Since When Did Atheists Become the High Priests of Everyone Else’s Beliefs?

An Anthropologist’s Indictment of Arrogant Unbelief

There’s a certain type of “rational” person infesting comment sections and videos these days. You know the profile:

• quotes a bit of pop‑science and philosophy,
• sneers at “sky daddy” and “imaginary friends”,
• calls believers idiots, brainwashed, or mentally ill,
• talks as if his personal conclusion about God is a universal law.

He’s not just saying, “I don’t believe.”
He’s saying, “Because I don’t believe, you must be stupid.”

My first question, as an anthropologist, is very simple:

Where do you get off?
Who appointed you inspector of eight billion inner worlds?

This is not a defense of every religious institution or every interpretation of scripture. It is a direct attack on the arrogance of those who think their unbelief gives them the right to own everyone else’s mind.

Opinion Is Not Authority: Who Gave You the Throne?

Every human on this planet carries a worldview. A story in their head about:

• what life is,
• what matters,
• what death means,
• whether anything holds this together.

One person says: “I see God, purpose, and a moral structure behind this.”
Another says: “I see no God, just matter, chance, and human stories.”

Fine. Two positions. Two interpretations.

The problem starts when the atheist jumps from:

• “This is how I see it”

to:

• “This is how it is, and you must be an idiot not to agree.”

Suddenly, his personal judgment is treated like a court ruling on reality. He isn’t just sharing his view; he’s judging billions of others as childish or insane for not sharing it.

From an anthropological perspective, this is not “rationality”.
It is cultural arrogance dressed up as science.

Disagreeing with religion is one thing.
Installing yourself as bishop of other people’s minds is another.

“Religion Is Stupid”? People Like You Wrote Those Scriptures

Here’s what the “smart” mocker forgets:

• The same species that gave us the scientific method, medicine, and technology
• is the species that wrote the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist sutras, indigenous myths, and mystical poetry.

All of it. The observatories and the monasteries. The labs and the temples.

If you trust human minds enough to accept their data about black holes, DNA, and vaccines, you cannot suddenly treat human minds as sub‑human the moment they write about God, justice, suffering, and hope.

You can say: “I think they are wrong about God.”
You don’t get to say: “Anyone who believes any of this is an idiot.”

And yes, history is soaked in blood where religion has been weaponized. Millions have been killed “in the name of God”.

But again: who did the killing?

• Not angels.
• Not demons.
• Humans.

The same species that built gas chambers under explicitly atheist regimes.
The same species that used “scientific racism” to justify slavery.
The same species that used Christian language to bless colonization and extraction.

If you want to dump every religious crime at the feet of “religion”,
be honest and also dump every atheist crime at the feet of atheism,
every nationalist crime at the feet of the nation,
and every scientific abuse at the feet of science.

An honest anthropologist doesn’t cherry‑pick. We track how humans weaponize whatever story they hold—religious or secular.

“They Gave Us a Bible and Took the Gold”: When Religion Was Never Free

There’s a scene that has played out on continents across the globe:

• The ships arrive.
• Flags are planted.
• The colonizers step ashore carrying two things: a Bible and a property system.

The pattern repeats:

• We were given sermons, sacraments, and salvation stories.
• In return, they took:
  • gold, diamonds, ivory, rubber, oil,
  • land, bodies, and labor.

Was this an honest exchange of values?
Was it a free spiritual marketplace: “your God, my God, let’s decide”?

Not even close.

In many colonized societies:

• Land was ancestral, communal, sacred—not a commodity.
• Resources were part of a shared life system, not a stock portfolio.
• Social structures emphasized mutual care, not individual hoarding.

The greed system and property‑grab logic came with the colonizers. Along with their theology.

Conversion was rarely a clean spiritual choice. It was tangled with:

• access to schooling, protection, and legal standing;
• escape from punishment, dispossession, or death.

Faith was not offered on a neutral table.
It rode in on gunboats, with laws and mining contracts attached.

From Forced Conversion to “It Was All Nonsense”: The Double Betrayal

It was not only land and gold that were taken.
People were taken.

Men, women, and children were captured, shipped, and sold. In the process they were:

• stripped of identity,
• torn from family,
• cut off from language and ancestral memory,
• punished for their original religions and rituals,
• forbidden to practice their own ways of honoring the sacred.

And what was put in their place?

• The master’s religion.
• The colonizer’s God, scriptures, and doctrines.
• Forced attendance at church, forced catechism, religious names, religious laws.

