Some things are best said by certain people. As an atheist, the following needs to be said by me for best effect.

Yes I am an atheist. I have been from one side of this world to another and don’t believe that there is any grand force determining my destiny. I have no belief in god, but I have to point out that the attacks on religion breaking out after the Paris attacks are not what I want to see.

People like to debate whether religion or atheist countries kill the most people. That is the wrong way of looking at the problem.

It isn’t religion per se. Nor is it atheism per se. The cause for most human misery is when some self important jerk comes to believe that he knows exactly what is best for all of humanity and that gives him (or them) the right to tell others what to do, what to think, how to dress, etc.

Can this be religious? Yes. Were Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, etc religious? No. They had their own form of belief, one that could be called a religion in its own right. This belief that they were the key to bringing utopia to the world led to the deaths of tens, maybe hundred of millions of people.

Right now, we are entering another period of fascism. It is something we as humans fall prey to from time to time. McCarthyism, the Salem Witch Trials and other cases show that from time to time people fall into the trap of group think and innocents are crushed beneath the wheels of the latest trend to save humanity from some sort of threat. We seem to have again reached a point where we have forgotten the lessons of history and are proving the truth to the saying, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Even South Park has picked up on this trend in our society.

With the attacks in Paris, those who dislike religion have jumped into action on places like social media to promote their message that religion is a threat and needs to be banished.

For one thing, I find this pretty vile for taking advantage of a this tragedy before we have even started burying most of the victims. For another, this is exactly the same type of thinking as the attackers from ISIS. They can’t stand a world in which there are people who think differently from them. They can’t stand people who make cartoons about their prophet and they kill them. And there are those who can’t stand the thought of people praying and seek to ban them.

When people start to push their religion on me, then I have a problem. I live in Colorado and it was only sometime when I was living in Japan that they started selling alcohol on Sunday here. There are still some Christians that think that is a bad idea, but their ideas have little sway in our secular society now. A significant number of muslims think that the first amendment should not cover mocking their religion, and some have tried to shoot up places that host such events. I have a problem with that too.

But if what you are doing has no direct impact on what I do, then I will give you the same respect I expect from you for not believing. It is not out of any great benevolence or love of religion that I want a society that gives people the right to believe differently from me. It is instead in my own self interest to build a society where no one can control what others think like that. I want a society where I can’t force my beliefs on others and they in turn can’t do the same to me.

When people try to suppress religion, they open the door to destroying that society I support. They never consider that the whip might fall from their hands and be picked up by someone else.

Protecting the rights of people to believe things we despise is not the most pleasant job in the world, but it is a vital task. We are losing that commitment to respecting others. As always in the past, the current trend toward fascism is clothed in the idea that there is a threat that can’t be allowed to live and individual rights stand in the way of making the world a perfect place to live.

As an atheist, I have no love for religion, but I will give my life in the defense of those that wish to worship in peace. To those that think their way of thinking has to be applied to everyone, you are my enemy.