Thursday, July 28, 2011

15-day atheist challenge, day 8.

What's your political alignment? Does your atheism affect how you vote and how you feel on issues?

Okay, politics are really not my strong point. When I was a Christian, I was a typical pro-war, pro-life, anti-gay nutjob (although the anti-gay thing got to me a lot; major source of cognitive dissonance, there). Now that I'm an atheist, I'm kind of... feeling my way around. I'm crawling in the world of politics; I haven't learned to stand on my own or walk yet.

I've made the jump from pro-life to pro-choice. Reading Freakonomics was big for me; the link between increased abortions and a drop in the crime rate made a staggering amount of sense. In my ideal world, abortions wouldn't be necessary because people would be educated and have sex responsibly, and they'd have enough money to take care of their kids, and there would be no rape, no incest, and no ectopic pregnancies or any other kinds of birth-related medical problems and so on and so forth... but this is not my ideal world, so abortion is--in my humble opinion--a necessary thing.

And of course I'm all for gay marriage and gay rights. I shed the anti-gay nonsense just as fast as I could... I went along with it in the first place because I thought it was what God wanted, but there was this constant disconnect. The rational part of my brain was saying Hey, a few of your closest friends are gay and they're awesome people, and they deserve the right to marry because that's a love thing, not a god thing. And the religious part of my mind was saying Well the BIBLE says that gay people are BAD. Nanner nanner boo boo!!

And education. There are some seriously glaring issues that need to be taken care of, like, um... why the hell is the teaching of evolution in public schools up for debate??? And yeah, I'm talking to you, Louisiana. You know how I learned about evolution? I had to teach myself!

And that, my friends, is bullshit. Because not every student in Louisiana cares as much about science as my fellow skeptics and I do. In fact, most of the people here are vehemently opposed to the very idea of evolution (even though they know NOTHING about it), because "evolution is evil and untrue" has been drilled into their brains by the church!

Example: there is this kid at my school. I do not know this kid, or anything about this kid, except for the fact that he or she has a bumper sticker on their vehicle that says "King Kong is NOT my grandpa!"

And that is a fail. And I really have to question if that kid was actually taught evolution, or if they were just repeatedly told that it is an evil theory.

Anyways. Rant over.

2 comments:

  1. I read Freakonomics a while back and loved it.

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  2. Yeah, it's a great book. I've been wanting to read Superfreakonomics but I haven't gotten around to it yet. :]

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