Tuesday, December 13, 2011

From PZ's Place, Fralan, USA, On Why I Am An Atheist

I am the confident and comfortable atheist I am today for three main
reasons, among others. These are just common sense notions that
leveled the Catholic faith I was brought up in when I was 14.

1. I do not wish to live in perpetual fear. Christian philosophy,
specifically Catholic philosophy, dictates that everyone WILL suffer
for eternity. You are born that way, you have no chance of escape from
the vile disgusting thing that is you. Only by completely throwing
your life away to a divine tyrant and unquestioningly spreading his
will, whether you agree or not, is the way to not suffer. Being angry:
damnation. Asking questions: damnation. Being born: Damnation.
Religion removes the point of life by making you miserable and
submissive. Religion relies on this loathing of oneself to get what it
wants: obedience and money.

2. I live in reality. Religion lies straight to the faces of millions
and they believe it. Why? Because it’s what the magic desert
scribblings say. So there. Once again they rely on straight fear to
keep people in line, and it is only this fear that keeps them
believing. They simply ignore inconsistencies as trivial because these
inconsistencies prove errors. Everyone knows that dinosaurs died out
65 million years ago. The bible says that the earth is 6,000 years
old, but people still just ignore it.

3. Religion is self-righteous and egotistic. Countless millions have died
because religion told them that their way was correct, as opposed to
someone’s slightly different way. Crusades, witch hunts, jihad, the
Holocaust, and scores of other events are justified only to the
killers because they’re just acting under a direct order from god,
given by man, of course.

Religion is a brutal prison warden on people’s lives. They stop at
nothing to maintain control and recruit new members. Permanent
psychological damage? They don’t care. It tries to destroy
independence, coexistence, and confidence in the name of an
oversensitive, jealous, maniacal, dictator in the sky, and they do no
one any good.


Fralan
United States

Fralan goes on a rant. Religion is perpetual fear. Religion is self-righteous and egotistical. Religion lies and kills countless millions. Religion stops at nothing,"to maintain control and recruit new members. Permanent psychological damage? They don’t care. It tries to destroy independence, coexistence, and confidence in the name of an oversensitive, jealous, maniacal, dictator in the sky, and they do no one any good."

Summary: Raised Catholic, Atheist at 14, he attributes every evil to "religion".

3 comments:

FrankNorman said...

Roman Catholicism certainly has a lot to answer for. Especially in making submission to an institutional system seem more important than any real faith in God.

Matteo said...

The problem with such "explanations" in favor of atheism (or anti-Catholicism in general, for that matter), is that if anyone hearing them has had a vastly better and more well-informed experience of theism (or Catholicism), then the entire "explanation" is immediately rendered null and void.

Given that such explanations are devoid of any form of reasoning whatsoever, there is no cause for anyone who has had a different experience to respond with anything more than "whatever".

This is the problem with atheist polemics in general. There is simply nothing rational there to engage with.

zilch said...

Matteo- theistic polemics has the same problem. In fact, any kind of polemics has the same problem. So?