Thank you for reading, by the way!

My own issue with it is that there’s an assumption that you may assert anti-theistic beliefs, only to serve up your own anti-theistic ends, but not assist in combating islamophobia, anti-semitism, and the like. The subject in question is not expected to act on instances of bigotry and resentment, and why would he? He already assigned himself the title of innately opposing the practice of worshipping a god.

“Anti-theism” in and of itself isn’t necessarily such a bad position to have, but that’s only setting the bar so low because the alternative would be ethnonationalism and we really don’t want that. What anti-theism does however, is that it allows a brand of complacency and complicity to run rampant. For white people to absolve themselves of the responsibility to better their surroundings and their own communities against the incumbent and not-so-subtle threat of islamophobia. The only people, who I had the pleasure of talking to, who’d allow for parades and marches telling me, and other people to go back to where we came from, are anti-theists, and fundamentalist Christians. That’s mainly for the fact that *they* occupy a superior role in the social hierarchy, and are afforded to have the comfort of rejecting to be involved and informed about the issues that plague the Muslim community in the West.

So while I completely understand your comment, and while it makes some pretty poignant points about the double-sided nature of calling out Islamophobia, what I’m not doing, is denying atheists the freedom to deny the existence of a God. What I’m however denying them, is the passive, or active recourse against the act of worshipping a deity. That’s why being an atheist, or an agnostic, is a much more palpable position than being “anti-theist”, something the OP could have easily expressed without putting their support for oppressed religious minorities into question.