If Atheists Sounded Like Christians
The Atheist Voice | 30.V.2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze0PHCMHa1s
"If atheists started talking like Christians"?
Many of you already sound like Protestants, when Protestants lampoon (but never refute) Catholic post-Biblical miracles (honourable exception since Pentecostalism, for some) and Atheists lampoon (but also never refute) miracles in general.
Have you seen Richard Carrier in action when he talks about St John and the bedbugs (whom he was if you read the text not sending off to anyone else, but the companions were fascinated watching the bed bugs stand at attention to the morning when St John dismissed them), or about Legio Fulminatrix?
He doesn't refute St John commanded insects by God's power, nor that the Legion was Christian, prayed to God and got a heavy rainfall on the enemy disbanding them. He just takes it for granted this can't be so, precisely as Protestants do with some Catholic claims.
"I'm not an atheist, I'm just a follower of reason"
Pretty OK spoof on "I am not religious, I am just a follower of Christ", which is a fairly Protestant thing to say, not even Protestantism in common, but specifically Evangelical.
"Hi neighbour, what library do you go to?"
Or how about "what science shows do you watch, do you prefer Sagan or de Grasse?"
"I love believers, I just hate their beliefs"
Kind of what you are about yourself, isn't it?
"I have a personal relationship with reality"
Ah, at least you recognise that a Christian whether "personal relationship" type or more traditional or both, does consider God as the ultimate reality and the ultimate true explanation of every other reality.
"You're religious? Oh, well, I'll think for you!"
If you are a Christian in certain situations and the people who are closest at hand to help you are not, or even are not Catholics, they sometimes do think they have a duty to think for you.
If you started saying things like that to Christians in all kind of positions, you might sooner or later find a Christian forgetting about the other cheek.
Praying for you is not half as patronising as thinking for you. If you are an atheist, you don't believe in the efficacy of prayer. So why bother if he prays for you? But if you are a Christian, you might still have to reckon with people who are in power and position to if not say at least show "I'll think for you".
"You don't act like a Christian."
In Sweden you can as a Catholic hear things like that. At military service, I was asked, if I am really Christian, why was I serving with a gun?
Not all Christians believe in Pacifism - as not all Atheist are either Commies or Rockers or both.
"Well, Darwin explains you!"
Except his explanation has a hole or two ...
"Axial tilt is the reason for the season"
You mean the weather season, right?
"I do good in the world because it is an atheist thing to do"
Pretty close to Swedes telling me they don't need God to do good and even think my goodness as venal if I am expecting a heavenly reward.
I mean, back a few decades ago.
"the universe moves in non-mysterious ways"
Except now that Chinese maths have shown there are "a gazillion" of solutions to the three body problem, how even a Heliocentric solar system with ten major bodies hangs together, as well as what mind is, seems very mysterious to the materialist atheist. The current phrase is not the one you gave, but its synonym "we don't fully understand it yet" or "just because we don't fully understand it yet doesn't mean your God is the true one".
"Reason loves you anyway"
I hope his reason does ... are you personifying some suprapersonal reason as distinct from that of men endowed with reason?
"thank you random chance"
The lameness of the phrase is kind of a reason why gratitude over small things (a fairly healthy habit, per se) survives best in those believing in some kind of deities, including the true God.
"we all have a truth-shaped hole in our brain"
Anatomically misleading, but technically fairly correct. We all do want to know truth (or those who don't seem to be gone fairly far in some personality twisting, not always only their own fault). That is one of the versions of the God shaped hole in our heart or in our soul ...
"Conservatives are waging a war on science"
I think I have heard this one with more specifying that it is about Christian conservatives "Fundies" and "Creationists".
Ah, you admitted it yourself!
"but remember : gravity has a plan for you"
Gravity as you conceive it hasn't. One reason why gravity (with Chinese multiple solutions to three body problem) is inadequate as planner of the supposedly Heliocentric solar system (let alone the Tychonian one which corresponds to our observations).
"I would like to thank my great genes for my team's victory tonight"
Sounds like a fair epithomising of "survival of the fittest".
"because they just don't want to obey the laws of physics"
Laws of physics are not obeyed by people. They are not disobeyed either. They are not about morals. Change it to rejecting Jainism and "laws of karma" and it starts to make some sense ... Christians certainly don't want to "obey the laws of karma" since Reincarnation is not a forgiving taskmaster.
"with science, all things are somewhat probable"
Except, on your view of what science presupposes, miracles, of course.
"then what stops your from murdering people if you don't think altruism guides your biological fitness?"
Klebold may have had a bad report about his health, also known as biological fitness, just before, you know. Most murderers on scales way beyond Klebold who were evolutionists were ALSO altruists. Hitler and Lenin and Stalin thought they were helping altruism along, by eliminating what they considered as egoists.
"[two next ones]"
Whatever is the true cause of our being is also the cause of the being of those who believe sth else is the true cause when it isn't.
Both scientific method on the one hand and reason and morality on the other are to some extent believed by both evolutionist atheists and Christians. The question is: am I better at explaining success of science without making "atheistic methodology" the key asset of scientific method, or are you better at believing you are doing the right thing when (hopefully!) doing the right thing without involving a supra-human and therefore divine morality?
"You don't accept science?"
A fairly common strawman from atheists ....
"a peer reviewed journal said it, I have no reason to doubt it"
If not your own attitude, Hemant, at least fairly common among atheists ...
"thank the farmers"
If you don't thank God, that is at least a start ... by the way, I hope you paid them, the farmers, that is? Sure the inbetweens are not underpaying the farmers?
"I heard St Thomas Aquinas recanted, just before he died"
l o l ... historically nearly plausible. But a very unspecific "recantation" since we don't know exactly what kind of aspect to his works he considered straw.
After that vision.
"there will be fire and brimstone and earth will be destroyed, in several billion years"
S o u n d s as if you thought this very urgent (not really).
"why don't you stop being delusional"
Have Christians ever been exposed to that kind of taunt, have for instance some shrinks ever had some kind of bias against Christians making them more likely to diagnose them? Check out history of psychiatry for some decades of the past ...
"And that is what a lot of Christianese sound like too."
If I do, I blame atheists close to my upbringing ... including a cantankerous granny!
OK, she was on and off atheist, but she aspired, intellectually, to atheism.
Some of the things you brought up were Protestant. In England, they have a habit of being so in relation to Catholics, and then in colonies of being more so than Catholics to Amerindians.
"I mean God won't love you"
Sure? I hope you are wrong.
I mean, if I put this in an article on my blog, I will definitely have shared it with 30 to 150 people, maybe more, insofar as articles on that blog tend to get many readers.
Now, what I would like to have a video about ...
- explain reason with no God (validity and our at least relative access to it)
- explain morality with no God (dito)
- explain ultimate mover of moved or changed objects, ultimate cause of either that or staying same, and what is the ultimate reality on which contingent realitie-S depend for existing, if other than God?
- explain what is the most noble thing, since graded realities (value being one of them) tend to an ultimate maximum (either positively by approach or negatively by remotion), if that is not God?
- explain what keeps and put the astroscale universe or biology in functional order with no intelligent designer?
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