For hundreds of years, across plantations and colonies, people were told:

• Your ancestors are “pagan” or demonic.
• Your gods are false.
• Your rituals are evil.
• Your identity is savage and must be erased.
• Your only hope, and the only truth, is in our book, our Christ, our church.

There was nothing “free” about this.
The Bible was not politely offered; it was driven down people’s throats, backed by whips, chains, and law.

Now look at the irony.

Centuries later, in the same broad cultural stream that:

• enslaved,
• stripped identity,
• destroyed ancestral religions,
• and replaced them with its own version of Christianity,

we now have a wave of “enlightened” voices standing up to say:

• “Actually, the Bible isn’t true.”
• “These stories don’t add up scientifically.”
• “The miracles are impossible.”
• “It’s all a man‑made hoax.”

First, your forefathers told us that everything we were was wrong,
that our gods were lies, that our ancestors were ignorant,
and that salvation could only come through their book.

They used that book to justify chains, ships, and plantations.

Now, after centuries of exploiting our bodies, labor, and lands,
the same system, through its “rational” advocates, informs us that
the book they forced on us is also nonsense.

So we are expected to accept a double message:

1. “Your original beliefs and ancestors were worthless.”
2. “The religion we forced on you is also worthless—silly myths, bad history, impossible miracles.”

Behind that, the real message is simple and brutal:

“Only we—the modern, secular descendants of empire—
are qualified to tell you what is real and what is not.”

From an anthropological point of view, this is not just hypocrisy.
It is a double betrayal.

So when a modern “smart” atheist, raised inside this long chain of power, lectures the descendants of the enslaved and colonized about how “nothing in that Bible is true”, there is a history standing behind that statement.

It isn’t just about abstract arguments.
It’s about a civilization that:

• took people,
• took land,
• took identity,
• took ancestral gods,
• forced a new faith as the only truth,

and now turns around and declares:

“By the way, that faith is also just a lie. Grow up. Join us in our enlightened emptiness.”

At that point, the question is no longer only, “Is this behavior arrogant?”
The question becomes:

How many times do you think you can strip a people of meaning,
before you lose the right to tell them what they are allowed to believe?

“In God We Trust”: The God You Laugh At Still Stamps Your Money

There is one more piece of hypocrisy we have to talk about.

Take a U.S. dollar. Any dollar. Look at it closely.

Right there, on the most powerful currency in the world, issued by the most powerful state of our time, you will find four words:

IN GOD WE TRUST.

This is not some ancient relic hidden in a museum. It is on:

• every note that changes hands,
• every symbol of global value and power,
• every line of money that moves through the world economy.

If “God” is absolutely nothing—
if the idea of God is just a childish fantasy with no weight, no meaning, no reality—
then why is that word printed on the central icon of trust and value of a supposedly “rational”, modern nation?

It’s not because economists needed decoration.
It’s because even in the heart of a hyper‑material system,
people know that money alone is not enough to legitimate power.

The same cultural space that:

• prints “In God We Trust” on its money,
• swears witnesses in court with “so help me God”,
• has politicians end speeches with “God bless America”,

is also home to loud voices telling believers:

• “God is a joke,”
• “your faith is stupid,”
• “grow up, face reality.”

When ordinary people in pain reach for God,
when they open a Bible or whisper a prayer to survive another day,
they are not doing anything stranger than what those institutions do when they stamp “In God We Trust” on the most powerful instrument of value on earth.

The difference is simple:

• They invoke God because they are trying to stay human.
• You invoke God because you want your money and courts to feel legitimate.

From an anthropological point of view, this is not proof that God exists.
It is proof that even the most “scientific” and “advanced” societies still lean on God—symbolically, politically, emotionally—when they want to ground what matters most to them.

When the same civilization that used Christian language to colonize,
and printed God on its money to stabilize trust,
now laughs at ordinary believers for trusting in God,
we are not looking at superior intelligence.

We are looking at a system that thinks only its own use of God is respectable—on court oaths, on army ceremonies, on national currency—but everyone else’s use of God is stupidity.

Congratulations: Your “No‑God” Narrative Is Just Another Cult

The militant atheist complains:

• “Religions are cults. They tell people what life means and demand conformity.”

Then what does he do?

• Tells you life is only chemistry and chance.
• Tells you your faith is delusion.
• Tells you “rational people” must see things his way.
• Mocks and shames you for not aligning your inner world to his narrative.

That is not neutrality.
That is not humble doubt.
That is someone preaching a different doctrine.

In structural terms, that’s a cult:

• clear belief system about reality,
• clear in‑group / out‑group (“rational us, brainwashed them”),
• strong drive to convert or humiliate dissenters.

