Why Are We Atheists? A Misguided Christian Answers

Trust a Christian Apologist to not consider whether evidence or reason may influence others. Make sense, it certainly isn’t influencing him.

You don’t have to get up on Sundays
I get up early on Sundays and read to improve my mind

You don’t have to give to the poor
I’m fairly generous through various charities and have a voting record in support of some distribution of wealth.

You want a new Samsung LED TV
Well, I bought one of those last year. It is supposed to use less energy than a conventional bulb TV

You want to play tennis and ride bikes (apparently Christians do not do that)
WTF! Exercise is good no matter what you believe or don’t believe.

I have to confess. Not getting up early on Sundays is one of the best things about not being a Christian. Sundays are for sleeping a bit, waking up, making a big pot of coffee and just sitting on my ass watching Sunday talk shows or surfing the net. It’s the only time of the week that nothing else is scheduled so I can’t think of a better time to just be lazy.

Only one thing is more bizarre and absurd than theists’ beliefs about gods, and that is their idiotic beliefs about atheists. The less atheists a theist actually has gotten to know closely, the more theories he has about atheists in general. When it comes to the thoughts, feelings and motives of atheists, Mr. Rauser doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, since he clearly has never come to know any. Probably doesn’t want to catch something.

He goes on to overanalyze Timothy Treadwell, a man who lived among bears because he “could find no objective meaning in his empty southern California life of beaches and parties,” and later was killed by one of them.

Everyone knows Christians don’t live among bears, they summon them to maul annoying kids.

Hmm, I do want a Sharp 46″ TV

…but I do go to the UU church in Columbus on Sundays (some Sundays at least)

…I never “get up early” though as I work 2nd and 3rd shifts.

Give to the poor? Well, I donate to many charities including the ACLU, SCA, the Democratic party, and Amnesty International. Guess that doesn’t count though.

Oh I don’t ride bikes or play tennis…weird that only atheists can do these things…

I want to see the percentage of Christians that don’t want a new tv, give regularly to charities, don’t exercise and always go to church…I’m sure they are NOT in the majority. Oh, and giving money to your church only counts if my giving money to the Democratic party does by the way.

Furthermore, there is the underlying unsubstantiated assumption that an objective, external, overcast moral compass, is inherently better than a subjective, relativistic, situational compass. I cannot see why this would be the case, and nobody is calling them on it.

That I think is the position that he needs to defend, because I think it derives straight from the Christian position that we are a fallen creation, that we are wretched and only a transcendent, pristine omnibenevolent deity can explain any good in us. Human morality is subjectively suited for humans, and that doesn’t make it objective.

Ah, but now we turn it around: “You aren’t a Christian based on any specific beliefs or relationship with a deity; you just have a pathological desire to get up early on Sundays.”

Here is a prime example of some confused Christian thinking….

Yesterday at work one of the Christians approached me and asked me what Christians thought of Santa Claus. The entire fire crew was in the kitchen with me. I stopped what I was doing and asked whether he thought he might be asking the wrong person, seeing as how I was presumably the only atheist in the room. He answered that after all, I was the one reading “that Christian Atheist Book” out there (I had “The Atheist Universe” on my bag in the comm room). I told him I wasn’t certain that I had ever heard of a Christian Atheist, and that I certainly wasn’t reading about them.
And then he told me in all earnestness that he believed in Santa Claus, and that I should, too, just like “you have to have faith in god”.
My only answer was that if I was wrong and if there was a god, he could go ahead and punish me. I left it at that, as it wasn’t a good idea to cause a rift in the crew for the rest of the shift.

But the logic of the conversation just frustrated me. Again.

Since so many of our values and morals are subjective, he can’t understand why atheists would bother to do anything good. That reeks of ignorance, not understanding.

Er, no… that reeks of “I think all people are monsters held in check only by the threat of eternal damnation because I think I’m a monster held in check only by the threat of eternal damnation and am too narrow minded to imagine anyone could be otherwise.”

I have a friend whose beliefs are exactly like this, and I’m sad for him that he can’t seem to apply his otherwise sharp intellect to the issue. I suspect he has a strong temper and thinks it means he’s a bad person and thinks he has to have “god” to control it. Somehow he can’t see that he claims that atheists are monsters with no morals who will randomly do horrific things because they have no magical sky bully to stop them, yet at the same time he knows I’m an atheist and he wants me to be “uncle” to his children.

* You don’t have to own a suit
* You don’t have to sit on hard benches
* You don’t have to pretend to sing (since you can’t)
* You don’t have to worry about staying out late Saturday
* You don’t have to worry about your kids hating you for dragging them to church
* You don’t have to read the same damn book over and over and over again
* You don’t have to listen to cookie cutter sermons week in and week out
* You don’t have to squint your eyes and pray out loud to an imaginary friend in front of others who only half believe it
* You don’t have to lie to your children

ooooops, sorry, just got in the mood. Thanks !

Whoops. …*that* I am …

You don’t have to get up on Sundays
Okay, you’ve got me there. I never get up early until I absolutely have to. I’m self-employed so that’s every day (okay I don’t get to bed until the wee hours of the morning but that’s beside the point).

You don’t have to give to the poor
There are plenty of nice things I don’t *have* to do, but since I’m a nice person I do it because I really *want* to. What’s better, doing it out of obligation or out of real desire to help?

You want a new Samsung LED TV
No, not really. I don’t watch a lot of tv.

You want to play tennis and ride bikes
And what exactly is wrong with exercise? Don’t care for tennis but I ride my bike whenever I can.

Crux, you can correct typos within the first 5 minutes of posting.

