Atheism has never unjustly killed anyone, apparently. Oh, wait. What’s the body count for Marxism-Leninism? 50 million? Can’t wait to hear how those avowed atheists are actually Christians or something. Meanwhile, even if I arrogated to myself the duty to apologize for every awful thing any theist has ever done, those numbers aren’t even close. If you want to say that you don’t want to attend religious services, or even that most of the believers you’ve met are maladjusted weirdos, just say that. But you can’t just make up stuff that’s easily disproven.
Meanwhile, have you ever met an atheist-agnostic who said, “Those Christians don’t really love like Jesus”? If Jesus has no divine authority, there’s no profit in being like Jesus. If you don’t believe Jesus is God, or that a god exists, how do you know anything about Jesus? What we know about Jesus purports to be divinely revealed. See where this is going? I don’t know anyone with more chutzpah than the citizens of historically Christian countries, from Christian families. If you don’t want to do any of it, don’t. But lecturing people about the content of their “fairy tales” you don’t believe in, is peak hubris.
We might say, “Let’s be good to each other,” but “good” has to have a non-arbitrary reference point. Let me save you the time: you’re unavoidably kicked back to theism at least philosophically, even if you want to deny something supernatural and binding. Contingent beings who depend on something else to exist cannot create themselves. If every human and every animal—setting aside plants for the moment—lives and dies, they cannot be the source of life for themselves. There has to be a non-contingent (non-dependent) Something holding the non-permanent things in being. No arrogant agnostics or atheists were forced to read alleged divine scriptures or attend religious ceremonies in the construction of this argument.
What about random dumb luck? It’s possible, I suppose. But in that scenario, a consistent adherent would look pretty silly, trying to impose values from literally nowhere upon anyone else. At least it makes rational sense to say, “You should live this way because the Creator of everything said so.” Why does it make more sense to take ethical advice from a random bloke who has no idea where he came from?
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