Dear Whoever You Are,

Normally speaking I don t send email to strangers. I find it easier to cope with my reality if I just pretend other people don t exist until I m confronted with their actual physical manifestation. Nothing exists until I say it does. Ego-centric and blatantly untrue? Probably. But, it works for me, so what s a girl to do?

I appreciate your site for the purpose it was intended. It s amusing and informative. Even so, I had no intention of emailing you to validate your existence. It was enough for me that you probably had some notion that you existed and had no need to know I existed and we could be content in our mutual apathy and unfamiliarity with each other.

Then, I started to read your blog. I started just reading in chronological order and then I got bored with all the overly intellectual philosophical talk. Being perfectly happy in my own loosely structured lack of belief system, I didn t really care to read and re-read the finer points of whether or not Atheists need/want/should have a code. I felt like rounding up every person who emailed you whinging about that and clubbing them to death with a baby seal. The site is supposed to be funny! It really does go to show that stupidity doesn t breed itself out of the species fast enough. You are no more trying to set commandments for Atheists than you are seriously expecting every person who sees the site to become an insta-Atheist. It would be awesome if your Mutant power was to make every person who read your words suddenly develop a brain but by the quality of email you receive, we can see that s clearly not the case.

So, I decided to skip over the intent pseudo-intellectual debate you were having with the mewling masses and my eyes fell on a specific tag: Hate Mail. I clicked it, because I was curious and no matter how we tell ourselves we re better human beings, we all seem to look when we see a car wreck on the freeway. And then, I started to read. The first few made me laugh. But as I progressed, especially where I got to the part where the monkeys some how managed to bang out against the keyboard their wishes to see you raped and put in the kitchen, I got sincerely sick to my stomach and the heart I pretend not to have truly went out to you. And I knew I had to say something.

Even if you don t really read this (it s long, you probably skim, I know I would) even if you just catch a word or two, I know how easy it is to let negativity like that impact you. It s easy to pretend to be tough and that it doesn t hurt but the fact that there are morons in the world willing to hide behind the internet to show their true ugly inner selves, it hurts the entire species as a whole. I don t know you, but you seem amusing and of a respectable amount of intelligence. You need to know the whole world isn t made of assholes. There are good and bad people of every religious inclination and perspective. Your site is great, keep up the good work. As to the good old boys and their backwoods negativity, I say hold your head up high and scream fuck you in their general direction. Darwin knows it s the nearest those morons will ever come to fucking someone who is not their third cousin.

Thank you so much for this insightful (and very well written) note. I read every word of every e-mail I get – no skimming! – and you're right that the weight of negativity gets burdensome at times. That's part of the reason why there are often long periods of time when I don't respond to e-mails – I sometimes have too much going on to let my self get distracted, no matter how much I love working on this site.

As for yelling obscenities, although I appreciate the sentiment, I'm more of a "hot bath + good book = letting morons blow away" person.