anecdote-from the archives...

I originally wrote this post about four months ago and unfortunately, I have no idea what post I was trying to link to, but I just re-read this and thought I'd post it. I liked it well enough:

I've been thinking a lot lately about a specific anecdote from my life that I think should be quite easy to extrapolate to general life. Let's see if I can express it in words.

There have been a few times in my life where I worked with or around glory-hounds. People who take credit for other people's work, don't really care about the quality of whatever work they did manage to do when they weren't sucking up to whomever they could and in general, just annoying everyone around them-especially the antithesis of a glory hound, the hard-worker. I like to think that I fall into this second category. For the most part, I like to share credit, even sometimes overly so, and/or to my detriment. I also, for the most part, am very humble about my own accomplishments, hard work, etc.

Now, second thing I've been thinking about lately. (Don't worry, I hopefully will be connecting these in about a paragraph.)

Believers (read: Delusionals) like to claim that atheists (or any shade of non-believer) don't care about our fellow humans. They like to say that we are incapable of caring because we are heathens, etc. (Actually, there's multiple arguments-all shitty ones-about why we apparently don't give a shit about anyone but ourselves, but I don't really need to put them all here and knock them down. I think you're all with me.) One of the things I've been thinking about lately is the fact that there aren't any prominent atheist charities. What I mean to say is, there's no atheist equivalent (at least I'm not aware of any) to say, Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. I just threw a few out there, but hopefully you get my meaning. So then I thought, well, ok then, maybe we should start an atheist charity.

Then, along comes this post and makes me see the error of my ways. It's not that atheists don't care about their fellow humans (I know, shocking, isn't it?) It's that we're not glory hounds about it. You never hear of doctors running around saying, "It's a good thing I'm an atheist AND was able to heal you!" or scientists saying, "All I do, I do in the name of godlessness." So, perhaps (and I would say almost certainly) a huge portion of the "good being done for humanity" gets done in some quiet, hard-working, day in and day out, humble, "Aw, shucks, m'am, just doin' my job" kinda way.

ARGH...in my head, it makes a lot more sense. Somebody help me out here. What am I trying and failing to say?

Update for Feb 08: Berzlebub's 3M project for Pmomma, and everyone who contributed makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I'm glad we non-believers (and a few believers) can come together and do good for fellow humans. Perhaps the next time people use that whole "atheists are self centered heathens" thing, we can all point to this project and say, "SEE?? We're not heartless!"