Posted on 04/14/2020 7:12:49 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
There are supposedly real benefits to being an atheist, ten of which I’ve listed below (those in quotes are from actual atheists[1]):
1. I can embrace new scientific theories about human origins, without being saddled with the belief that a god created everything.
2. I’m free from church hierarchy telling me what I can and can’t do.
3. I can embrace a woman’s right to make choices when it comes to her own body.
4. I don’t have to give my money to a church, so that the pastor can afford his own personal jet.
5. People don’t look down on me intellectually because I believe silly Bible stories like Noah and his ark.
6. I don’t have to prepare for an afterlife I believe I will never get. I instead enjoy the life I already have.
7. “I don’t feel any guilt about enjoying my sexuality, quite the converse. I often see crippling guilt over sex, especially, among the religious or recently recovering.”
8. “I get to do what feels right to me...I have a freedom of thought that just can’t be achieved within most religions. I’m free to consider all avenues of life and make my own sense of things. I don’t have a superior telling me that my gay friends are evil, or that sex without marriage, even with somebody you love completely, is wrong.”
9. “I feel a lot better knowing God doesn’t know my every thought, because then I would definitely go to hell (which I believe is mythical as well).”
10. “I get my Sundays back.”
Recently, CBS reported that every day 20,000 new people join a website that links married people with other married people, so that they can secretly commit adultery. The CBS report began with a surprising quote:
“It is the only commandment repeated twice in the Bible, right? Once for doing it, and once for thinking about it,” said psychotherapist Esther Perel, who has been studying infidelity for more than a decade.[2]
The quote is “surprising” because the last place this world wants to look for instruction is the Bible. This is because the Scriptures say that the reason we want to rid ourselves of God is the same reason criminals want to rid themselves of the police. Criminals don’t like the law telling them what to do or not do, and threatening them with punishment. The Bible puts it this way:
The mind of the flesh [with its sinful pursuits] is actively hostile to God. It does not submit itself to God’s law, since it cannot. (Romans 8:7, AMP)
Our sinful mind’s active hostility is seen in how it despises the God of the Bible. We hear this daily when His name is taken in vain and is used to cuss. What greater contempt could I have for another person than to use their name to express disgust? But the human contempt for God is there for a reason, and it’s the same reason criminals hate the police.
The hostility is there because of His moral Law (the Ten Commandments). The atheist believes that if he can get rid of the thought of God, he gets rid of the moral Law. If the Law can be removed, it then opens the door to the pleasures that come from adultery and everything else that our sinful mind desires.
But there is still the annoyance of the conscience. Despite the massive societal shift in the perceived acceptance of adultery, the still, quiet voice of our conscience tells us that it is wrong. This intuitive knowledge was alluded to in the CBS article when psychotherapist Perel stated:
Ninety-three percent of Americans think that infidelity is morally wrong—more morally wrong than...domestic violence.
One way the atheist quiets the conscience is by believing in Darwinian evolution. If we are mere products of evolution, so is the conscience. It’s just some sort of unknown societal means of survival, and it has nothing to do with the God of the Bible.
However, the average atheist doesn’t realize that his non-belief in the existence of God isn’t the real issue. The real issue is what the atheist does with the Savior. We want sinners to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, because if they die in their sins, God will see to it that they get absolute justice for their sins, and that’s a terrifying thing.
Most of us could probably come up with ten benefits for not putting on a parachute while in a plane, knowing we’ll have to jump 10,000 feet. One could be that no one would be telling me what to do — I’m my own boss — and I don’t want to have that cumbersome parachute on my back.
But the second I’m forced out the door, I will realize what an absolute fool I have been. But then it will be too late.
[1] “What are the advantages of being an atheist?” Quora.com www.tinyurl.com/y9gez323>.
[2] “Infidelity: Why the oldest taboo continues to be broken,” CBS News, February 18, 2018 www.tinyurl.com/y83gxu53>.
I was also an agnostic/atheist in my 20s and early 30s. In my experience atheists are primarily made up of two groups. The first are those that are angry at God. They were abused or molested, parents died, etc. They tend to be the insufferable ones that want everyone to be atheist. The other are what I call the intellectual atheist. High IQ and usually very learned either on their own or through college. Sometimes know the bible better than some “Christians”.
I went to a debate between the vice president of American Atheists and a college professor at a local Christian college. I’ll never forget the atheist’s opening remarks. He said, “Like all of you, I am an atheist.” You could almost hear the whole audience think what the heck is he talking about? He went on, “Like all of you I don’t believe in Ra, Thor, Zeus, etc. Like all of you I don’t believe in 99% of the gods humans have believed in our history. But unlike all of you I also don’t believe in Jehovah, Jesus. So you and I are only separated by a 1% difference.”
Thought it was an incredible way for him to start.
“Atheists don’t believe in God. But the Devil does’’.- Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.
Wow, how clever! Why didn’t I think of that! I can abandon my adopted children and foster children and do what I want! I get to kill people and take their stuff as long as I can figure out a way to get away with it! Good stuff, thanks!
