This is your good luck to not be born in Afganistan , Saudi Arabia , Sudan or anywhere in between. If you are born into Islam ,or convert to it, it is death to leave it and if you are late to prayers there is a guy with a stick whose job it is to make you more aware of your duty.
Well, that is a positive happenstance for me and had I been born in one of those countries who can say that I would have become an atheist? Perhaps I would have become a Christian or a Buddhist. Who can say?
But to address your point, while it is true that there are nearly zero churches, synagogues or mosques in the US that have a literal death clause as part of its religious logistics and none that I have heard of with a guy with a stick, surely you won't deny that there are other, less physical surely, but just as scarring forms of coercion and retribution in American forms of religious practice.
Again, I can and will only draw on my own experience with religion to exhibit my points.
(An aside: For what it is worth, I will offer this clarification and consolation. My real venom and vitriol is directed at the idea and practice of religions. A god hold no more weight with me than Santa Claus or the Boogeyman. My disagreement and disdain is for those who perpetrate and abuse those false figures in order to control and enslave their children. The Dobsons, the Falwells, the Hinns, the Donohues, the Bushs, the types who would fill a person's head with nonsense then insist they pass the nonsense on to their progeny. Over the years, a few have suggested that I had "God" for my lot in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. As an atheist, how could I blame something that doesn't even exist for anything especially the one thing I have the most control over? It's ludicrous and a specious argument. Religion is the true affront.)
Back to the coercion point: As a pre-teen and teenager in the south, attending churches of varied flavors with a mother trying to find stability for her two children and herself, I was subjected to any number of fears. For a long time, I was afraid that if I didn't get up the nerve to go down and get saved one Sunday morning, I would suffer several horrible fates. My friends would not want to be my friends anymore. My mother would be ashamed of me and worse, nag me about it. And, in some abstract way, I sort of feared going to hell. And to flip it, I feared that if I did go down and get saved and then baptized, I might somehow be found out that I didn't believe in "God". I never imagined that the waters in the baptismal would burst into flames or anything but that there might be some kind of questioning in which I might be asked to describe my love for Jesus or something and I wouldn't be able to fake it.
Then, of course, there was the worry that my dad, who was Church of Christ (yeah, I know), would give me grief about getting baptized at the Baptist church.
So, please, don't insult our intelligence by suggesting that US religions are so much more tolerant than Muslim ones. What's even worse, in my opinion, is the conundrum I face as an atheist and a parent.
Put yourself in this pair of shoes: I'm an atheist who feels that religion is a form of slavery that forces you to believe in something that isn't real by telling you that there is something wrong with you if you DON'T believe that unreal something. Now, do I work to pass that idea on to my son and make the decision for him hoping that he doesn't rebel against that teaching as a teenager thus making him a member of one of the smallest and most hated minorities in America OR do I simply give him my opinion and let him make it for himself as a teenager and hope that he doesn't feel the coercion and corralling of peer pressure and buy into the fallacy in order to belong to some majority and continue to spread the fallacy?
It is agonizing at times. I'm not forced to sit in the back of the bus. No one sprayed me with a fire hose but it is going to be a long, hard row to hoe.
I olden times those who lived in Islamic territory and were not Muslim were made Dimmi and paid a secial tax , got secial scorn . This is looked on as the good times by many Muslims of the present , but very few Christians want to return to the old days of Church surpremicy with it's consequent perpetual cycle between war and repression.
The US has alwas been tolerant of its minority Athiests, every village had one.
Regarding the special tax: Come on. My local housing taxes were given to two churches here in Memphis recently to do "preservation work" which, if I remember right, consisted of most landscaping. Clearly, a violation of the idea of church and state.
Regarding special scorn: I've gotten lots of scorn from theists. It's usually couched in cute coinages like "The US has alwas been tolerant of its minority Athiests, every village had one. "
Regarding the alleged tolerance of atheists: Yes, the oh so benevolent tolerance for atheists. Check out the delicious tolerance from this FOX NEWS anchor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JrEOPTuifs True none have been killed for being atheists (that I can think of off the top of my head) in the US but, please, be honest, does anyone really want to simply have their views "tolerated"? The point could be made that I tolerate religious beliefs but what choice do I have? I have no financial, political majority to get my back and force my beliefs into the mainstream.
In some ways, I can understand how African-Americans still cling to the idea that racism is everywhere because to not point out even the most benign of racist actions is to allow for a slippery slope. Did Imus really hate black people when he said what he said? Of course, not. He made the same mistake that I have made, in that being around certain groups and being accepted by them, it is possible to riff with them in the same lingo and attitudes that would not be acceptable outside of the situation or more directly, would certainly be open to misinterpretation by others who were not aware of said riffing. But African-Americans should have made an issue of his comments (and many, many others' comments) because it insinuated that it was ok to call black women nappy-headed hoes on national radio and have a good laugh. (Although I think Sharpton really took it too far to insist on Imus being fired but that's the norm for Sharpton and his ilk. Get everything you can.)
In that same way, as sirs laughingly pointed out, I am forced, yes forced, to use money every day that espouses something that not every American believes. A majority? Surely. But that is still an example of the tyranny of the majority in a realm that the state has no reason whatsoever to enforce and that is why it should be stamped out and harped on because it leads to the slippery slope to religious tyranny.
For all their wailing and gnashing of teeth about using government as a tool for the greater good of all, the right sure loves to brand government with their personal beliefs and worrying about how the government reflects their beliefs such as "America is a christian nation." America is no more a christian nation than Chex Mix is a pretzel snack. (Ironically, I'm not a fan of pretzels either. lol)
