In which I am cheesed off at a certain breed of atheist.

or, when Dan Savage made me angry.

Backstory: I was listening to the podcast from a couple weeks ago, and Dan was catching hell from a blogger who had taken issue with a *previous* podcast talking about female ejaculation. Fine, all well and good. The blogger in question — I’ve forgotten her name — is apparently an out and proud atheist which is fine; Dan is also an out and proud atheist. Fine. Given the way he’s talked about the conflicts between religion and sexuality for him in his early life, I’m not surprised.

This caller had a question about her boyfriend who was being inducted into a Wiccan coven and was being told he had to get naked and kiss someone, and the caller was asking if it was cheating. After answering the question by saying, essentially, “It depends on how you define cheating,” Dan and his guest then devolved into a discussion about how silly religion was and how silly people were who left a religion because their religion was overly harsh towards GLBT folks, and so they went and found another silly religion that was nicer to GLBT folks so they could carry on believing in Santa Clause.

I get where the frustration comes from. I hear my fellow theists (and I am defining “fellow” here as similarly liberal, or even conservative-but-sane Christians, not assholes like Fred Phelps) speaking about atheists in really derogatory ways. Saying that people have a God-shaped hole in them, and whatnot. That’s as crappy as saying that a lesbian just needs a good deep dicking, or that someone who is clinically depressed needs to just “get over it.”

There are people out there who state to me that they do not feel the presence of God in their lives. Fine. What can I do but believe them? How can I be so presumptuous and rude to believe that I know where they are in their journey, how DARE I stand up and say “I know better than you what your state of being is.” How would that be any different than the so-called friend who once told me that I was leaving my partner of five years because — well, his actual words were lewd enough that I’d rather not admit them to the public record.

The Bible says, in no uncertain words, that I am not to judge others. People hedge that, say it only applies to this person or that person — I like to take the red words at their face value. Judge not, lest ye shall be judged, says The Man, and I try to listen to that.

I get that I seem to be the exception to the rule, at least in the eyes of my atheist and agnostic friends. But I know when I tend to get pushy and frustrated is when my very strong and incredibly powerful belief is called silly.

When I started writing this, I thought I’d have some grand point to make — some drum to hit, some call to sanity for both sides of the aisle. It would have something to do with how there will never be peace between “us” and “them” until we can agree to disagree AND respect each others positions without denigrating them. But it turns out that I don’t have a neat turn of phrase to explain how I think we all just need to respect each other, and not make broad statements about how each of us relates to the universe, because that is such a hugely personal thing.

I feel like I should be asking someone to dessine-moi un mouton.