Greta Christina

Our beliefs affect our behavior towards others. And that makes ourbeliefs, not just a personal question, but an ethical one.

Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts. And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings.

Atheists_ anger doesn__ prove that we__e selfish, or joyless, or miserable. It shows that we have compassion, and a sense of justice. We__e angry because we see terrible harm all around us, and we feel desperately motivated to stop it.