You're being so negative!

::sigh::

I get this charge a lot, both in general..e.g....as theists accuse atheists of being "negative" in general, and also, sometimes in my personal life. Now, if anyone wants to attempt to convince me how making a conscious effort to confront reality head-on at all costs is being "negative", we can start there, but in all seriousness, you've got your work cut out for you. I say right up front that I don't like false hope. Nope, 'no likey. Why? Simple---because it's false. Shit happens, and why shouldn't it happen? There is not one scrap of evidence that demons and devils cause shit to happen. When shit happens, wish-thinking isn't going to change the fact, and many times, wish-thinking can even cause more shit later on.

For those who believe that a god does all the good stuff and a devil causes all the shit, you are perfectly free to believe that, but here's a few things to consider: 1) blaming an invisible bad guy when shit happens takes focus off any viable solution to the problem, while conveniently deflecting responsibility in cases where  people actually cause shit to happen. 2) a world in which there is a devil and god causin' shit and fixin' shit, respectively, is totally indistinguishable from a world in which we sometimes get lucky, and other times, we get unlucky...aka "shit happens".

Now, how, pray-tell, is it being "negative" to accept and live in the simpler, much-more-likely "world"? One saves so much time and avoids so much potential aggravation by dealing with what's in front of them. If common sense - in conjunction with things like logic and reason - tell you that something ain't right, then we owe it to ourselves to accept and confront that "something". Seriously, if we cannot trust our own ability to reason, then we've essentially got nothing. To do the polar opposite of using common sense - that is, to look for ways to reconcile utter nonsense - is to do ourselves a disservice. But yet, trusting our reasoning abilities makes us "negative" and "pessimists" according to some. Sad, but true.

I'd like to conclude with the following analogy:

If an alcoholic overcame their drinking dependency and he or she started a blog - say, a blog both to raise awareness to the disease and also as a form of self-therapy - who on earth would have the cajones to call him or her "negative"? How is this analogous to anything, you might ask?  Here's how: I have stopped be dependent on religion, namely, my inherited, Christian beliefs. I am now free to actually use my brain to its fullest potential.(negative?). I no longer believe that someone is watching me 24/7, listening in on my every flippin' thought.(negative?) I try to be good for goodness sake, despite that I am not perfect at this and have made many mistakes.(negative?) I have spoken very frankly about things on this blog(and at times, on Facebook) because I know that there people out there just like me who have honest doubts about what they were taught to believe, but yet, they are too afraid to question it, simply because they are taught to not question it.  Well, I feel that I am giving these people real hope, where their "faith" and/or their church might be giving them false hope, which is the equivalent of none at all.