Yes, there is a difference between a real atheist and those who are just anti-Christian.
Real atheists, while I may disagree with them, tend to be nice people who really don’t have a problem with Christians. It’s the ones who are vehemently anti-Christian, that are the problem, for example, they always seem to want to defend Muslims.
There are no atheists in foxholes!
What do atheists say during orgasms?
I can kill a baby after it is born because I define what murder is, not God.
A lot a people who self-identify as “atheists” do believe in God, they just don’t like him.
#3 I can kill babies if I say I don’t believe in God
Imagine that
I consider “Imagine” more of an anti-religion song, than necessarily an atheist song.
You can be a believer without necessary belonging to a religion.
Atheism is like being a democrat..no consequences.
RE: Or don’t atheists have consciences?
If we believe the Bible, then we have to believe that EVERYONE has a conscience. However, the conscience has to be INFORMED correctly.
The Bible tells us that the unrighteous suppress the true knowledge of God (Rom. 1.18; Ps. 14.1). If you keep telling yourself a lie, you may come to believe it. But it’s still a lie.
…Well, as I say, this should not be all that difficult to grasp. And yet any speaker at one of those atheist revivalist meetings need only trot out either of two reliable witticisms—“I believe neither in God nor in the fairies at the bottom of my garden” or “Everyone today is a disbeliever in Thor or Zeus, but we simply believe in one god less”—to elicit warmly rippling palpitations of self-congratulatory laughter from the congregation. Admittedly, one ought not judge a movement by its jokes, but neither should one be overly patient with those who delight in their own ignorance of elementary conceptual categories. I suppose, though, that the charitable course is to state the obvious as clearly as possible.So: Beliefs regarding fairies concern a certain kind of object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much the same sort of intentional and rational shape as beliefs regarding the neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all. Fairies and gods, if they exist, occupy something of the same conceptual space as organic cells, photons, and the force of gravity, and so the sciences might perhaps have something to say about them, if a proper medium for investigating them could be found.
God, by contrast, is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for photons and (possibly) fairies to exist, and so can be “investigated” only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and conjecture or, on the other, by contemplative or spiritual experiences. Belief or disbelief in fairies or gods could never be validated by philosophical arguments made from first principles; the existence or nonexistence of Zeus is not a matter that can be intelligibly discussed in the categories of modal logic or metaphysics, any more than the existence of tree frogs could be; if he is there at all, one must go on an expedition to find him.
The question of God, by contrast, is one that must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, act and potency, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence. Evidence for or against the existence of Thor or King Oberon would consist only in local facts, not universal truths of reason; it would be entirely empirical, episodic, psychological, personal, and hence elusive. Evidence for or against the reality of God, if it is there, pervades every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.
God, Gods, and Fairies - David Bently Hart
Fair enough, but is the Bible the only valid source of information? Can't peoples' consciences be equally informed by reason and experience?
My problem is the author slides from listing atheist arguments to equating religion and morality.
I think non-believers have moral codes as well.
“I think non-believers have moral codes as well.”
Psychopaths have a concept of “right and wrong”
Doing “wrong” can mean going to jail. Doing “right” means you probably won’t go to jail.
There is no question that atheists do moral things and believe in right or wrong, but that is not the issue. The real issue is: do they have a foundation or basis for moral decision-making apart from God?
The issue for atheists is that they do not have an ultimate standard for determining right and wrong. In an atheistic worldview how could it be determined that it is wrong for someone to think it is evil to donate blood or help an old lady across the street? This atheist infers that a person is not “normal” if they think those things are evil, but then what defines “normal” and why should “normal” be the ultimate goal?
This “sense” of normality and abnormality is (according to the Bible ), INGRAINED in every person like breathing out and breathing in.
In fact, many evolutionists are quite clear that evolution does not provide a basis for morality.
William Provine, evolutionist and biology professor at Cornell University, states in referring to the implications of Darwinism, (and I quote) “No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth.” Thus, if evolution is true, then there can be no universal moral code that all people should adhere to.
If human beings are merely the inevitable result of the laws of physics and chemistry acting over time, then how can people have any genuine choice in what they do? If the decisions people make are simply the deterministic outworking of electrochemical reactions in a brain—which is itself allegedly the mindless outworking of billions of random chance copying errors in our DNA—then how would it make sense to hold people responsible for their “decisions”?
After all, we do not attempt to punish the planet Venus for spinning backwards. And we do not get angry at baking soda for reacting with vinegar. This is just what necessarily happens in the universe given the laws of nature. So why would an evolutionist be angry at anything one human being does to another (such as creationists supposedly “lying” to children), if we are all nothing more than complex chemical reactions? If we are simply evolved animals, why should we hold to a code of conduct in this “dog-eat-dog” world? After all, what one animal does to another is morally irrelevant.
When atheists attempt to be moral, they are “borrowing” from the Theistic worldview.
I've heard many an atheist say that they like the concepts of Christianity, even if they don't necessarily believe in it.
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