<<<I would have been happy to have you at the
bus stop distributing your atheist literature, too.
I have no fear of your ideas. But you seem to
have a great deal of fear of mine. That tells me
much.>>>
That calls to mind Anatole France's remark that the law in all its majesty forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.
That is a safe platitude for you to issue, and empty, too; and in so far as it isn't empty, it is undeservedly self-congratulatory. I spent my childhood being barraged (in the public school and elsewhere) with your ideas and every time I turn on the radio there they are again. How often have you heard anyone but that media-exhibitionist psycho, the late, rebarbative Madalyn Murray O'Hair, giving the atheist position?; and how often is the TV wall-to-wall Christian evangelists? (My husband even buys the Bible Review, LOL!) Neither you nor your children have been barraged with the ideas of freethinkers, while freethinkers live in a veritable blitz of yours.
And of course since freethinkers are not proposing to insinuate their ideas, and literature, and heroes, into the schools, it is quite safe indeed for you to make a claim of even-handness, openmindedness!-- especially since your definition of atheist ideas being promulgated in a public school is simply theist ideas not being promulgated there.
You get little credit for openmindedness, I think.
You may think it impressive that you would be happy to have me distribute atheist literature at the school bus stop where the Christians were going to distribute theirs, but I hope you do not pretend that your (stated) view is that of most theists. When I called a local radio station proposing to do just that, I assure you there was frothing at the mouth; and the Christians' plan was never heard of again. |
