As usual, Answers in Genesis has it completely wrong. I find it absolutely stunning that an organization can get as much funding as they do and continue to post material that has no connection with reality. I have to give a hat tip to the Sensuous Curmudgeon whom posted the link to this article.
Are you tired of all the evil associated with the philosophy of atheism—Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on?
This is the first mistake right here. These people were not all atheists. Hitler most definitely wasn’t. Here’s an entire article devoted to his religious views.
Here’s just one quote from Hitler “”My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. “
Stalin was an atheist, but he also supported a great deal of religion. Of course, it was only to help secure his power, but that’s what all of these people did. Used religion or lack thereof as political tools.
Let me ask this. If atheists must be forced to deal with Stalin, Pol Pot and the others, then why aren’t Christians being forced to accept their own mass murders? The Protestant death squads in Ireland or the Crusades or the witch-hunting or the inquisition, etc.
I submit that because those actions were in support of Christian faith, then the Christians must accept them and ask if they represent the real Christians. Of course, we can also go look in the Bible with God’s commands to commit genocide and take the young women and children of defeated nations as slaves. Yeah, that’s so much better than Stalin and Pol Pot.
Of course, this just gets us into the “No True Christian” argument. Of course, if that’s a valid defense for Christians, then why isn’t it a valid defense for atheists. One must really ask about the double standard (or hypocrisy) that these Christians must go through in cases like this.
After all, most murderers, tyrants, and rapists are not biblical Christians, and most have rejected the God of the Bible.
That, of course, is utter BS. The Crusades, the Holocaust (yes, that was religion vs. religion), The Inquisition. What about the people who bomb abortion clinics, those are Christians. We can play this game all day long.
The point is that people are people. There are good people and bad people and honestly, religion is NOT the determining factor in whether a person is good or bad.
Even if they claim to believe in the God of the Bible, they are not really living like a true Christ follower (who strives to follow God’s Word), are they?
Ah yes, here’s the “No True Christian” argument. Discussed already.
Do you feel conflicted about the fact that atheism has no basis in morality (i.e., no absolute right and wrong; no good, no bad?) If someone stabs you in the back, treats you like nothing, steals from you, or lies to you, it doesn’t ultimately matter in an atheistic worldview where everything and everyone are just chemical reactions doing what chemicals do. And further, knowing that you are essentially no different from a cockroach in an atheistic worldview (since people are just animals) must be disheartening.
Atheism means “without deity”. That’s all. Why do these Christians assume that we have no moral compass? It’s true that we are, biochemically, no different from the majority of other living things on the planet. However, we are intelligent. Unlike Christians, who must be told what is right and wrong and threatened with eternal punishment if they step out of line, the majority of atheists are good people.
But even more importantly, they are good because the CHOOSE to be, not because they are being threatened or extorted to be good.
Who is more noble? One who acts good because of a threat or extortion or one who acts good for no perceivable benefit.
Are you tired of the fact that atheism (which is based in materialism, a popular worldview today) has no basis for logic and reasoning?
Atheism not based in logic and reasoning? Seriously? That’s pretty much the only path to atheism. No one becomes an atheist so that they can be bad with impunity, that is reserved for politicians, CEOs, and the religious.
The logic and reasoning behind atheism are inescapable. If one applies logic and reason to any religion, that religion fails.
Is it tough trying to get up every day thinking that truth, which is immaterial, really doesn’t exist?
Why does truth not exist for atheists? Because this is a clever little word play here. What the author means is “Truth” as in “I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Light”. The author here, is preaching to his choir. He’s not out to convince anyone that religion/Christianity is more rational than atheism, he’s trying to make people feel good about being better than those ‘nasty atheists.
Are you bothered by the fact that atheism cannot account for uniformity in nature(the basis by which we can do real science)? Why would everything explode from nothing and, by pure chance, form beautiful laws like E=MC2 or F=MA?
Atheism is not a science. It’s not supposed to be able to account for fundamental laws of nature. Of course, religion is not a science either and no religion can account for the these same things.
So, shall we hold Christianity to the same standard that atheism is being held to? Then I’ll expect a detailed treatise on a grand unification theory using God to explain everything that is both testable and falsifiable. I won’t, however, hold my breath.
Do you feel like you need a weekend to recoup, even though a weekend is really meaningless in an atheistic worldview—since animals, like bees, don’t take a day of rest or have a weekend? So why should atheists? Why borrow a workweek and weekend that comes from the pages of Scriptures, which are despised by atheists? Weeks and weekends come from God creating in six literal days and resting for a literal day; and then the Lord Jesus resurrected on the first day of the week (Sunday). And why look forward to time off for a holiday (i.e., holy day), when nothing is holy in an atheistic worldview?
Seriously? This is your big complaint against atheists. That we use the same work-week as everyone else due to federal law?
I wonder if the author knows that the American concept of the ‘weekend’ was developed to accommodate Jewish workers who took Saturday instead of Sunday off. Should Christians, therefore, work on Saturday as their God supposedly did?
Henry Ford standardized the five-day work week in 1926. He was pretty much the first to use a five-day instead of a six-day work week. Tell you what, since I generally work 60 hours or so a week, and some weekends, I’ll expect the author to work on Saturdays… a full eight hours (without extra pay of course).
