They have many other exotic circumlocutions for addressing their saints. For example, they have precisely delineated how to talk about transsexuals and prostitutes. There are extensive A+ taboos dealing with gender interaction (anything involving elevators is right out). They have taboos against inadvertently offending the aged. Most delightful is the concept of the “trigger warning,” which warns the saints that they may find something unclean which may disturb their saintly A+ repose. Trigger warnings are required when expressing mild disagreement and remembering the former name-calling and disagreements listed in their exhaustive enemies lists. Such trigger warnings are not necessary when making holy war upon devils and witches such as heterosexual Christians. Since they are devils, their feelings are not important, and holy war brings joy to the saints. 

The A+ crowd is considered important by the credulous. It seems to me that they’re mostly interesting for being a pure strain, a seething petri dish of neurotic misery. It is of scientific interest to study this disease in its isolated form so vaccines and antitoxins can be developed. The pestilence embodied in the A+hole faith has already spread far and wide throughout Western Civilization. 

What emotional complex causes human beings to become wild-eyed totalitarian numskulls in the name of “sensitivity?” As with many religious beliefs, their ideas start with seething ressentiment. Unhappy people often blame others for their misery. Unworthy people come up with elaborate justifications for why it is everyone else’s fault. The old Christian formula of “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first” has been recycled in the guise of the “privilege” phlogiston. Their hurt feelings and oversensitive natures are now sacred relics among the faithful. It is status and power, at least among the faithful and chivalrous enablers, social goods otherwise denied to them due to fortune and poor choices in life. There are plenty of talentless, lazy dunderheads looking for a faith which accords them status for being malcontented slobs. 

While the A+holes do not constitute all of public atheism, the remainder is no better. Alpha atheist Dawkins thinks telling children about Jesus is worse than sexually molesting them. In the second tier you have attention-seeking primates such as PZ Myers desecrating a communion wafer and a Koran, and, to be fair, one of Dawkins’s books. It’s a performance about as edifying as flinging poo from the monkey cage. Myers is probably physiologically incapable of breaking actual atheist taboos, such as saying something which might be remotely construed as sexist or racist, no matter how true it might be. In the third tier of public atheists are idiots who sue the local city council for saying a prayer before meetings. I’d wish a plague on their houses, but all their houses are already asylums for the emotionally challenged.

I don’t believe in any gods, but the public evidence on display indicates that lack of belief isn’t worth bragging about, either. I can’t continue to call myself an atheist for fear someone will confuse me with unpleasant cartoon characters.

I think Rudyard Kipling had the right idea calling himself a “God-fearing Christian Atheist.” Until the Atheist Anti-Defamation League sends the present crop of public atheists to the stockade with tar and feathers, I’m going to call myself that. It beats being confused with an A+hole.