Why Do People Think Atheists Are Bad People

Who do people think atheists are?

Who do people think atheists are?Misconceptions about atheism and atheists unfortunately are really common. A good friend of mine once snapped at my spouse for attending a church service because her nephew had his first communion. He thought my spouse and me as atheists would not attend church services because we thought we would be furthering the wrong cause by doing so.I told him that by the same logic he as a vegetarian furthered meat eating by sitting at the same dinner table with meat eaters. He had nothing to say to that.And he is not the kind of person you would expect to have such misconceptions. He is highly intelligent, highly educated, had no religious indoctrination whatsoever, he just became christian a few years ago. He also has known me for 30 years and my spouse for 17 years and we have been meeting once a week for 25 years now.If even such a person has such misconceptions about atheists I cannot even imagine what kind of misconceptions other people have.

Why do religious people think that atheists are bad people?

I'm going to answer the question as 'Why would a religious person think that an atheist is a bad person?'In most countries, the government derives its power and legitimacy from divine power. This is what its citizens are taught and what many institutions portray through their symbols. Examples abound in any country where this is the case, but I am going to stick with the US: the dollar bills famously say "In God We Trust". The Justice Courts have statues or pictures of Minerva, the goddess of justice. The Pledge of Allegiance had the words "under God" added to it in recent decades, etc. Whether real or not, the average person has the deeply ingrained idea that good and justice come from a divine source.This imagery, where God is good and "no god" is evil, has been exploited through human history. A few decades ago, communists were portrayed as godless evil beings bent on world domination. On top of it, religious people are taught a set of precepts that according to their faith come from God himself. Precepts that set the stage for a good society in which everyone is happy and fairly treated. Since the world is very different from that utopian society, it must the work of evil forces that prevent us from reaching that happy and fair state.With such pervasive ideology putting a god on the good side, it is very easy for a religious person to think that an atheist is someone without a moral compass. Someone who cannot possibly be able to tell for sure what is good or bad.Fortunately, as Barry Hampe mentions, it couldn't be farther from the truth. The fact is that the US Constitution starts with the words "We the people" and does not set any god in the place of the origin or source of all power, sovereignty or justice in the land (regardless of what any political party may say). As he says, any religious person who thinks that atheists are bad people is a misguided individual.

Why do some people consider atheism to be bad?

It drives them crazy that we “blithely” (from their point of view) ignore rules that they believe are immutable. That we go further and question those beliefs. They feel insecure, and try patiently to explain how wrong we are. In the process they realise at some subconscious level that their belief is based upon their belief and nothing else, and that without that belief to start with they have no basis for their belief. And (again subconsciously) they realise their belief is just that: a belief. But they have based their entire life around that belief, and they cannot afford to have their entire raison d’être set aside, so instead they find artificial means to bolster their belief. And the more they build up that artificial means the more they become resentful that we “blithely” (again) ignore all their mumbo jumbo. They have locked themselves into false belief. Anything (like us) that tends to highlight the falsehood of their artificial means of support must be forcefully rejected. And so a few years ago we had the Spanish Inquisition torturing and murdering anyone who didn’t share their particular subspecies of belief.This applies only to those who beleive atheism is wrong, I want to make it clear that many theists freely accept that atheists have a right not to believe.

Do most Americans (mainstream) think atheists are bad people?

There is no reason to say that atheists are bad people BECAUSE they are atheists. What makes many people uncomfortable is that atheists have a BELIEF that is different than their belief in God. Lots of people believe in God despite the fact that there is no objective evidence that this belief is real. If someone does not believe as they do, the knee jerk response is that the nonbeliever is wrong, which is synonymous with bad for many. If viewed as a group, religious activities have done more damage than anything an atheist could have done but at the same time there are groups of people who are “religious” that have done good. The same cannot be said for atheists; they have not damaged anything.