Please check out this guest post (warning: it contains NSFW language) by Jason Tippitt. Ideas expressed here do not necessarily represent my views or those held by any of my affiliates — or any of Jason’s affiliates for that matter, including ANTS, the Unitarian Universalist Association, or the American Ethical Union. I’m posting this because I believe it will provoke discussion while I’m off working on my book; hope you’re well, friends!

The Norway shootings were a last straw for me, though I think in retrospect I’ll see that this decision has been coming for a long time. I’m throwing my hat in with Chris Hedges and saying: I don’t believe in atheists.

Note: I am still an atheist, in that I do not believe in any particular deity. I am also an agnostic, in that I believe “knowledge” of a deity is impossible. I am also an Ethical Culture-influenced humanist — ethics are my religion — and a Unitarian Universalist, in that I seek to work with others who share my social and ethics and justice values despite whatever our differing cosmologies.

(A pause while certain people drop me from their Facebook and Google+ connections.)

As I said, this has been brewing for some time, I think. Attending graduate school at a liberal seminary — though I am not on a ministry-focused track and no one’s tried to proselytize me — has not so much changed my way of looking at the world in numerous ways as given me affirmation of what I already more or less quietly believed.

People are good or bad first, religious or nonreligious second. Sometimes religion motivates the goodness or the badness, but sometimes — perhaps a majority of the times — it’s used to rationalize the pre-existing tendencies. An altruist helps others because it is pleasing to God, or perhaps because it’s the way to make the most of the only existence we have. A greedy asshole withholds aid from others because their suffering is a sign of God’s displeasure or because Ayn Rand told him that service of the self is the highest goal.

Religion has brought us the Crusades and 9/11. Religion has brought us the march to Selma and Gandhi’s liberation of India. Atheism has brought us the philanthropy of Bill Gates and the heroic resistance efforts of Albert Camus. Atheism has brought us Stalin’s purges and (through the Randroids’ screw-the-poor policies) today’s impending economic disaster in the United States.

But mainly, it was the Norwegian shootings that tipped me over to this statement that I no longer believe in atheists. The creature who’s confessed to the attacks — and whose name I feel no need to type here and help glorify for history — was apparently a marginal Christian, but he was mainly an anti-leftist and an anti-Islamic bigot.

He didn’t quote “new atheist” Sam Harris in his manifesto, but he did quote ex-Muslim author and women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is another favorite of contemporary atheists. And he quoted a number of others who are popular with the contemporary atheist movement.

Radical Islam is dangerous, yes. And its abuses of women are to be condemned. But I can no longer associate myself with a movement that treats Muslims as guilty until proven innocent. Not when one of the finest people I’ve ever known, my high-school economics teacher (and husband to my fourth-grade teacher) is a Muslim (with a Christian wife, no less — and both politically left of center).

Nor can I any longer stomach the assumption that every Christian is a new-earth creationist who hates gay people. Nor do I care to hear every Jew treated as a radical Zionist who wishes death on all Palestinians, though I’m a critic of Israel’s Palestine policy myself.

For several consecutive days at Google+, in the wake of the Norway attacks, I ended up blocking someone from my circles there for sounding a hell of a lot like the Norwegian terrorist. “The Muslims brought this (presumption of guilt) on themselves,” one person said. No, and incidentally, fuck you, “the Muslims” did NOT bring this presumption on themselves — Islamists did it for them.

One of Aaron Sorkin’s smart White House people on The West Wing — I think it was Josh Lyman — said it right when he made the analogy that al-Qaida is to Islam as Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity. Reasonable people get the point — that each represents a small, utterly toxic, portion of a whole. But the atheists with whom I take issue are not reasonable people. They think that al-Qaida = Islam and Ku Klux Klan = Christianity.

The “Islam is inherently violent” (or any other religion) argument — or to say they’re inherently sexist, or whatever — misses the point that the majority of people of any religion do make interpretations and adapt themselves to a more modern, more enlightened perspective. There are people of any religious background who are fundamentalists and whose thinking is flawed — but the existence of Ayn Rand and her cult of personality (to name just one) shows that’s not limited to theists.

When legal issues of church-state separation come up, I’ll continue to spread the word. When human rights violations appear in the news, I’ll disseminate that information as well. But I’m making a massive pre-back-to-school purge of my Google+ and Facebook connections, looking at the atheist connections I have there.

If they have something constructive to say, they’ll stay. If it’s all “oh, these people all believe in talking snakes, aren’t they idiots?” and “look at what the savages did now,” they’re gone. My interest in playing “spot the contradictions of scripture that prove it can’t be read literally” ended the moment I realized that serious scholars of the various religions KNOW those contradictions are there and thus DO NOT TAKE THEM LITERALLY. In the pursuit of justice, I want to focus on people who aim to make things better, and I realize that takes cooperation — not marginalization. The grown-ups of the atheist community and the grown-ups of the religious community are largely all humanists in the classical sense — and largely agree on issues of justice and mercy and, you know, things that fucking matter.

Call me an accommodationist if you want. If you think I’m talking about you, I probably am. If you want to say goodbye before I get to you, have at it. To those who have been hurt by religion, I wish you peace and healing — but suggest, from my own personal experience with an angry deconversion experience, that not picking at the scabs might speed up the healing. There are other things to read and discuss and contemplate beside religious follies and felonies.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. If you’re always looking for people to label as part of the problem, you’re not part of the solution, which leads us back to … yeah, you see where it’s going.

(P.S.: Phil Ochs’ song “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” inspired the subject line, in case that was nagging in the back of your mind.)

Jason Tippitt is a Master of Arts candidate at Andover Newton Theological Seminary in Newton Centre, Mass. and a recovering journalist. A Tennessee native, he maintains a personal blog and a pop culture blog that may not be suitable for all audiences, and a Unitarian Universalist Podcasts blog that is.