You haven’t escaped religion. You’ve re‑created one.

You’ve simply changed the scripture (science articles, Reddit threads, YouTube videos), changed the liturgy (sarcasm, memes, edgy one‑liners), and enthroned your own mind as the final authority.

7

Eight Billion Worlds: You Don’t Own Anyone’s Inner Universe

Every serious anthropologist knows this:

There are roughly eight billion worlds walking on this planet. Eight billion individual consciousnesses, each with:

• a different upbringing,
• different wounds and loves,
• different experiences of death, luck, injustice, mystery.

Two Christians do not “believe the same” in identical detail.
Two atheists do not.
Two people reading the same verse or the same physics paper do not experience it the same way.

We live not in one flat mental landscape, but in billions of overlapping, shifting interpretive worlds.

Scriptures do not erase this. Atheist manifestos do not erase this.
Each person still has to translate those words into their private inner language.

To look at eight billion unique interpreters of reality
and declare that only your way of seeing is sane
is not science. It’s narcissism.

You are entitled to your worldview.
You are not entitled to own anyone else’s.

What Business Is It of Yours What Another Human Believes?

Put all the academic games aside and ask one simple question:

What business is it of yours if another human wants to believe in a tree, in the sun, in the stars, in Muhammad, in Christ, in Buddha, in a stone, in a statue, or in a God you reject?

As long as that person:

• is not violating your rights,
• is not attacking you or forcing you to worship,
• is not trying to legislate away your freedom—

what exactly is your stake in their inner life?

The basic principle of any serious human‑rights framework is this:

• Every human being is born free in body, mind, and soul.
• Each has the right:
  • to think what they want,
  • to believe in what they want,
  • to live according to that belief,
• with one clear limit: their actions must not infringe on the rights of others.

If a man kneels before a tree and prays, it costs you nothing.
If a woman lights a candle to Christ or chants a mantra, that is not an assault on you.
If an elder speaks to the ancestors or a child whispers to the stars, that is their inner universe, not yours.

The moment you cross from:

“I disagree,”

to:

“You must not believe this, you are an idiot, shut up, wake up, abandon your faith,”

you’re no longer just expressing an opinion. You are attacking their right to self‑determination of mind and soul.

You are effectively saying:

• “Your mind does not belong to you.”
• “Your soul may not orient itself as it chooses.”
• “I will decide which beliefs are allowed.”

From an anthropological and ethical perspective,
that kind of behavior begins to border on criminality,
because it runs against the foundation of freedom of conscience.

If you truly believe in freedom, it must include freedom of conscience:

• freedom to believe in God,
• freedom to reject God,
• freedom to worship a tree, a stone, a star, or a story you do not like—

as long as no one’s rights are violated.

An Anthropologist’s Diagnosis: Too Much Time, Not Enough Insight

When I see someone spending hours online, day after day, hunting down religious content just to write degrading, insulting comments, one thing becomes obvious:

This is not the behavior of a person at peace with reality.

Ask yourself honestly:

• If you were deeply engaged in building a good life—meaningful work, authentic relationships, inner growth—would you really have the time and energy to patrol the internet, sneering at strangers because they pray or read a Bible?
• Would your priority be to prove, again and again, how much smarter you are than “the religious”?

From where I stand as an anthropologist, this compulsive need to attack believers reveals:

• an identity that is fragile without an enemy,
• a mind more interested in being right than being grounded,
• a life that may be empty enough that it needs the drama of online war to feel significant.

You don’t have to believe in God.
But if all you can do with your time is tear down people who do,
the central question is not “What is wrong with religion?”
The central question is: What is missing in you?

10

Believe, Don’t Believe – But Stop Playing God Over Other Minds

This is not a sermon asking everyone to become religious. It is a demand for basic honesty and respect.

You are free:

• to believe there is no God,
• to treat scriptures as literature,
• to critique doctrines,
• to expose abuse and hypocrisy in religious institutions.

You are not free—if you want to call yourself ethical—to pretend your personal interpretation of existence makes you the judge of eight billion souls.

That is not “science”.
That is exactly the kind of spiritual arrogance you claim to hate in religion.

If you truly oppose cults, then stop behaving like the high priest of your own anti‑religion. Live your life. Hold your view. Argue your case like an adult when asked.

But let other human beings walk their path without needing your sarcastic “blessing.”

From an anthropological point of view, one thing is clear:

You think you are analyzing believers.
But the way you treat them is the clearest evidence of what you really believe—about freedom, about dignity, and about your own place in the universe.

And on that evidence, it is not the believer who should be ashamed.