That is offensive!

Is there a difference between being an outspoken atheist and being an outspoken Christian?

The very question betrays America's subconscious desire to be willfully ignorant and comfortably stupid. In what other area of knowledge would such an equivalency be drawn? Is someone being offensive when they say, "Astrology is bullshit?" Why on earth am I obligated to grant respect to an institution that not only teaches falsehoods, but teaches them in the face of and in spite of scientific knowledge?

When I am confronted by an evangelical Christian, I am not insulted. In fact, in most cases, I'm quite flattered that this person is genuinely concerned about me. In their minds, I am going to hell if I maintain my beliefs, and frankly, if they didn't try to change my mind, I fear they would be just as evil as they're accusing me of being. No, it's not the conversations that bother me. Nor does it bother me when I am at a friend's house and their family reaches their hands toward me for prayer. No, it's not the traditions that bother me.

I am bothered by the stupidity that comes along with dogmatically accepting to have faith. It is impossible for someone to maintain a sense of empirical analysis while they teach their children that the earth is 6000 years old and that people used to live until the age of 900. The disconnect that one must suffer in order to live in the physical world we inhabit and also to believe with their whole hearts in such ridiculous dogmas is what truly bothers me. It doesn't bother me in the sense that I wish the world had no idiots. I am not naive enough to think that a world like that would even be any better than the one we're in today. No, it bothers me because I know that their children will grow up thinking the same thoughts. It bothers me that just a little bit more of our population accepts evolution, now a concrete scientific school of study, than the Middle East, a region so intellectually and technologically devoid, that every single one of their achievements in the last few centuries, from electrical power to nuclear power, has been stolen or bought with oil. Ever since Islam took power in the region, and intellectualism was shunned as evil (as they knew with intellectualism comes atheism), the culture has been a scientific wasteland. It has been over 600 years since the time of Muslim technological achievement, and this is the culture we want to emulate?

Being an outspoken atheist means that you aren't comfortable sitting back and twiddling your thumbs when the very country you live in is more comfortable in denying science than it is in denying a book that barely resembles the text written by a bunch of Iron Age bigots.

Someone telling me that I'll go to hell for what I don't believe in is nothing like me saying that the belief in a personal God is a symptom of scientific ignorance. One demands you ignore epistemological discourse, and the other demands you embrace it.