ATHEISTS, please help me understand.....?

Kelly, you're behaving in the way that I think Christians need to behave to make converts, and to make your religion admired instead of resented and feared.

Keep at it, please!

As an agnostic, though, I have to admit that there are certain parts of the Christian scriptures that just don't make sense to me, and certain Christian beliefs that I find morally and practically horrifying.

I do think that it might be good to get to know you as a friend, and I hope to meet you at an anti-war protest sometime. If you're also supporting Jubilee America, the largely Christian group that's working to end Third World poverty, then may God bless you, if God exists.

If you make your life a blessing for everyone, including even us skeptics and nonbelievers, your example may help to negate some of our doubts.

I can't promise this, however, given what I see mainstream Christianity saying about eternal damnation for the "unsaved." I think my mother was unsaved, and my father too, and I can't accept the idea of God condemning them to hell. I don't see why a loving and merciful God would do this.

But if you believe in a loving and merciful God and help to exemplify that idea through your worldly existence, I'll probably give your theology a try from time to time.

**I say the following as one who was forced to be educated in an evangelical school system. awful.* heaven and hell are devices used to ensure the plebs maintain a healthy lifestyle that is crucial to the overall development of a state and, subsequently, an empire.

However, I believe, like many religious concepts, what starts as a genuine interest by those religious to maintain the ideal lifestyle they envision, they take it a step further to say that you are condemned for not doing so, and then God's wrath will be upon you.

He will send you to a place where you will burn and scream and suffer and cry in eternal anguish for ever and ever, with your soul in complete and utter misery for all eternity, long after your dust is lost in the layers of soil that some egotistical, violent race will scour a few million years from now.

But of course, He loves you! See where the concept of hell can give power to someone? Fear is powerful tool to attain something, when you look at the corruption in religion over time, that's usually money. I do not want what you describe in the former paragraph! I'll pay my religious rites! Here!

And you know what? Watching a TV program tonight that sold little packets of "holy water," I'd say not a damn thing has changed.

So no, it's not permanent, it's not real, and the real hell is living in fear throughout the only life you have.

Heaven is a place where you look around and feel blessed; it's only short moments scattered through out life, because we immediately feel we don't have enough; it's our nature, it's our culture, it's our society, it's us.

B/c of all this, and the fact that, yes, if you pray to the Sun God or Buddha, your prayers are answered 50/50, just like a coin flip. That's because there is no Trinity, there are no angels, there are no miracles, there is no God. Not one, never.

>how it is worth eternity to just say you don't believe.

How is it worth eternity to you to say you don't believe in Allah? Or Buddha? Or Yahweh, or Odin, or Quetzalcoatl, or Osiris, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? The 'eternity' you claim to be offering us is only one of thousands offered by millions of followers of thousands of different religions around the world. It makes virtually no difference whether we choose to be religious or not, because once we've chosen one out of, say, 3000 religions, there are still 2999 religions that claim we're going to burn forever in Hell. Until you can provide us with some very good reason to think that your religion is the one true and accurate religion and all the others are false, we have no motivation to believe in any one religion any more than any other.

>Maybe you got exposed to "religious christians" that tainted your idea of who God really is.

Regardless of who has talked to me about the subject, the fact remains that according to the evidence we know of, God is simply nonexistent. This evidence would not change significantly even if I had never met a christian, or even if christianity had never existed; I would still be an atheist even if everyone on Earth was an atheist.

>I know more christians have hurt me than unbelievers.

That is to be expected statistically given that there are many more christians than atheists on Earth.

What if the god that really exists sends all good people to heaven and all bad people to hell except people who pretended to know for a fact another god existed? then all good atheists are going to heaven but YOU ARE GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL. Why not repent when you still have time? Why risk eternity in hell?

What if god loves music and sends all musicians to heaven, but all other people to hell? How can you risk eternal torture by not playing at least four hours a day?

