Intolerance and Ignorance

"There's people out there that say I'm no good,
'Cause I don't believe the things that I should"
Fuck Armageddon... This is Hell! by Bad Religion

This has been a funny sort of week. It kicked off with the "Myths About Atheism" talk by Dr Tim Kenyon which the Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers of Waterloo (AAFW) hosted. It was an attempt to tackle many of the misconceptions about atheism/atheists. The event went well, and I was in high spirits. An Imprint article (Imprint is the university of Waterloo's school newspaper) was going to be written (and has since been published), which would give us some publicity and inform a wider audience about the myths about atheism.

As the week went on, however, I became increasingly distressed. I am used to hearing about atheists being treated unfairly, and I wasn't overly surprised to come across this article about the largest online community of atheists being deleted by Myspace due to complaints by religious users.

However, as the week went on, I came across more and more intolerant things close to home. Take, for instance, the comments on this Imprint article, in which "Muslim Concerned for Atheist" says to an atheist commenter "How does it feel to live a purposeless life? How does it feel not knowing why things happen to you the way they do? How does it feel not knowing where you're going to end up after you die?" This article is nearly a year old, but it is somewhat disconcerting to see something like this come out of someone so close to home (I can only assume that the commenter was a fellow University of Waterloo student, as Imprint is our student newspaper).

This comment served to remind me of all of the whispered comments I had overheard during clubs days while watching over AAFW's booth. When people saw our presentation board (which contains the club name in big neon yellow letters), it wasn't uncommon for them to whisper comments to each other like (and this is one I heard) "Yea, let's be atheists, then we'll just be depressed all the time", followed by giggles. While their comments weren't made to hurt, and they certainly didn't, the ignorance behind the comments was certainly hard to stand.

On Wednesday, I went to the Atheists, Agnostic and Freethinkers of Waterloo's Facebook group and found this interesting comment on the wall:

"this group is ridiculous. your angry at christianity because it doesnt support the lifestyle that u want.

what about judaism
buddhism
islam.
you never see any people athiest or agnostic come from that religion because well, they arent as liberal as you idiots claim to be" (italics are mine, spelling/grammar/logic mistakes and factual errors are his)

Yes, this is a University of Waterloo student. He is even a friend of a friend of mine, apparently. I am not going to criticize this comment here because the criticisms are self-evident. I will just make one quick snide comment: How can the person who wrote this have possibly gotten into university?

All I want to point out is that he calls everyone in the group an idiot, and all he knows about us is that we belong to a group called "Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers of Waterloo".

This was the first negative comment we had gotten directed toward the club in a public medium. It was angering, but also amusing due to the extremely low quality of the comment.

After these comments, to top off the week, my friend Anatoly dropped a bombshell on my mood. It seems the Laurier Freethought Alliance (which he is the vice-president of) was denied official club status at Wilfrid Laurier University (the university right across the street from the University of Waterloo). The reason? "While the promotion of reason, science and freedom of inquiry are perfectly legitimate goals, what is most in question in regards to your club's vision is the promotion of 'a fulfilling life without religion and superstition'. While this university is indeed technically a secular institution, secular does not denote taking an active stance in opposition to the principles and status of religious beliefs and practices." (For more information see this, this, and this).

So apparently promoting "a fulfilling life without religion and superstition" is somehow intolerant, while promoting a fulfilling life with religion is perfectly fine (Laurier, like any other university I've heard of, has an ample number of religious clubs). I hope this statement was just due to (extreme) incompetence on the end of the Campus Clubs department and can only hope that this is cleared up in the next short while. If not, it should be interesting (and depressing) to see a court case ensue due to this discrimination.

Why do I point all of this out? At the beginning of this term, at the first AAFW general meeting, one member asked what the point of the club was. He didn't think that discrimination was an issue. One of our other members (an ex-Muslim), told the story of how one of his friends had told him "You should die" for leaving Islam, and then never spoken to him again. The sad fact is, there is a lot of ignorance about atheism and intolerance towards atheists around the world, in Canada, and even here in Waterloo.