Thursday, December 31, 2009

Atheism



In the past century, nothing has been the catalyst of more grief, hatred, war, and crime than atheism. Atheism allows a person to hate, kill, torture, or steal, while allowing him to recuse himself of all blame. Atheism causes people to break the laws of ethics and morality for they have no God to answer to. The only morals they posses, if any, are those they pick and choose for themselves.

Atheism dulls the mind and weakens the senses. It makes "I felt like it" seem like a reasonable answer to anything at all, squelching questions of why, and how, and when. It gives rise to the reasoning such as Social Darwinism that states giving aid to the poor, workers rights, universal education, and welfare should be avoided as they interfere with the natural order of social competition*.

Atheism spreads like disease through societies, rarely coexisting with pre-existing mythologies, rather preferring to conquer or be conquered. Atheism is anything but tolerant.

Theists are not afraid to point out that which is true: atheism is ridiculous. Mental delusion and atheism are synonymous, and none is better than another. Atheism is malicious, malevolent, and unworthy of respect.

You probably knew that already.

We're respectful of the American People's individual rights to practice as they see fit (equal to our rights to do the same), but this does not mean we have to respect the decision. If you choose to ignore faith and reason in order to deny a higher power, you've made a ridiculous decision and we're not going to pretend it's "just another way of looking at things".

We challenge the ethics of the professional liars who claim to speak for atheists to bilk other people into giving away their faith in exchange for mere pleasures of the flesh and immorality. We also challenge the ethics of the politicians who use government to further their atheist agenda, and vice versa. We will not let anyone's atheism infiltrate our schools, our government, or our pockets, at least not without a good fight.

Atheism, the antagonist of religion, is the only "ism" that claims a monopoly on intelligence and rational thinking. Atheism is the complete lack of what makes human beings special, the ability to believe there is something more. In atheism the only thing one can look forward to is the finality of death and the realization that they are meaningless specks in this universe that could not care less about their existence. The only real contribution they could achieve in death is to leave their rotting corpse out in an open field in hopes that some equally poor and meaningless wandering animal may gain one more meal before it too succumbs to the inevitable of being wiped from all existence as if the universe cared. After all, feeding their bodies to wild animals would be the greatest contribution an atheist could ever hope to give to the world. And judging from the screams of world climatologists it would be better if atheists did this sooner rather than later.




Well if you have made it this far and are still reading you can relax now and know that I am not being serious. The article above was originally from American Atheists and directed towards religion. I took it and altered the wording sufficiently to make it refer to atheism while still conveying basically the same, illogical, point. I originally posted this on a religious debate forum as a kind of social experiment. The original article had come up in a thread and, after being pointed out that it was nothing more than polemic bigotry by a couple posters, was defended by atheists who claimed it was perfectly legitimate “criticism”. A few even claimed that those who found the article to be offensive were nothing but self martyrs. I decided to post a variant of the article, directed towards atheism, in a totally different thread, as if I were a troll, to see what would happen. As one would expect I got a string of responses from atheists who were *gasp* offended. I decided not to intervene in the frenzy and waited till another poster figured it out and let the cat out of the bag. Some people were relieved I was not serious, some tried to save face, and others were a little impressed with the experiment.

Ultimately, the main point I was going for became clearly visible for many to see. It is much easier to see bigotry and hatred when it is directed directly at you. And further, it can be extremely difficult to spot such behavior when it is directed towards a group whom you already disagree with (confirmation bias).

*You can read more on this from Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God, pg. 174-5. I did a series of posts on his book you can view here.

5 comments:

  1. I think it's a good social experiment, save for the essential difference between religion and atheism: Atheism commands nothing. It can't be used as a justification for action, since it's the absence of a belief rather than something upon which a decision could be based.

    In any case, you did make a good point about how ridiculous the polemics coming from either side can be. That's the main reason I don't like it when any 'major' atheist organization claims to represent us all. They certainly don't represent me.

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  2. Rwanda. WWII included a lot of religious rhetoric by the axis powers. Rwanda and a lot of the misery of the DRC are tied directly to religion.

    Afghanistan started because a religious nutter convinced some other religious nutters that flying planes into buildings was what it took to get into heaven, and frankly Iraq looks more like a holy war with every press leak.

    The human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia that everyone ignores while striving to reintroduce a feudal theocracy in Tibet (Because hey, Tibet is trendy) are tied to religion. As are a lot of the horrors perpetrated in Nigeria, with children being targetted with witch hunts.

    Parents murdering their kids because their kids married the wrong person is a common story in India. Even in America you have cases of people praying rather than giving their kids proper medical care - often resulting in their kids dying.

    The thing with the atheist side of the argument is that we can point to specifics which were very definitely tied to religion.

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  3. Jake

    The point is that the atheist phrasing of it can be quite easily defended with hard data and examples - whereas the "reveral" of the statement can't.

    Take for example the claim that atheism causes people to break the law - a very, very common claim BTW. Unfortunately for the theist the claim is in fact directly contradicted by a study done by Gregory S Paul in 2005.

    Because there is data on this, the inversion doesn't really work.

    While the claim is offensive when inverted, most of its punch is in it being an oft made one. I have argued with Christians who quite frankly said everything you wrote there with a straight face.

    But the original claim's punch is in that it can be backed. The crooked televangelist who wants you to give him that "thousand dollar seed", the politician claiming to have found the lord, or the priest trying to replace the constitution with the ten commandments.

    Now I don't really agree with the original post. I think a lot of what puts religion in the lead on horrors is that atheism only became legal in the last few hundred years, and that religion is often more a reaction to social disfunction than a cause, but at least it doesn't flat out contradict the data.

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  4. Anonymous,

    I can back up the statement "blacks are more dangerous to society than whites" with hard data and examples, but it does not actually mean anything. Correlation does not imply causation.

    "But the original claim's punch is in that it can be backed."
    Only through cherry picking and reductionism.

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