I have found the edit comment feature to be horrifically slow – as in, unlikely to respond within said 5 minutes.

You want a new Samsung LED TV

Yeah, can everyone knows that it is impossible for Christians to like earthly possessions.

Well, I donate to many charities including the ACLU, SCA, the Democratic party, and Amnesty International. Guess that doesn’t count though.

Next time you find an article about a study claiming to find that ‘liberals don’t donate as much as conservatives’ or ‘non-religious don’t donate as much as religious’ try to find out if the ‘study’ included the ACLU or Amnesty International as charities.

So I’m an atheist because I ride a bike, not because I don’t believe in god.

Thank you for enlightening me, Randal.

although, I do wonder if my early sunday mornings and donations balance me out as an agnostic?

I’d rather hang out with bears than attend church.

He posted a response article to all the commenters. I’m already working on a response to that.

Wow! they seem good enough reasons to me.

I signed in on the Christian Post Blog (man, they want all sorts of personal info) So I could speak directly to Mr. Rauser’s remarks. I have copied my comment here:

There is clearly an inverse relationship between the number of atheists whom an apologist knows closely, and the amount of amateur psychoanalysis that the apologist will spew forth about the thoughts, feelings, motives and actions of atheists in general. I can understand speculating out of thin air all sorts of assertions about the nature of gods since there isn’t much evidence go to around, but there is no excuse for doing the same thing about the nature of atheists. You have a ready supply of real, living atheists all around you whom you could get to know and learn about directly. Yes, yes I understand that the prospect of talking to atheists at length is an icky one, but if you were willing to try, you would be pleasantly surprised. They are lovely, interesting people for the most part, especially when you are not busy slandering them with bigoted nonsense that you have heard and are repeating without question.

Mr. Rauser, please go out into the real world and meet at least 12 atheists from different age groups, different walks of life, different levels of education and different parts of the country. Get to know them closely, as a respectful friend. Ask them many questions about their thoughts, feelings, motives and actions. Learn their stories and watch them living their daily lives. Then after at least three years of that research, come back to your Seminary and write a new article about what you learned, free from spin, free from selecting only the findings that fit your prejudice, just an honest and honorable report. I promise you that your new article will be so radically different from this calumnious tripe that you will have to preface it with an apology and a repudiation of this present article. You will be better for it. You will be a better Christian, clean of the disingenuous conceit and willingness to repeat falsehoods that weigh you down now. And, you may even have made some new and wonderful friends.

Lody lody lody they got me, the atheist conspiracy has finally been revealed!

[/throw up in mouth]

“…atheists cannot admit that there is no meaning to life, and so they engage in the futile and self-deceptive attempt to project meaning onto the universe.”

POT CALLING KETTLE BLACK! Excuse the caps, but seriously…

IMO, there is no singular meaning of life (except reproducing ;D) but we make our own. What’s wrong with that? Does living life to the fullest with my friends and family really sound that bad? Maybe I should just off myself right now. >_> This shouldn’t be that hard for religious people to grasp…

What an ignorant article, I feel dumber just for reading it.

You don’t have to give to the poor

You also don’t have to worry about your money going to support the opulent and decadent lifestyle of a televangenist, or going to support witch-hunting in Africa.

In the comments, RD Rauser presents this anology of a rock and a hammer:

So what am I arguing? Well consider a simple analogy. You come across a rock in the woods. It ended up there randomly. Nobody put it there. Nobody designed it. Since the rock was not designed with any purpose or intention in mind, it is by definition impossible to misuse it (for for doing so would constitute a deviation from an intended use).

Now imagine that you find a hammer in the woods. While you cannot, by definition, misuse a rock, you can indeed misuse a hammer because it was created with a particular intention or purpose.

Now to close the loop of the analogy. While atheists believe human beings are more like the rock, Christians believe they are more like the hammer. That is, atheists deny that human beings were created for anything, with any purpose in mind. By contrast, Christians believe human beings were created with a purpose or meaning.

We humans are the rock. It is society and sociological perspectives that are the hammer. Society as we know it was created and designed by humans. People take advantage of differences in society, and the various stratifications within, for their own gain every day. Most of the time, this is in the name of a god.

Take this, Randal Rauser:

Why Atheists Have Better Sex
by Greta Christina

I have met more than one atheist who has claimed that atheism offers people freedom from the idea that they are committing sins or offending some kind of divine entity… I don’t know if that is the reason they are atheists or not, but it is not so different from the reasons that are cited above.

I think atheists are misguided people who have failed to recognize the irrationality of their position (and I say this as a former agnostic).

Here’s an example of what I’m referring to:
‘For Rauser, if a Holy Book or a faith isn’t giving your life meaning, then you can’t have one. If you give yourself some meaning independently, it’s worthless. Since so many of our values and morals are subjective, he can’t understand why atheists would bother to do anything good. That reeks of ignorance, not understanding. There are plenty of evolutionary explanations for things like altruism.’

How does explaining that altruism can have evolutionary causes have anything to do with answering the above problem?… the burden is on the atheist to show why it is that they are able to rationalize the belief that such a thing as good and evil actually objectively exists. If they say that we believe in good and evil, because of some evolved trait, that does nothing to show that good and evil are objectively real.

For example, if a person claimed that killing people was morally good, how could he be objectively wrong? If we all make up our own purposes and meanings, then he evidently couldn’t be wrong, because that was his own meaning to create.

God Bless,

I don’t know if this was in any way related, but the recent exchange between some atheists and Randal was expunged from the blog, and the CP account I created in order to post there has also been deleted.