I Attack
Christian Fundamentalists
Janet Voska
From: " Janet Voska"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: Skeptical_Film_Reviews,_Anyone?_9850
Date: Wednesday, July 19, 2000 3:15 PM
For myself, I attack Christian Fundamentalists because they are diametrically opposed by faith to the furthering of civil rights in this country and are hell-bent on destroying the walls of separation between church and state. No matter how they voice it, they want this country to be under the laws of the 10 Commandments and their specific interpretation of "God's Innerrant Word", the Bible. There are no compromises here.
Women will lose their civil rights. Homosexuals will lose their civil rights. Education in public schools will come under the domain of Bible-believing, creationist teaching, anti-science, anti-intellectual theists. Lord only knows what they have in mind for atheists. Maybe the rack and stake. Immigrants wil be unwelcome. Courts will be dominated by Bible-believing theocrats, bastardizing the Consitution at every turn.
Lest anyone accuse me of being a reactionary, let me point them to the history of Germany after the First World War and up to and thru the Second World War and learn of the small faction of racist/ fascists who eventually turned the world upside down and brought horror and death to over 25 million souls. Let me point out the clever tactics of blaming all the ills of this society on the loss of belief in the Bible and the never-ending voices of "true Americans", the Pat Robertsons, the Falwells, the Pat Buchanans, the Baptist leaders in the South. etc., etc., etc ... and see the connection between atheists, humanists, witches, homosexuals, unbelievers, etc., and the poor Jew, the Gypsy, the Jehovah's Witness, the mentally ill and deficient, the physically impaired of the 1930's in Germany. Germany by all accounts was considered a Christian nation.
I don't attack fundamentalists because they call themselves "Christians", I attack them because they are religious fascists.
Or look at the Crusades and the Inquisition to see what happens when fear and Holy Faith meld.
I doubt many atheists are out to de-convert Christians or any other believers of other persuasions, they have no reason to. But by following their consciences and allowing scientific, medical and psychological truths to emerge without censor, and letting the churches battle internally their questions as to truth, the day may come when superstition and ignorance are not viable for thinking, questioning people. I hope so!
It may take a village to raise a child, but it only takes a few determined fanatics to destroy a village.
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