Heathen, infidel, gentile, pagan, unbeliever, apostate, ungodly, godless, unholy, heretic, blasphemer, doomed, damned, cursed, condemned, satanic, of the devil, etc., etc.

That's the sort of abuse you'll hear from the mouths of religious bigots if you decide, in the name of all that is humanly decent, not to heed their hocus-pocus.

Religious bigots and fanatics assume they have an unquestionable monopoly on knowing what is right and wrong, true and false, natural and unnatural.  Some will go as far as to claim they're actually chosen by God. Seeing yourself as one of God's favourites logically implies that God doesn't favour others as much as God favours you and people like you. You either have an extraordinarily high opinion of yourself or a very low opinion of your God!

That sort of belief can easily make you think you have the divine right to treat others as lesser mortals. Trouble is that some of those others may have chosen to consider themselves chosen by another God. If they do they'll see you as lesser mortals in the same way as you look down on them. That's when the childish ignorance of the ‘My God can beat up your GodŽ syndrome sets in and people feel justified in causing each other harm in the name of their respective Gods.

This religious ignorance is childish, arrogant and destructive. It's arrogant not just towards the ‘lesser’ mortals but also, if you're a believer, towards whichever version of God is involved because in most religions no mortal can be permitted the arrogance of claiming exclusive rights on matters supposedly immortal.  

It's through such unilaterally declared divine right and superiority that humans find ridiculous justifications for committing attrocities like the holocaust, the Vietnam war, the exploitation of Latin American and Arab peoples in the hunt for profits, the killing of innocent civilians in suicide attacks, the bombing of innocent civilians in Lebanon and Gaza, etc. ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, ‘Gott mitt uns’, ‘holy war’, ‘crusade’, ‘jihad’, ‘God's chosen people’, ‘promised land’, etc.  The abracadabra-hocus-pocus magic knows no bounds. Give us a break!

Fanatics (e.g. right-wing Christians, Jihadists and Zionists) should all remember that the only guarantee for religious freedom is, as both Ghandi and Atatürk noted, a secular society. [1]

That’s just one good reason for becoming an atheist today. It's no use leaving matters of morality and ethics to the arrogantly and unilaterally self-appointed experts of the divine. We have to reclaim those values for ourselves, not just from the bigots and fanatics but also from the foul perversions of consumerist propaganda (‘advertising’) and their own cynical and ignorant brand of capitalist hocus-pocus.

1. ‘The religion of Islam will be elevated if it will cease to be a political instrument’ (Atatürk, 1924; Wikipedia article, footnote 25).