Naked Emperor: Why Believers Are So Threatened By Non-belief

In the US, there's been a lot of very public press for Atheist/Agnostic/Skeptical/Etc. groups lately, and it's got some folks really bothered. I'm sure you've heard of the various billboard, print, and airplane banner campaigns, and the resistance they've faced. Letters are written, billboards are defaced, stores are boycotted, pilots won't fly, and rambling, illogical editorials are showing up in papers and online.

The *less* irrational ones say things like, "Why can't they keep their beliefs to themselves?", "Children might read that!", or "Freedom of religion means we shouldn't have them trying to convert us!" The downright crazy ones, which of course far outnumber the first set by ten to one, say things like "Those damned atheists know they're going to Hell, and they want to take us with them!", "We should round these unAmerican basterds[sic] up and have them shot", or my personal favorite: "Almighty God, we pray that you unleash your wrath on these Satan worshiping garbage."

The irony is that, for the most part, these advertisements have been almost entirely innocuous, containing messages like "Are you good without god? Millions are.", "Don't believe in God? Join the Club.", and "You don't need God - to hope, to care, to love, to live." These are obviously messages of outreach and hope for other non-believers, not attacks on believers, yet they garner exactly the same vile, hateful, completely irrational responses as the more aggressively themed ones, like, "You KNOW they're all scams!"

These stories have been bothering me a lot. I haven't been able to understand how these inoffensive messages could provoke such rabid over-reactions. There's a whole laundry list of logical reasons why religious people shouldn't care about atheists advertising to other atheists:

• These are obviously *not* intended as attack messages.
• They are exactly the same kind of message hundreds of religious organizations put in these same places every year, but Christians aren't so offended when the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. do it.
• Shouldn't religious believers *best* understand how important the freedom of religion and freedom of speech are? It's how they get to believe whatever it is they do without interference.
• Even assuming these were much more aggressive messages, don't most of their religions try to convert others to their "one, true faith" virtually every day?

So I started thinking about something a psychologist once said to me. He told me, "The thing you have to realize is that every one of us always makes the most logical decision, but it is based on the information, thoughts, and feelings inside our heads, not on the real world." In other words, even the craziest of crazies is acting rationally, to him. If you want to understand why any particular person seems to be acting irrationally, you need to understand the hidden processes in their head. It makes sense. How many times have you seen a friend do something ridiculous or illogical-seeming, only to find out, upon questioning, that she had a very good reason for doing exactly that, but either was in possession of knowledge you were not, at the time, or simply had an otherwise reasonable personal preference that constricted her available choices to the actions you just observed?

I started working backward. The religious overreactors seem to be lashing out because they feel threatened (or that their children are threatened, etc.). This brings up two questions; a) Why would they feel threatened by a non-believer's simple statement of his own existence? and b) Why are they apparently more threatened by non-believers that by people of other faiths?

I think the answer to both questions is self-doubt. They take their identity and emotional support from their religion, so they feel as though they will lose their identity and support if it is wrong. It's all a question of degree. Non-belief is saying that their emperor has no clothes, but the other religions only argue over how He is invisibly dressed.

Other faiths don't bother them as much as non-belief because if they are wrong, and someone who believes in another faith is right, their identity and support don't have so far to fall, as most religions have all the basics in common. I'd love to see a study done on how badly religious folk react to statements of existence from different religions, categorized by *how* different that other faith was from their own. I'll bet there would be a linear relation between similarity of belief and acceptance.

So I think that's it. Our lack of belief threatens their identity, period. The content of the messages we send to the public don't matter, because any message at all informs them of the simple fact that we exist, and the knowledge of that existence makes their identity feel threatened. To them, we represent a gaping hole in their worldview that they fear they will fall into, and this particular hole has no bottom. The worst part is that since even the most rational among us have a natural tendency to believe that the more people believe something, the more likely it is to be true. Therefore, the more public we become, the more of us there seem to be, and the more it seems we might be right, pushing them that much closer to the edge of that hole!

I'm sure the vast majority of believers have no idea this is the case on a conscious level, but it's there, informing their decisions from the inside, making it the most "logical" decision to see us as a real threat that needs to be hidden from ("Why can't they just keep it to themselves?"), defeated ("Ha ha, those damned atheists know they're going to Hell!"), or destroyed ("We should round these unAmerican basterds up and have them shot").

Anyone care to comment?