A few weeks ago I created a "billboard" celebrating my public announcement of atheism. It was a fun little creative exercise offered electronically by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is headquarted right here in my progressive hometown. Then, pleased with my product/announcement, I posted my billboard onto my Facebook page.
The FFRF calls this campaign of theirs a coming out of the closet, and I think that's appropriate. Christians have always excelled at not only advertising their religion (think the Pledge of Allegiance, uttered by scores of school children and sports fans every day) but proselytizing on its behalf (again, think the Pledge of Allegiance, uttered by scores of non-Christians every day). Conservative Jews as well as Muslims make sure no one misses their religion by wearing yamulkas and veils, long unbarbered beards and skirts that are never quite sufficiently long to obviate the need for dreadfully hot socks and even gloves underneath. Jewelry, beads for Catholics and Muslims, saintly medals and crosses for every brand of Christian, all these announce to the world the presence of religious people. Oh yeh. And then there's the family joining hands to loudly infringe upon everyone else's conversations to say grace around a table in Applebees and the Muslim bowing to pray in a corner of the airport and the anti-abortion fundamentalists with guns shouting about the right to life. These are everyday events, religioius people showing their burnished badges of devotion. But how do we who are irreligious ever get to show our pride? Or don't we feel any?
The response to my posting of my billboard surprised me. Though my sign said nothing about scorn for any other viewpoint, though it said nothing in fact, except that I'd rejected serving the Cruel Man Up High that my own fundamentalist parents raised me to fear and to love or, if I couldn't handle the dichotomy of that, then at least to feel the fear, the responses to my FFRF billboard surprised me. My friends, on and off Facebook alike, tend to be so far left they frequently fall into the margin. They are poets andprofessors and artists and librarians and revolutionaries and sometimes just shabby old hippies with increasingly scraggly, graying ponytails gathered proudly despite the bald pate above it.
No one, not one of my friends, even gave me a casual thumbs-up; no one "liked" it. The comments I got made me feel like I'd just revealed myself to be a blood relative of Genghis Khan or Pontius Pilate. I was so unnerved I actually took the posting down after reading a few of the responses, and tonight I had a heck of a time finding a trace of my once innocent-seeming "billboard" so you could see it. It was rather like announcing an alternate sexuality to a gathering of family and friends and being met with a silence so profound it echoed. At times like these, one is almost grateful for the single voice that finally pipes up, saying something like, "Don't you ever think about being a parent/Don't you think there's a force larger than you in the universe?"
OF COURSE THE HOMO/TRANS/BI-SEXUAL THINKS ABOUT BEING A PARENT! And some of them, like some heterosexuals, will think it's a worthy endeavor.
OF COURSE THERE ARE FORCES LARGER THAN ME IN THE UNIVERSE!! Gravity, for one; the St. Bernard down the street for another!
Why is it so alarming that I write that I don't choose to serve a Mad Master? If there is a God and this God is omniscient and omnipotent and is just sitting back and enjoying the spectacle of human starvation and war and the way we fight to the death to eat the last crumb of our perceived dignity, then no: I don't choose to serve God.
And if this is not who or what God or Allah is, then I think I will be forgiven anyway, except apparently by my friends who now think that I'm close-minded and averse to anything of a non-material nature.
I leave you with this photo, taken at dawn in a rural cemetary on the way up to my mom's sickbed.
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