I want to take time to respond to an open letter written to atheists over at a reasonable faith. I would have rather commented on her site but it may not be approved so, I invite all of you to weigh in.
Why do you not believe? Why do you allow your senses to rule instead of your sense? Your eyes don’t see God, your ears don’t hear him, nor would your outstretched fingers find his form. But if God doesn’t exist, how is it that you do? If God doesn’t exist, why is there something rather than nothing?
To believe or not to believe is not a choice one makes. I don’t think you chose to believe but are in the particular religion because of geography. Had you been born in India, you’d be talking about Hare Krishna had it been Saudi Arabia you would be a Mohadeen maybe ready even to volunteer for a suicide mission. Why do you have a brain in the first place? Isn’t it to reason and follow the path reason leads you too? What has god to do with my existence? You can touch me to verify my existence, the fact that am responding to you means I exist, if god exists, I hope he is going to respond to this post. We can wait eh? Why is there something rather than nothing? Read Lawrence Krauss a Universe from Nothing
Why do you not believe? You clamor for justice and robe yourself in rights. But your appeals for fairness and freedom carry no weight without a transcendent standard. Who are you to tell me what’s right and wrong? Are you my judge? Are you my god?
Are you implying that without transcendence, there can be no justice? I disagree, we have made laws in defiance of god[s]. Your god condoned slavery, we abolished it, your god commanded we kill our children when they disobey we said no, your god commanded we kill those who work on sabbath, we don’t; your god drowned everyone except 8, we try to rehabilitate. Now between us and your god who is better?
Why do you not believe? You gaze out into the night sky and your immaterial thoughts carry you deep into space. You reason an endless expanse and discern a limited comprehension. Is it not reasonable to conclude that a limitless being exists who knows something you can’t?
Why is hard to conclude that we are a small speck in the entire cosmos? Why would looking at the vast expanse of space draw you to your god and not to Zeus, Odin or even better to Osiris?
God is horrid, you say, if he even exists. Just look at what his supposed Word says. He’s capricious and cruel, sadistic and sullen. Are you his judge? Do you really believe a creature who can’t even explain his own existence, much less create another like him, who is beset with badness, imperfect in piety, negligible in knowledge, can call to account the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Maker of all that is? Can expect to fully comprehend his ways?
Fortunately am not his judge, am just making an observation. If the bible is his word and he commanded those things, the only reasonable view is that he is capricious, a cruel bastard, a bigot, misogynist and all bad things we hate among our fellow-men. He is a racist to add to the list. If you think this deity created us, who is guilty of the imperfections, who is culpable? The created or the creator? Be honest with yourself Caroline and tell me do you believe we are born depraved?
And what’s that about anyway? How can you argue against God’s character and actions if you don’t even believe he exists? You fashion an image of what God would look like if you were him, and then cast off as unbecoming or unreal (one or the other…it can’t be both) a God that doesn’t line up with your image, in essence declaring yourself god by decreeing everyone else an imposter. You elevate the scientific method as the supreme diviner of truth, but skip over the observation of evidence and go right to the conclusion based on your biased preconceptions and your materialistic worldview that precludes any consideration of the supernatural.
You got it all wrong, the bible describes god and it is that description that we find in contradiction to what he does. The bible says he is all loving, but he commands Abraham to kill his son. If I was Abe, I would have told god to fuck himself! The god of the bible is contradictory even in definitions, all merciful and most just are traits that can’t be held by one person. Tell what truth has religion revealed to us since the beginning of time? Just one truth and while at it, I only ask for one miracle in our time. The ones you quote are old. The supernatural is not explanation, we live in a naturalistic universe and it has shown no evidence of the supernatural. The universe acts in a way that makes us conclude there is no divine intelligence involved.
Dear atheist…what if you’re wrong? What if it’s true that the God of the Bible does exist and your sin will separate you from him and happiness forever if you never receive his provision for your salvation? What if he is standing ready right now to forgive your sins and seal you for redemption if you will only turn to him and believe?
Caroline, the Pascal’s Wager is lame. What if you are worshiping the wrong god and every time you bless YHWH he takes offence and is waiting to condemn you? If this god you call true exists, let him show up and please not in my sleep neither should he send a representative. Pascal is asking you suspend reason and just have faith even if it is false. Hasn’t it occurred to you if this god is all-knowing as you want us to believe he would know you are faking it? And if it is a just god, don’t you think he will regard honest disbelief instead of rewarding blind faith?
What if you never believe?
That is god’s problem not mine and if he should exist and we meet, I hope he gives me a chance to defend myself. I will honestly tell him he failed in the evidence department!
Feel free to weigh in on your thoughts on this letter.
Random thoughts 
Wow, just fucking wow. I’m still shocked some days by people that have insulated themselves so much that they can’t find refutations of their arguments on the internet. I … well, I’m still shocked, because it’s not that hard. They seem so trained to not think for themselves that they seem to sound like robots regurgitating all they have been trained to say as though they think there will be no reasoned answer.
I spoke at length tonight with “pretentious ape” about such discussions. They are framed by the theist in theistic terms. This has the home court advantage to the theist because the discussion is about their world view and not why their world view is wrong.
We need to take that home court advantage away from them. We need to stop discussing the conversation in and on their terms. It is high time that every discussion be centered on the theist justifying their beliefs in such a way that forces them to both think about what they believe and verify that they have evidence for it.