And how can you worship a sadistic god that tortures good people - most of the people who ever lived - for all eternity?

Pascal's wager:

"If god exists, it's infinitely better to believe, since you get heaven instead of hell for eternity. If he doesn't, it doesn't matter since you're dead anyway. So overall it's better to believe"

This is, of course, false.

Some of the problems with the argument:

* The assumption that if a god really exists, he or she set up an afterlife with a heaven and hell

* The assumption that if a god really exists, he or she cares about belief in him/her above all else

* The assumption that if you believe in a god, it will definitely be the same god that actually exists.

* The assumption that you lose nothing if it's false. Religious belief costs people plenty - money donated to churches, time spent praying, marriages ending because of religious differences, lives lost because of relying on prayers or refused medical care, wars... need I go on?

* The assumption that people can believe in something simply because it benefits them. Would you believe goblins exist for twenty bucks? Why not?

* The assumption that any god won't see through the "believing just to get into heaven" ploy.

http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/wager.html

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/wage...

Ahem. All I have to say is that humanity is evil in general. Whether you believe in something like an ultimate being or not, you are still wrong. Most crimes are because of a religion, like the KKK. No, I somewhat trust and believe christians, since many of many friends are, but I do not trust many christians. If I knew you better, I may, but from your comments, I am afraid I do not. You may be a great person, but I do not know. Plus you're a total stranger, no offense.

I'll try.

First of all, your belief that eternity is at stake is an unfounded assumption. I have no evidence that anything exists for me after I am dead. So I expect that dead is dead.

Your beliefs may work for you because they ease your fears of death, but they just sound silly and arbitrary to me. Besides, if you are really concerned that someone can make a wrong choice and screw up an eternity, why are not not at all worried that you might have made a wrong choice of deity and dogma and screwed up yours? Did you arrive at your choice of belief through a rigorous process of elimination and evidence, or did you just happen to have one of hundreds of religions by accident of birth and circumstance?

I am atheist because no hypothetical deity that any believer has imagined and described to me makes sense to me as something that could be real.

--

Regards,

John Popelish

Or maybe we've reached the only reasonable conclusion, from the absolute lack of evidence to show there's any such thing as a god or "eternity?"

I'm a rational person, who judges things by the evidence for or against them. With no evidence for your god-idea, and a ton of evidence showing that it's completely false, how could I force myself to "believe" it when it's completely unsupported by evidence? Just on the off chance, perhaps one in ten trillion, that it might possibly have any validity at all? And why, given those odds, should I believe in your god -- when it's just as likely that the god-ideas of Zeus, Baal, Thor, or thousands of others are correct?

I don't "say" I don't believe...I don't believe. And I can't believe, because belief in your god is not rational given the evidence.

So the real question is: given the complete lack of evidence to show you're right, why in the world would you believe you are? It makes no sense.

Peace.

You have no more chance of converting me to Christianity than I do of converting you to Buddhism. You have what you consider the truth and I have what I consider the truth.

You assume that everyone is a Christian by default and only strays away from the fold if they have suffered some indignity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Billions of people have never been raised to be Christians and telling them that they are damned if they don't believe with nothing more than a book for evidence just smacks of arrogance and stupidity.

A large portion of atheists were raised as Christians. I know I was, and many of the people I went to church with were very nice. They had no effect on whether or not I believe in something.

I don't believe in god because I've examined the evidence and it is not convincing.

Most who don't believe in god don't believe in heaven or hell. Just rotting in the ground until they're literally gone.

And honestly, don't act so high and mighty like you praying for all atheists in the world will make them be exposed to the 'almighty word and gracious saving father.' What kind of sadist god creates people just to damn them to eternal fire and hate? And the term is 'nonbelievers' not 'unbelievers.'

There are christians that behave like you and it's no different than the other christians. You still preach to us and pray for us and pretend like we'll all be saved and taken to eternal paradise. You're all the same in that way.