Pt.3 – Six Answers For Everyone [Anyone] … You Pick
To re-cap from part 1:
I’ve been meaning to do one of these questions ‘things’ for some time. Having just posted the What Now part 2 post, I think it might be time for one of these.
It’s just six questions from Dive In Scripture so don’t get too excited, right. I don’ t have a plan here. I’m just going to answer them as they show up on the page.
Gah!! That took some effort to answer just “question #1” so it looks like this is going to be a ‘six’ part series. All this pretending that there were only six questions is making me feel math challenged.
So lets see what is on the menu for the part 3 question(s). I’m going to break this one up as it is quite long for a single question though the writer is banging away at a single point.
3. When people have embraced atheism, the historical results can be horrific, as in the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it?
This is a steaming pile of fallacy. The people mentioned did not ONLY embrace atheism. Atheism is not a world view. The world view of these people necessitated that they also not believe in gods. It will take you only 15 minutes on Wikipedia to note that they instituted a cult of personality, had political agendas, and went about destroying those that did not agree with their political agendas. These are not good people by any stretch of the imagination but it was not atheism that drove them to act as they did. Lets not start with thinking that if they believed in a god it would have been better. We only have to look at attrocities committed by those who did believe in a god: Hitler, the Pope, the Spanish King and on and on. These famous atheistic bad guys did not commit the attrocities in the name of ‘not believing in gods’ but in the name of their god – themselves. Lack of belief does not motivate people to do things. Belief in something does motivate us humans.
In other words, what set of actions are consistent with particular belief commitments?
This doesn’t actually make sense. If you understand it, let us know in the comments. I think the author is implying that atheism is a belief commitment? Sound the buzzer, this game is over. Atheism is not a belief system nor a world view. period. game over.
It could be argued, that these behaviors – of the regimes in question – are more consistent with the implications of atheism.
Though, I’m thankful that many of the atheists I know do not live the implications of these beliefs out for themselves like others did!
I wonder what is meant by the implications of atheism? The only thing it implies is that there are no gods or supernatural beings. Lack of belief does not motivate a person to do things. I can only imagine that this is yet another dreary attempt to say that without god people have no morals and will go around killing others and raping and pillaging etc. There is only one word that truly embraces this notion in the same spirit it is put forward: BULLSHIT
This argument goes on and on as long as non-believers allow the believer to frame the conversation in terms where morality and good behavior are the result of believing in an imaginary friend. They are not. Clearly the news indicats that believing in an imaginary god does not make you good because it is full of ‘believers’ that steal from the church, rape children, promulgate bigotry, misogeny, and hatred of every kind. Believing in a god does not make you good. It is simple then to understand that not believing in gods does not make you bad. There is no causal relationship there. Belief motivates people. Non-belief does not. Hitchens is famous for saying that there is no moral thing that a believer can do that a non-believer cannot. The fact that many non-believers are good people and only a very few have managed to show themselves as terrible people is indicative that non-belief does not motivate people to do bad things. This is not so for religious people and religion.
It could be argued that the socio-political ideologies could very well be the outworking of a particular set of beliefs – beliefs that posited the ideal state as an atheistic one.
This is another huge steaming pile of fallacy. An atheistic state says nothing of what it believes or how it is run. We have examples of what might be called atheistic states – countries with little or no religious belief. They are some of the happiest people in the world and their government is not out to kill and torture everyone that doesn’t agree with them. The facts are clear that this kind of thinking is nothing but a ploy to engage people falsely. Belief does not make you good. Non-belief does not make you bad. People are motivated by their world views. Atheism is not a world view. This attempt to use a sparse set of examples of people who were bad AND did not believe in gods as in indictment of non-believe is a logical fail because it would mean that believing in gods makes you good and this is clearly not so. Atheism does not require that people act or behave in any particular way. It is NOT a world view. Religion is always a world view, by definition.
I’ll leave you with some Hitchens to help balance out the ewww that this question leaves in your life today.
myatheistlife 
No trackbacks yet.