For professing atheists, these questions can be overwhelming to make sense of within their worldview. And further, within an atheistic worldview, atheists must view themselves as God. Essentially, atheists are claiming to be God. Instead of saying there may not be a God, they say there is no God. To make such a statement, they must claim to be omniscient (which is an essential attribute of the God of the Bible) among other attributes of God as well. So, by saying there is no God, the atheist refutes his own position by addressing the question as though he or she were God!
These questions are not overwhelming. They are nonsensical. No atheist claims to be God. That’s among the stupidest comments of this author. Atheism… A… THEISM… without God(s).
That’s the definition of atheism. Why would an atheist claim that there is no God and then claim himself or herself to be God.
What I think that the author is getting at here (and doing a very poor job of) is that atheists take personal responsibility for their actions. Atheists develop their own moral standards (and generally those standards are much higher than and held to more firmly than the religious). Atheists don’t blame God or Satan or anyone else when they fuck up. There is only one person to blame when an atheist makes a mistake… the atheist.
I would also like to add here, that Christians are massively guilty of this same thing. When was the last time a child in America was stoned for disobeying its mother or father? When was the last time that a Christian beat his or her slave? When was the last time a Christian ate a lobster or wore clothing of two different materials?
And before we get into the old “Jesus came and the old laws don’t apply anymore” argument, please read this.
Do you feel conflicted about proselytizing the faith of atheism, since if atheism were true then who cares about proselytizing? Let’s face it, life seems tough enough as an atheist without having to deal with other major concerns like not having a basis to wear clothes, or no basis for marriage, no consistent reason to be clean (snails don’t wake up in the morning and clean themselves or follow other cleanliness guidelines based on Levitical laws), and no objective reason to believe in love.
There is no ‘faith’ in atheism. Faith is defined as belief without evidence. Few atheists have faith about anything. We have evidence. We don’t have faith that our partners aren’t cheating on us, we are confident that they are not because there is plenty of evidence that they have not cheated on us. It’s not faith, it’s evidence and confidence values.
I was going to ignore the stupid comments in the middle and comment about ‘love’ only, but I changed my mind. Let’s talk about these things for a second.
Is there a reason to wear clothes? Yes, at my house, it was bloody cold this morning. I also wear clothes so that people won’t be distracted (or disgusted) by my body. Let’s be honest, the naked human isn’t all that attractive.
Is there a basis for marriage? There is, in many cases, it is just more effective for parents to share the workload in raising altricial offpsring to maturity. Besides, there are many species of animals that are monogamous too. But the real question is, “is marriage in our modern society useful”? How many women decide to ‘go it alone’? They have a career, they have money, they don’t have a man and may not want one. But they have a kid anyway. How many extra children are there in the world whose ‘standard’ marriage parents didn’t want them or couldn’t care for them.
As far as cleanliness, have this author never heard of hygiene? Being clean is healthy, it’s good for the person be clean. It’s not “God’s Law” that makes us atheists want to to be clean, is health.
Finally, Love. What is love? It’s a feeling, an emotion, toward another person. Those are chemical reactions in the brain. That’s all, but that’s like saying a computer is nothing more than some properly arranged silicon. Do we understand it? Not really, but then neither does the Christian. Again, atheists love without being commanded to. We do so freely, without need of benefit for ourselves.
Are you weary of looking for evidence that contradicts the Bible’s account of creation and finding none? Do the assumptions and inconsistencies of dating methods weigh on your conscience when they are misrepresented as fact? Where do you suppose those missing links have gone into hiding? Surely the atheist sees the folly and hopelessness of believing that everything came from nothing.
Nope. I enjoy looking at the actual world we live in and seeing how it works. We may not always be able to find the answers we want, but at least we scientists (not atheists, but scientists) can admit that we don’t have all the answers.
The alternative is looking for answers in a 2000 year old book that is full of contradictions, outright mistakes
In fact, why would an atheist care to live one moment longer in a broken universe where one is merely rearranged pond scum and all you have to look forward to is . . . death, which can be around any corner? And in 467 trillion years, no one will care one iota about what you did or who you were or how and when you died—because death is the ultimate “hero” in an atheistic, evolutionary worldview. Of course, as a Christian I disagree, and I have a basis to see you as having value.
Death is not all we have to look forward to. It’s all that Christians have to look forward to, death, then their eternal reward as mindless robots in heaven with no feelings or emotions.
Atheists have one life and we try to live it as best we can. Many wish to leave a mark in the world. My work, not because I’m an atheist, but because it’s my job, will impact literally millions of people in the US over the next decade or so. I do a damned good job because I know how important it is.
I don’t care if my name is known by all until the heat death of the universe, that’s for those arrogant Christians who want to be remembered as the biggest donor to the new church, while ignoring the thousands of starving people in their own neighborhood. No, I want to have a positive impact, even if it’s little more than raising my child to think and be free.
Personally, I don’t think that everyone has value in the world. I think that a lot of people work very hard to actively harm our society and our culture. I’m not afraid to call them useless burdens of society either. I don’t have to be nice to everyone because I’m a Christian and do what I’m told.
I can afford to be realistic. I can speak the actual truth, without having to check with The Truth to see if it’s Biblically correct or not.
In conclusion, the author of this post is an idiot who has no idea what atheism even is. Plus, he (quite unknowingly) thinks he attacks atheism with his comments, but is also attacking his own faith.
Again, I don’t encourage anyone to actually visit AiG as they are well known for inserting cookies to track your online behavior.
