Responding

On another blog I write, this comment was posted:

Dear all…
I do not like to be crazy religious fanatic, that’s why I am not into that stuff they send eventhough I believe in God. if you please allow me to share 2 simple ideas. To me, being fair, I would say Science and Logic really do not say a firm word on God like YES or NO. Then why I still believe in God? Simply because if there is God and He will reward and judge all then He will reward me for being good or leading a good life, if there is no God, I am no loser, death is our portion any way. no big loss!!! Another reason, I hope for God because if there is no God, there is no Judgment day, then the worst terrorists who enjoy killing innocent people will be equal to my 8 years old little friend Mary who died in Los Angeles children’s Hospital of Chronic Leukemia. Because this is not fair I still hope for a God to execute Justice. If there no one then No big deal give yourself 50 years and we all will be in graves including me, you, Osama Bin Laden and Little Mary!!!

I don't have enough space to respond in comments there, and that kind of discussion really isn't germane to that blog, so here's my response to Truth Lover.

Pascal's Wager isn't really a compelling argument, though. What kind of deity wants believers who are just hedging their bets? I, and most atheists, didn't choose not to believe in gods, we came to the realization that we just didn't, despite the fact that most of us were raised in at least nominally religious environments and most of us at least tried to believe, and that science and logic present far more compelling arguments about how we got here and what to do now that we are. What good would it do, if there is an omnipotent/omniscient god, to go around saying we believe and acting like we believe, if we really don't? It wouldn't fool a god who sees us when we're sleeping, knows when we're awake, and so on. I have brown hair and eyes, and I could get hair dye and colored contacts and look to all the world like I really had blonde hair and blue eyes, but it wouldn't change the pigments that my body produces, and eventually my hair would start growing out brown and I'd have to take out the blue contacts and be brown-eyed again, just as going to church and saying I believe just to avoid eternal damnation would make my friends, family, and fellow parishioners think I was christian, but it wouldn't do anything to change the fact that I just don't believe, and nothing that I have ever read in the Bible has or could make be believe in what it says. And an omniscient god would know that.

As far as judgment goes, is your own judgment not enough to convince you that Osama Bin Laden is worse than an eight-year-old who died of Leukemia? Do you need a daddy god to pass judgment from on high to prove that masterminding terrorist activities is wrong? I can trust my own intrinsic moral idea that killing someone who isn't about to kill me or someone close to me is wrong. Part of becoming an adult mentally is realizing that the world isn't fair- sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes good things happen to bad people. Osama bin Laden is alive, Steve Irwin isn't. If you believe in a just deity, what message does that send? I'll leave it at that, because it's just something to think about, why a loving deity lets bad things happen to good people, and why a deity who would let those things happen would have any interest in punishing those people who make the bad things happen.

A Question for Religious People...

Specifically, Christians. I don't want to pick on any particular religion, because I think they're all silly, but I live in the US, and Christianity is the one with which I'm most familiar. Here's my question. Many Christians believe that every person has a set time to die, "It was his time" and all that. If you believe that, how can you justify making murder illegal? If it was Jim Doe's "time to die," and it was going to happen by the closest available means, what difference does it make how he died? And why should abortion be illegal and/or morally wrong, if it was my eight-weeks-gestated fetus's "time?" Is God gradually phasing out his creation of lives that are supposed to end in infancy in the US? Is he running an experiment in Europe and parts of Asia to stop making people whose "time to go" is before their first birthday, but is using Africa and South Asia as a control group? If you believe that, how do you reconcile that with Christianity's promotion of a loving god? Why not just not create lives that are going to be short and difficult? What kind of loving god would make 1.5 million Armenians whose "times to go" all happened to be between 1915 and 1923?

This brings me back to the "everything happens for a reason" issue: if everything happens for a reason, and we're just behaving according to plan, why do we have rules at all? If everything that's going to happen happens no matter what because it's all preordained, then why try to prevent anything?

Religious people often accuse atheists and atheism of being immoral, but we believe in free will, and that everyone who has the cognitive ability to reason has control over their actions and should be held accountable for them if someone or something else is hurt/damaged/deprived. If one is of the belief that we're all running around acting in accordance with some divine script, then when bad things happen it should be the playwright who is blamed, not the actors. If we're all acting out the script, then I'm supposed to be an atheist, and the genocides of the 20th century were supposed to happen. Just something to think about.