Strictly speaking, atheism is simply a lack of belief in deities. However, being part of the greater community of reason for several years now, I have noticed something. Most active atheists tend to also be humanists… even if they don’t like that term. In this sense there are atheist values.
Tag Christian
Awhile back, a Christian Tweeted an interesting question to atheists. The question was this: “Why would you risk your soul? #atheism” Now, I know the Christian wasn’t actually expecting an answer, but I would like to answer this question anyway.
Obviously, it is my strongly help opinion based on the complete lack of evidence and compelling counter-evidence that the entire Christian mythology is fiction. While I am fond of spreading the real “Good News,” that Hell is imaginary too, I think just talking about the concept of Hell is a win for atheism.
Many Christians love to tell their stories of how they got saved. I think it is also valuable for atheists to tell our stories of how we became damned to eternal torture… I mean how we de-converted from religion to atheism. The thing is that I think atheists and Christians have very different processes for how we came to our present position on the existence of deities. I don’t really want to know how someone got saved, but I would like to know what convinced them of their beliefs. That is not necessarily the same thing.
On Sunday, Google put up a picture of Hugo Chavez on their main search engine page. Apparently, a lot of Christians were extremely offended by this. They weren’t offended because of the now dead Venezuelan leader’s policies or because they just didn’t like the guy. No, they were offended because it was Easter and Google didn’t give a shout-out to Jesus.
Equality for gays to marry is in the news again as the Supreme Court heard two cases this week on the subject. Surprisingly, even many Christians are starting to come around on this topic. However, some (not all) of the Christians who support marriage equality still have this problem of believing that homosexuality is a sin.
I used to tell some of my Christian friends that I don’t have faith in deities, but that I do have faith in people. This was and still is often my opening line in many conversations with religious believers.
One of the reasons why I fight so hard against the ideas of religion is because I see religion as detrimental to human progress. Religious thinking divides people, focuses people on ancient mythologies, and gets in the way of our global vision.
A lot of times when atheists argue with or debate with religious believers, we actually take their beliefs seriously and try to refute their claims with logic and reason. This is great and we should definitely keep doing that, but… The hard truth about religion is that almost all of them are flat out ridiculous and we can’t lose sight of that either.
Christian evangelist Ray Comfort is at it again. I recently popped in on his Facebook page and noticed that he surprisingly isn’t all that fond of the word, “banana.” That aside, he recently posted a status demanding “extraordinary evidence” for evolution. He clownishly claims that there is no evidence.