A pro-Muslim YouTube channel called MercifulServant attempted to “expose” atheism by showing how awful it is and how even “the West” doesn’t approve of it, but the video may have unintentionally shown how ignorant people in this country are when it comes to their understanding of our non-belief.
I wouldn’t be commenting on it except this is a channel with 1.4 million subscribers. People are going to see this.
So watch the video. Keep in mind the goal is to put atheists down.
Let’s go through the problems…
1) The Scientific American article that “proves” how Americans don’t tolerate atheists? The piece didn’t do anything like that. It simply explained a research paper that showed people were less likely to trust people who were described as atheists. In other words, atheists may be good people, but there’s a stigma against us.
Nothing in the research or the article suggests atheists deserve that reputation.
2) The Washington Post survey which found atheists to be the “most abominable” group? It doesn’t exist. The closest thing I could find was another article explaining the undeserved stigma against atheists. Let me repeat that: There’s no article saying we’re the worst… but there is an article describing how atheists are so much better than our reputation would suggest.
3) The University of Minnesota study from 2006 is real. But, again, it’s a survey about perceptions of atheists. It doesn’t say we are bad people, only that people often think we are.
Are you seeing the pattern?
4) The video then explains how even several states have laws in their constitutions prohibiting atheists from holding elected office. Those laws are indeed on the books, but the video never mentions how all of them are unenforceable because the federal Constitution overrides them and says such faith-based bigotry isn’t allowed. The only thing those state constitutions prove is that atheists were once a persecuted group — we still are, in some ways, but not due to those now-meaningless laws regarding who can’t serve in office.
…
In short, the West doesn’t reject atheists. But a lot of religious people in the West hold a lot of inaccurate, prejudiced views of atheists that still linger in our collective conscience. We need to work to change that — and it’s slowly happening — but it’d be wrong to claim the U.S. condemns atheists because people don’t like us.
More importantly, there’s nothing in this video that should give other nations ideas for how to (mis)treat atheists.
You would think a Muslim channel would know better than to try and discredit another group based on strangers’ ignorant opinions of who they are.