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Roddy
New Member
Panama
48 Posts |
 Posted - 08/27/2007 : 21:10:57
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Wherever someone debates a Christian, either on a forum, IRC, or television the arguments are pretty much the same, and it is hard to see some atheists (not always) falling into Christian/Muslim arguments again and again. It'd probably happen to me as well. Then again I rarely debate Christians, it is a waste of time.
Anyway, here are some of the arguments Christians make and my reply to them:
(1) If God doesn't exist, then who created the world?
This one comes in many shapes, but they are all variations of the same argument: "Everything needs a creator." "Everything
around us is evidence of God." "If you find a watch, there must be a watchmaker", etc, etc, etc.
Bill o'Reilly threw this one at Richard Dawkins, and Kirk Cameron and his partner in crime (whoever he is) threw it at
the Rational Responder Team during the ABC Debate. The idea that God always was completely overrides the
idea that everything needs a creator. Saying that something always was means not everything needs to be created. If I say
the universe always was, or life always was, or energy and matter always were, I win because I have an advantage over
the theist because I can easily prove life, matter and energy, and the universe exist.
Furthermore, the argument is nothing more than "ignorance" put on an altar and given a name. We don't know how everything
came to be, so we are putting a creator where science has no answers (yet).
(2) Look at the world around you. The sun comes out in the morning. Look at the sunsets, the birds, the trees, etc, etc.
This argument is nothing more than a variation of the "lottery ticket" argument. If I buy a lottery ticket with 11 numbers
in it, and I win, I'll conclude a God helped me win because the chances of me winning equal 1 in 100,000,000,000.
The problem here is that there are millions of people who bought lottery tickets and lost, just like there are thousands of
planets that have no life, and thousandsof suns that may lack planets, and perhaps we are living in a universe out of a
million universes. The Banana Argument Kirk Cameron is so fond of falls into
this category. He is ignoring the coconut, the lemon, the cherries, the watermelons, etc, etc.
If we didn't have one nose, we'd have no nose and breath through our mouths. Then Christians would say that God is a perfect
engineer because he made a hole we can use to eat and also breath. If men didn't have two testicles but one, then Christians
would say, look at that testicle, it must've been engineered by an engineer.
(3) There are thousands of Christian charities. Where are the atheist charities?
Laura Ingraham tried to get Brian Sapient with this one. First of all, you can't have something called "An Atheist Charity."
It'd get attacked by everyone. Evil atheists can't be charitable, that's the idea. First of all, the best form of charity
comes from stopping people from being poor or miserable in the first place. Birth control stops women from being barefooted
and pregnant, and in many third world countries, they are, thanks to Muslims and Catholics. Prosthetics allow amputees to
have lives that are close to normal. And quite frankly, I don't see prayer making people grow back missing limbs, and I
don't see religions creating better forms of birth control or better versions of prosthetics. It is science that does
this, and science, last time I check, isn't exactly religious in nature.
And I don't see christians helping HIV victims much. In fact, I see them helping HIV by saying condoms don't help and
creating abstinence programs that don't help, and blaming homosexuals for the spread of the disease. Once again science
seems to be the one coming to the rescue.
Second of all, if I help someone in need, it won't because I have something to gain from it. Neither will I give money
or food to someone in need and then try to turn that person into an atheist. Christian charities do their best to force
people into being christians, and some of the money received by these charity services usually end up being used to build
more churches and temples, as in the case of Mother Theresa (watch Penn and Teller's episode about her).
(4) I get my morals from the Bible. Where do you get your morals from?
This one does make atheists brainstorm for a while. First of all, let's define morality:
The term “morality” can be used either
1. descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or,
1. some other group, such as a religion, or
2. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.
Morality changes according to a society, but eventually every society learns that killing people is a major no-no, and
stealing is also a major no-no. The rest of our moral behavior changes with the times. If we never questioned our morals,
slavery would still be legal (the Bible supported it), women wouldn't be allowed to vote, and it'd be illegal for a
member of one race to marry a member of another.
Atheists usually get their morals from the society they are living in. Many of us get them by questioning what's right
or wrong ourselves.
(5) Every scientific achievement, every movement that changed the world had a religious element to it.
Laura Ingraham said this to Brian Sapient. A Christian once told me that the Catholic church was the one behind the
Renaissance. If I decided to write about this one, I'd need a bigger hard drive.
(6) Atheists are criminals
This one implies that someone who lacks belief in God will kill and steal, rape, etc. Why? If I told a Christian that there's
no God, would he start stealing, killing, and raping people? If so, then I don't want to speak to such a person.
If you look at the history of the world, you'll realize that almost every war and terrorist attack had a religious element
to it. Crimea War, 1000 years war, the Crusades, the war in Kosovo, IRA, Al Qaeda, etc, etc. If religions stop people from killing each
other, it hasn't done a good job in that area so far.
Furhtermore, right now, using Bill o'Reilly's own statistics when he debated Richard Dawkins (which are probably bullshit),
there are 65% atheists in Japan, 44% in Britain, and Sweden and Finland have similar numbers. How come those societies
have crime rates that pale in comparison to that of the United States? How come their governments and societies aren't
as corrupt as those of Latin American socities, where the Catholic Church is a big influence and politicians are as
corrupt as they can be, and the Church usually backs them up wherever they can get in a position of power.
