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.
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.
posted by Stella at
5:43 PM
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