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I think first we need to take this war to their doorstep. Whether they are muslim, jew, christian or whatever, we must first show them their holy books are not inspired, then we show them their god is not worthy of worship, that their laws are horrid and finally we take the war to home ground but by then there will be no theists left so it will all be a beautiful world 🙂
We must also be able to get them out of this cocoon they find themselves as accident of birth and geography to consider other religions first to see just how ridiculous their claims are and hopefully they will make the steps to rationality by themselves without more help.
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I’d have to say that the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on terror’ have given me a particular distaste for using the word where there is no carnage, death, and planned campaigns of killing.
Having said that, I have started taking the home court advantage at every opportunity. Today the weather sucked and a coworker offered that it is the only job in the world where you can be wrong every day and still keep your job: weatherman. I added: and preacher. This is a believer but one who does not like church/organized religion. It went over well. He and I are both preachers kids.
I’m working to make sure that the conversation is always framed in terms of religion being wrong and why. Never about belief, just about religion being wrong. Anyone can believe what they want and you can’t really argue with that part, plus what someone believes is not my beef. It’s religion that is wrong so it is always on the hot seat and the accused in the stand, always under cross examination. This gives me the advantage in that any dissenter has to defend religion rather than their personal beliefs if they wish to argue. It’s not very easy to do, either.
Not too many people want to defend pedophile priests or pastors who steal money etc. Nor can they defend the gullibility of those taken in by such people and the fact that they are taken is that they are taught to respect the “men of the cloth” so no one questions them. They should. They should do background checks on them.
That is fine at the moment but has a chance of backfiring. Should everyone get to breathalyze the pilot before the flight? There is only so much checking you can do so the point is to get them thinking about how bad people get into their circle. Sew suspicion and prompt the questions. If you can get one person in a church doing so, perhaps it will cause others to do so as well. If we can foster skepticism in the church itself, it has a cancerous effect which is exactly why they try to be so insular.
One thing we can do is stand outside the church and hand out tracts. Put them on the windows of their cars during the sermon. Nothing bad, just stuff to get them thinking and perhaps asking questions. You know, things like how did an omniscient, and omnipotent god allow the snake into the garden? There are better ones but that comes to mind just now.
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Really?
Did God really fail in the evidence department?
Is God really failing in the evidence department?
If I asked you to touch air by the grasp of your fists, will ya?
If I asked you to lock it up in a bottle, can yah?
You will feel it though, the swift wind beneath you earthly wings, wont ya?
Aint that proof enough there exist air…?
Are you so hard of feelings to notice air?
Are you so hard of feelings to Notice God…?
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Quite right. You’re talking about intuitionism, and that would be the only way that knowledge of Abraham’s sort of god would be possible. You can certainly hold that view of what constitutes valid knowledge, but you shouldn’t be surprised or offended if others do not share it (that would be inconsistent). Likewise, I recognize your position as a reasonable one to hold, though you may associate yourself through your religion with the majority of the faithful whose beliefs are shallow and motivated primarily by cowardice, as witnessed by the reference to Pascal’s wager above and the incessant demand for validation inherent in evangelism.
So I commend your effort to be consistent in your beliefs, but with your last line, you are already going astray.
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Hey Nick,
If you hold that god is in everything then you are likely to be a pantheist not monotheist. I maintain that god has failed in the evidence department unless you are willing to provide verifiable, testable and falsifiable evidence of one
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Niques, just replace “god” in all of your post and see how your claims are the claims of every other theist, even those you are sure aren’t worshiping the right god. Still no evidence of your god that can’t be applied to every other one. Must take time worshiping them all.
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“If I asked you to touch air by the grasp of your fists, will ya?”
Sure I will, and I could feel it especially if it was colder/hotter than my body temperature. That is not rocket science!
” If I asked you to lock it up in a bottle, can yah?”
Sure I can, I can demonstrate that if I put a bell inside the bottle and ring the bell, you’d still hear the bell from the outside, but if I pump out the air, even if you can clearly see the bell ringing, you wouldn’t hear it at all! Air exists, it is a substance that you can touch, feel, and most of all so some experiments with, in the past, now in the present, and in the future.
” You will feel it though, the swift wind beneath you earthly wings, wont ya?”
Sure, again especially if it was cold and windy… it is “matter” you know, it is not magic
“Aint that proof enough there exist air…?”
Well, there cold be more experiments done to assert this, but if your question was if this was enough to accept air’s existence, then I’d “personally” accept this as a proof
“Are you so hard of feelings to notice air?”
No, not at all, I can feel it, and have some fun with it, do many experiments with it.
“Are you so hard of feelings to Notice God…?”
Well, I am so skeptical noticing God, even though I do not dismiss the idea of his existence, simply because, so far, there is, or has been, no single experiment you or anybody else could perform on God to detect and demonstrate his existence. This is atheism in a nutshell.
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Beautiful! I wish she would approve this… you should at least try, N.
I have tried to reply to Caroline but she simply refuses to approve my comments. I wasn’t rude, simply explained to her that quantum field theory easily explains her ‘something-from-nothing’ query. It appears she doesn’t actually want to learn anything, just ramble away in her own very small, very closed world.
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She seems to have had a change of heart and approved my comment. I hope she gets to read Lawrence Krauss though, she may at least understand a bit of it
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I’m watching your tennis match with her right now! 5-0 to you in the first set, 40-love in the last game i do believe!
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