Added: 1017 days ago by By Jingo and BFG | Posted in: Religion | 68 Comments

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<div align='center'><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog/18909/Arguments-Against-Atheists/'>Arguments Against Atheists</a><br><div align='center'></div><br><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog'>See more like this on kontraband.com</a></div>

1. Atheism is just another belief system, in effect, it is a religion itself.
I do not support any football team in the English Premiership. But is my not supporting a team, in effect, supporting a team? Of course not. Atheism is not a belief system it is the denial of belief in faith based ideologies. Atheism is a starting point for me, cleaning away the obvious lies I was indoctrinated with as a child and allowing me to look at the world with as much rational thought that my meagre two or three pound brain can muster. Neither my personality nor my morality is defined by my disbelief in God any more than it is defined by my disbelief in Santa Claus.

2. How could something as perfect as an eye not be the work of a divine creator?
This is how.

3. Without a higher force to enforce it where do you get your morality from.
Do you own an item of clothing that is 50% cotton and 50% polyester? Do you own a razor? Do you like shellfish? Have you ever been disrespectful to your parents? Ate bacon? Bad news, at best you have to be banished from your community but more likely you are to be killed brutally and immediately. There are an enormous amount of rules from the various holy books that are ignored in our more enlightened times because they are quite clearly Bronze Age idiocy.

Thou shall not kill is always a good one if you believe that no-one had thought of it before Moses spoke to a combustible shrub. And what does it say about people who need an omnipotent sky wizard to threaten them with eternal damnation in order for them to not kill people? Are all religious people homicidal maniacs barely held in check by their faith? (Well actually...).

For example:
"Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead! So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the Lord. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths"
(2 Kings 2:23-24)."

Do you believe that the punishment for mocking a bald man should be you and 41 of your friends getting mauled by bears? Then yeah, the Bible is for you.

4. You cannot disprove God.
True, no one can disprove the existence of God. And rather wonderfully we don't have to. It should be up to the person who proposes a proposition to prove it. Otherwise we'd be up to our necks in invisible pink unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters, celestial teapots and my own contribution to this crowded ethereal collection of wonders that can't be disproved, the undetectable 10,000 fathom cup of tea and the neverending digestive biscuit. Glory be upon them.

What we can say is that all available evidence points to the existence of god/unicorns/spaghetti monsters being so extremely improbable that they should be allowed no more serious consideration than a man who claims to be a sponge cake.

5. There are no atheists in foxholes.
George Orwell. Rather a lot of Soviet soldiers during the Second World War. (But besides being incorrect would it really be such an indictment of atheism that we non-believers weren't thrilled to be involved in the brutal dehumanising business of war?).

6. Albert Einstein believed in God thus proving that science and religion are compatible.
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."

"I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."

Einstein used the word God frequently that's true, however he was not referring to a supernatural entity, he and other scientists used it as shorthand for the unknowable, the mysterious symphony of the universe or as a personification of the forces of nature.

Speaking about a religious God, here's what he had to say in a letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, January 3, 1954:

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

7. Science has a history of getting things wrong, of changing its mind and has certain things that confound it, religion is constant.
I'm using this as an umbrella for all the "well people used to think the world was flat, Tyrannosaurus rex walked with their backbones vertical, the age of the earth went from 100,000 years to 4.5 billion in the last 200 years of scientific investigation, who is to say that the current theories aren't wrong too?"

Personally I don't consider this an argument for religion, quite the opposite. The great strength of science is that it is constantly trying to disprove itself. It does not treat its established theories as untouchable, never to be questioned, and as a result the human understanding of everything has increased at an amazing rate.

8. Human beings need transcendence to lead fulfilling lives, atheism doesn't provide that.
I can get by with just the awesome spectacle of nature, the neverending amount of human expression that manifests in art, literature, music and movies, my friends and family and the rather wonderful Natalie to keep myself content. (In fact, it seems that myself and my fellow atheists are more capable of experiencing the numinous than the faithful. The swirl of a galaxy, the changing of the seasons or the majestic scenery that is outside my door are all the more marvellous for knowing why they are the way they are.)

9. Hitler was an atheist!
Hitler was a heterosexual! Hitler was a vegetarian! I assume you believe that all vegetarians and front bum lovers are inherently predisposed to genocide too?

And, he was actually a Catholic. Every Nazi WW2 belt buckle was inscribed with 'Gott Mit Uns' or God With Us. Indeedy.

10. Pascal's Wager, where they say that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
If you believe in a god and there ends up being no God or heaven, you won't know the difference, but if you don't believe and there is one, you're f#cked.

The arguments sucks though, because there are so many different flavours of religion and so many rules that are impossible to obey, it's almost guaranteed you'll pick the wrong one and be condemned to a particularly gruesome eternity by an unforgiving God anyway. If the price of a billion to one shot of ending up in heaven means a lifetime of servile worship, or proud ignorance and immoral morality you can count me right out, thankyouverymuch.

In the spirit of being fair there are some very good arguments against atheism that remain unanswerable. You can check them out here.

Added: 1017 days ago by By Jingo and BFG | Posted in: Religion | 68 Comments

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