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3/2/2009 10:14:03 PM
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Tim A
Posts 10
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Fellow atheists... what are some of the most common arguments/accusations that you hear made about atheism by Christians and other theists. In particular, I'm looking for things that I haven't covered in one of the FAQ articles on the site!
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3/4/2009 6:36:03 AM
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spotty
Posts 1
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umm, how about - without God there are no morals and we'll all kill eachother ---- just like Stalin!!!!
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3/4/2009 9:12:09 AM
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Alexander
Posts 5
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No morals is a common one. A variation on it is the tired old, "Stalin and Hitler were atheists" argument. Hitler was actually a christian, but that's neither here nor there.
Another common one is, "Well, if there's no god, how did the world / universe / people get here?"
I've also seen a lot of "(insert bible quote) therefor, Jesus is the only way to get into heaven."
More than that, I just see bad logic from them (and from some agnostics as well). I hear things like "nothing can be proven" or "there are no absolutes".
Lastly, there are many attempts to villify prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins.
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3/4/2009 1:01:50 PM
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JustTheKidNextDoor
Posts 6
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hello everyone..
besides, let's be honest. It doesn't really matter who's more moral, or whether religion or atheism makes you more moral or less moral. That's not the point. The point at stake is whether there's a God or not. Sam Harris says it really clearly in his book Letter To A Christian Nation:
«Even if a belief in God had a reliable, positive effect upon human behavior, this would not offer a reason to believe in God. One can believe in God only if one thinks that God actually exists. Even if atheism led straight to moral chaos, this would not suggest that the doctrine of Christianity is true.»
But I agree, it's a really unfair, ungrounded and annoying accusation. But we should right away make them see, that's not the point being discussed. Even if atheism made people immoral, that wouldn't justify anyone's beliefs in the supernatural.
edited by JustTheKidNextDoor on 3/4/2009
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3/9/2009 4:30:45 PM
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The_Swindall
Posts 5
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I have been accused of having no faith in anything BECAUSE I dont have faith in a God. Which provoked me giving this face...  lol
When debating against a friend, he argued that 1. because the religion had been around for so long, it must be right.
2. because so many follow the religion, they cant ALL be wrong.
3. and the real winner.. Its obvious that christianity is real, because of the Bible 
Who can name the logical fallacies? lol
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8/6/2010 3:25:15 AM
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reddragon
Posts 1
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I'm not going to waste a lot of time on this. but essentially you belief system is just as idiotic as religion (idiot used in clinical sense, not pejorative)
http://keytoann.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/the-g-word/
walt
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12/4/2010 12:22:11 AM
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Yrreg
Posts 7
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My observation is that I define God as the necessary being creator of everything that has a beginning.
Since you don't accept God, to what or to whom do you credit the beginning of the universe?
Or for you the universe has always been around?
In which case then there is something or someone in the universe that is doing the work of God, which then is God within the universe, but also He is outside of the universe -- there is no internal impossibility for the concept of God to be existing outside time and space, is there?
How is that?
Well, God is so huge and so subtle that he can be outside as to surround the whole totality of existence that has a beginning, and also so subtle that He penetrates every material particle and force or string or wave whatever that He has created.
Yrreg
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12/5/2010 1:32:23 AM
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skapigeon89
Posts 1
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I, personally, believe that man doesn't need to worry about how we were created. Why does it matter? We're here now. Isn't that TRULY what matters? Also, Why does the Earth have to be 'created', yet God doesn't have to be 'created'?
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12/6/2010 2:19:44 PM
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Yrreg
Posts 7
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You say:
"I, personally, believe that man doesn't need to worry about how we were created. Why does it matter? We're here now. Isn't that TRULY what matters? Also, Why does the Earth have to be 'created', yet God doesn't have to be 'created'?"
-------------------------
That is why man has intelligence and asks questions, making man different from animals which don't ask questions, otherwise you can see them writing books.
You have a mouth and you use it; you have a brain, so use it, ask questions like what am I here for?
Why does God not have to be created?
Ask people who know that God exists, don't ask people who deny that God exists.
Now, to people who know that God exists, they know God to be a necessary being creator of everything with a beginning.
You don't accept that kind of a God, then for you things have always been always around, but scientists who subscribe to the Big Bang theory tell us that things or the observable universe has not always been around.