It's hard to believe that someone who is planning to kill people with a machine gun will not do it if someone tells him
the Bible is wrong. The Bible is full of murders and genocides itself, murders carried out by people who saw the act as
negotiable.
(7) Almost every dictator and genocider has been an atheist
A variation of #6. o'Reilly gave it to Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens got it from some conservative host, I forgot his
name.
Was Hussein an atheist? Was Hitler an atheist? Christians say the latter was, and they say Milosevic was an atheist as well. But why
would atheists go around killing Jews and Muslims. If anything, we would go around killing everyone who isn't religious,
if genocide was in our minds (certainly not in mine). Even if Hitler and Milosevic were atheists, they didn't kill people
themselves, soldiers did it for them. People did it for them. Hitler said Jesus was an aryan who fought against Jewish
opression. Milosevic's hatred came from a centuries-old conflic between Orthodox, catholics, and Jews.
It seems Christians are going by numbers here. A tyrant who murders 10 people is worse than one that murders 10,000,000, as if there's a competition to see which one is better at genocide.
As for the communists, they didn't kill in the name of atheism. Communism was more of a religious philosophy than atheism
per se. A religious philosophy where the state was God, and Marx was a prophet. A perfect example of what can happen when
someone thinks he can save the world by shoving ideas down other people's throats, whether atheist ideas or not.
I am sure that most dictators didn't believe in dragons and unicorns either. That doesn't mean a-dragonsists, and a-unicornists
are killers. The idea that atheists make great tyrants is based in the idea that you need to believe in God in order to
respect life. Ask Bush and his minions if they respect life when they find cheap excuses to bomb other nations and torture
people in Guantanamo.
Let's say 6 and 7 are right. Even if religion offers a form of social control over people, the fact that it lost control of society says a lot. Think of
the censorship it has used to silence atheists and agnostics. Think of all the atheists and agnostics and pantheists tht
were burned at the stake. The fact that we are still here says that Christianity is a terrible form of social control.
The fact that it has lost its way clearly says that it is no better than facism and communism and every other doctrine
that claimed it could redeem mankind. If we want to improve mankind, we need to understand the human mind better, understand
societies better, and quite frankly, a religion that explains human imperfections with the idea that every evil originates
from a couple of nudists eating an apple is just plain idiotic.
(8) If everyone was a Christian, the nation would be better off.
Well, let's see, in the Dark Ages, Christianity was the foundation of almost all of Europe. The same period in history
where the average lifespan was 48 (apparently miracles didn't save people fron dying early), women were second class
citizens, inquisitions were commonplace, and so were wars, plagues, and above all: ignorance. The Catholic church censored
almost every form of philosophy because they thought some philosophical teachings could contradict those of Jesus. Likewise,
it censored many of the writings of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, some of which ended in Baghdad and returned to the
west via Andalusia a few centuries later.
Today's Christians still continue to spread ignorance regarding the use of condoms, birth control, and of course evolution.
If Christians took over the world, it'd be a disaster when it comes to reproductive rights, preventing diseases like AIDS,
and of course, learning more about our true origins. It'd also be a disgrace for behavioral psychology, for Christians tend
to despise things most psychologists see as normal, like pride, ambition, lust, etc.
Also, many people, my family included, tend to pray all the time hoping to get better lives. They don't seek better lives for themselves, they just ask God to hand them to them in a silver plate. The idea of God encourages laziness.
God is also a health problem. In many people, my family included, tend to pray to stay healthy. In 1977,
my mom broke her leg in a fall. The only time in her life when she went to the doctor. Today she walks with a cane, rarely
leaves the house. She also has back problems. Overweight. A doctor would be able to improve her health. But she keeps praying.
Four hours each day. Imagine an entire nation behaving like this.
(9) Evolution goes against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
From Wikipedia:
The second law of thermodynamics is an expression of the universal law of increasing entropy. In simple terms, it is
an expression of the fact that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out in a
physical system that is isolated from the outside world. Entropy is a measure of how far along this evening-out process
has progressed.
The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at
equilibrium.
First of all, the Earth is not an isolated system. If evolution started with high entropy (lots of disorder) and
the entropy got lowered (more evolved, less disorder), it is because work was done by other systems, like gravity,
the sun, meteors, you name it. A species eating another species is work, not a nice form of work, but work nonetheless.
Furthermore, the First Law of thermodynamics goes like this:
The increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the
system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.
Let's make it simple: energy and matter can't come out of nowhere. And a God making it all out of nowhere would violate
the First Law of thermodynamics. If a Christian says he can because he is omnipotent, then there are like a thousand
arguments against omnipotence, like why are we still evil, sinful, etc?
(10) Who are you to question God?
The Christians use this one was driven into a corner. First of all, most of us are not genociders, pesticiders, and
we aren't tyrants who have people in our cellars being set on fire for all eternity.
Second of all, we can question God just like we can question the Tooth Fairy's constant need for teeth. Why doesn't
he start collecting hair instead? Loser.
Ten sounds official, so there. Ten. I don't have the debate skills of Christopher Hitchens or Brian Sapient, so help
me improve some of the things I said. There are probably more christian arguments out there. Keep in mind that turning
this list into a Bible wouldn't stop a Christian from winning a debate because they tend to pull shit out of their asses
as they speak, often saying stuff they make up, like Kirk Cameron claiming evolution is false because the "bullfrog"
has yet to be found, as if someone claimed the bull came from the frog.
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Answering some Christian Arguments
