The Frightened Atheists

I envy the gays and the lesbians. Decades ago, they were laughed at, threatened, insulted, maltreated, ostracized, frightened, beaten, tortured, lynched, burned, and hanged. But they stood their ground to vigorously fight hatred and bigotry. Today, the gays and lesbians are the accepted parts of mainstream society. They are in government as politicians, in church as priests and nuns, in trade and commerce as businessmen and businesswomen, in schools, colleges, and universities as teachers and professors, creative artist in the advertising industry, actors and actresses in the film industry, golly they are even loved moms and respected dads raising decent children. Except the frightened atheists. We are still behaving like a bunch of intimidated freaks. Instead of evolving publicly; we would rather be recoiling privately. We are still afraid to expose the power of knowledge that got us to be atheists to begin with. We are still hiding inside the dark closet. For Christ’s sake, there are even existing atheist today who are famous authors, lawyers, educators, philosophers, and scientists but they are among the first idiots to intimidate fellow atheist not to identify our true identity in public as “atheist.” After all, they insists: the word “atheist” connotes something of a criminal, if not some kind of an animal. In this 21st century, we atheists are left out like a bunch of crippled idiots in a quagmire stuck away from the decent struggle to promote tolerance for our rights to openly exist too. We continue to be frightened hiding under the pressure from those who enjoy exalting fear and fanaticism for and in this world that forever needs feeding. Poch Suzara - The Father of Atheism in the Philippines