So think about that, use your intelligence, that is what makes you different from animals whose only observable purpose to your eyes are to eat and to breed.
You will tell me that the question is being asked again, who created God if God created everything.
That is a silly question, you can ask it again and again and again until you die, that does not make it anything existing really like what silly thinkers want to call an infinite regression.
You must answer the question, who created God, in this way, God is the only necessary being Who has always been existing and He started everything.
If you don't accept that then there is nothing more silly in using your brain than repeating the same question again and again and again and again, not infinitely, but only until you die.
Yrreg
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12/7/2010 12:47:54 AM
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JustTheKidNextDoor
Posts 6
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[quote]"You must answer the question, who created God, in this way, God is the only necessary being Who has always been existing and He started everything.
In that case you wouldn't be behaving as a scientist with intellectual honesty. You cannot answer questions with whims or wishful thinking. God's existence is your personal presumption that many don't share, and not because they cannot answer the question "who created God", but we don't have enough evidence to believe in a god in the first place. What you wanna do is force a pretext (God's always been) to prove a presumption (God). I don't consider that intellectual honesty. It's like saying: unicorns exist (presumption), but you can't see them cause they become invisible to human eyes (pretext). I'm really not interested in that kind of talk.
Besides, many philosophers consider the universe to be the only necessary entity. Why can't you think like that, and we would be getting rid of one unnecessary presumption: God. We would be behaving like scientists by using the Occam's razor. So it's you who must answer the question of the universe that way: the universe is the only necessary entity.
[quote]If you don't accept that then there is nothing more silly in using your brain than repeating the same question again and again and again and again, not infinitely, but only until you die."
And I don't see anything wrong in asking questions once and again if they're legitimate questions that haven't been answered. You cannot ask just the questions that are convenient to your personal beliefs. "God has always been" is not an answer. It looks more like what you personally wanted the reality to be, a personal whim, so it's not not an answer that should be accepted by intellectually honest person. Let alone when the subject is a presumption.
edited by JustTheKidNextDoor on 12/7/2010
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12/8/2010 1:58:45 PM
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Yrreg
Posts 7
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Today's scientists are into a dungeon of their own prescription, to not think beyond their nose.
So, don't bring in today's scientists, unless you also subscribe to the self-restriction of your brain cells to not work beyond the boundaries of your nose.
Scientists of the past greater than any today were not afraid to think beyond their nose, because for them genuine and integral knowledge is not limited by for example keeping one's brain pickled in a vat of empirical socalled evidence, which is always deficiently and fallaciously propounded as to exclude reasoning from the facts in the world and in life.
Yrreg
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12/8/2010 2:24:04 PM
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JustTheKidNextDoor
Posts 6
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Science is the most reliable of human disciplines nowadays to obtain objective reproduceable predictable knowledge about the universe. It has restrictions, but because our senses are limited, and this discipline is way too intellectually honest to venture into magic. You have to open your mind, but not so wide that your brain falls out of it.
When you say that scientists of the past were greater you mean they were more willing to believe in magic, and that's because they were misinformed. Scientific knowledge is real knowledge. It might be wrong some times but the good news is the discipline is self-corrective and intellectually honest and its discoveries are scrutinized under what's known as full-disclosure, which is one step of the scientific method, whereby results are reproduced by detached groups of scientists all over the globe. Science is fallible, but reliable at large. Faith has never shown a single sample of truth in its claims, the very opposite. I'd rather claim I don't know than to be wrong, and that's the scientific mindset. And yes, I subscribe to it, along with its restrictions. The restrictions is what makes the discipline intellectually honest actually.
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12/8/2010 3:16:44 PM
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Yrreg
Posts 7
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JustTheKidNextDoor wrote:
[Yrreg says] "You must answer the question, who created God, in this way, God is the only necessary being Who has always been existing and He started everything."
In that case you wouldn't be behaving as a scientist with intellectual honesty. You cannot answer questions with whims or wishful thinking. God's existence is your personal presumption that many don't share, and not because they cannot answer the question "who created God", but we don't have enough evidence to believe in a god in the first place. What you wanna do is force a pretext (God's always been) to prove a presumption (God). I don't consider that intellectual honesty. It's like saying: unicorns exist (presumption), but you can't see them cause they become invisible to human eyes (pretext). I'm really not interested in that kind of talk.
[...]
[End of quote from TheKid.]
I put in bold your words above, to bring your brain to the fact that you are using a question as an argument, that God is into an infinite regression therefore He cannot be existing.
Don't you if your brain is not already pickled in silly words manipulation feel right away that there is something wrong with that kind of pseudo reasoning?
You cannot get it?
There is no infinite regress of God creating God creating God creating God... to the nth time.
An infinite regression does not exist in the universe, it is only in the mind of foolish men or men who from malice prefer to be foolish rather than wise.
What you are into is to ask the question again and again and again... but not infinitely because you will die within the next for certain 100 years.
Now, you say you will invent a machine that will repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat the question.
Very smart(?) but still not intelligent and not informed.
Don't you or have you not read that astrophysicists tell us that the energy in the universe according to their speculation will wear out, then no more movement, wherefore your machine will stop.
Just don't be silly, do some really genuine original cogitation with your brain, and not miasmally pickled in foul swamp pseudo thinking.
And don't bring in unicorns, that is unworthy of a true thinker; no one ever defines God as a unicorn except deceitful atheists who grab at all and any straws not to do intelligent thinking but to resort to false analogies from wicked intentions to insult God.
What about this false analogy:
Your mother is promiscuous therefore she is no different from street walkers.
The fact that you atheists have to always sprinkle your writings against God with derogatory words like magic, unicorn, leprechaun, spaghetti, fairies, show very glaringly that you cannot or more correctly from spite against God will not go into reasoning, but are into insults while putting up a perverse excuse that you just want to show that God is all fiction like unicorns, etc.
How can God be fiction when you can touch the nose in your face?
Think about that.
Yrreg
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12/8/2010 3:32:05 PM
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Yrreg
Posts 7
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About time you get to the fact of paradigm shifts among scientists, it's like flavors of the month with ice cream.
And do some personal original thinking, instead of parroting words from others who are themselves parrots.
Parrots appear to talk but they don't really think; that is why if you have a parrot which picks up words from everyone you allow inside your home, you'd better keep it away from the parlor where you want to meet people accustomed to decent speech.
Yrreg
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12/9/2010 12:25:14 AM
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JustTheKidNextDoor
Posts 6
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Yrreg wrote:
I put in bold your words above, to bring your brain to the fact that you are using a question as an argument, that God is into an infinite regression therefore He cannot be existing.
The argument is only to show that you cannot stop the regression of questions wherever you please. If you're gonna ask the question "who created X" it has to be asked about everything ad infinitum. What you're doing is neutralizing the regression at your own personal and whimsical convenience. Asking "who created" something is already the wrong question to ask, because we're talking about a phenomenon we don't know the nature of. By saying "who" you're already making the presumption the phenomenon that caused the beginning of the universe has a mind, is self-aware. The phenomenon might as well have been a natural phenomenon if any. The question won't be answered either by invoking a conscious omnipotent being or through a-priori reasonings anyway. And if it's not, we should, in the meantime, behave as scientists, apply Occam's razor and get rid of unnecessary presumptions.
The most probable anyway is whatever caused the beginning of the universe has no mind, cause it would make no sense complexity occurring first. If there's god, and it has a mind, that mind must have been the result of evolution through natural selection. No mind has ever been observed to just popped into existence. No mind could have ever been the first uncaused cause, regardless of the way you wanna conceive it.
Something that can conceive the whole universe in itself has to be considered complex, and the first uncaused cause, cannot be other than simple.
Through debates like this, one day, maybe the atheist side might give you that there was at all a first uncaused cause for the beginning of the universe. Some already do. But what theists do is make a lot of presumptions about the first cause. They already want ascribe it to a self-aware mind, and they endow it with other divine attributes found of course, in the conception of their own personal deities in their own sacred scriptures. If there was a first uncaused cause, that's all we have. It doesn't follow from there it had a mind, or was omnipotent, or was omnipresent, or that is still around us or that it wants our worship. The first uncaused cause, might as well have been a natural uncaused cause.
I was laughing at the parroting accusation, cause I presume you're religious, and your religion has its own sacred scriptures. If not it doesn't matter, because doctrines and dogmas don't necessarily have to be put down on paper. But honestly, have you ever seen a human discipline any more "parroting" that religion, repeating the same old unchanged things for thousands of years without anybody raising a single brain-cell. Come on. The blind man laughing at the one-eyed.
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