Atheism
Politics
Memes
Mind
Matters
Interact
Matters
String
Random
Feedback
Links
Debate
Home
The Logic of Christians
Why I am an Atheist
Why We are Atheists
Do You Want to Buy My Soul?
The Power of Faith
Faith, Hope and Belief
The Leap of Faith
Religious indoctrination is child abuse
What the Bible Says About Abortion
Aborting Babies
Animal Rights
Women and Islam
Evils of Music
Kill the Puppy Dogs
9/11 Inside Job?
Masturbation
Does God Bless America?
Seeking Jesus
The Cult of Christ
Anti-Semitism: the Big Lie
Desecration
America's First 9-11
Beheading in Islam
Why can’t they understand the simple truth? Why do Christians always think that something traumatic must have happened to me as a child in order to “harden my heart against God.”
This is so frustrating. I do not hate God, I do not fear God, I do not want to spite God, I simply do not believe in God. Why do Christians find this so hard to believe? After all they seem to find other much more bizarre concepts very easy to swallow.
I struggle in vain to remember anything traumatic in my childhood. The best I can do is to remember the time when I was waiting outside the church for choir practice and a boy was throwing dried up slices of bread about, one frisbee-ed at my head and caused a severe cut. Oh yes, one of the old women in the congregation had singing that would terrify anybody. I thought of her as Eleanor Rigby, wearing the teeth that she keeps in a jar by the door.
The fact is that my childhood was not traumatic. Nothing happened to screw me up inside. I heard the word of God, I grew up with it and I found it wanting. I did not rebel against religion, I did not make a big deal about it, I quietly got on with my life.
At university I wore a badge that said Born Again Atheist. This was not making any major point, just a reaction against all the sanctimonious types who went around with their little fish emblems feeling so smug and saved or the equally unbearable black t-shirted types with upside down crucifixes and the like.
I have never had any Road to Damascus type experience. I simply listened to the messages I was hearing from the Church and from science and I found the message of science much more believable. I liked the way that science did not claim perfect knowledge, that it accepted the possibility of error. I liked the way science was open to new interpretations, new explanations and at the same time it was not at the whim of fashion, there was a proper way of doing science, a proper way to bring new knowledge to light.
I had never felt that I was or had a soul. It was always obvious to me that my thoughts were the processes of activity in my brain. This was what I thought before I came across anybody who could confirm it to me.
I used to fantasize a lot about having special powers. When I could not get to sleep I imagined whole worlds in which I was controlling everything. Three wishes was kid stuff. This was the big league. Because I did not believe in a god watching my thoughts I had no problems with imagining that I had god-like powers. These fantasies helped to confirm to me the ludicrousness of the god hypothesis. When I imagined a world designed to please me full of independent men I came to despise my motivations. I also started to wonder what a god would want out of a universe. A god had no scores to settle, a god had no desires of the flesh, no hunger, no need for lust. At first a lot of my fantasies did involve fulfilling desires of the flesh but then it occurred to me that if I was a god flesh and desires would be entirely optional, and so the idea of creating a lust in order to slake it started to seem just silly, like wishing yourself somewhere you didn't want to be so you could enjoy travelling to where you wanted to be in the first place.
If a god wanted to create beings with freewill in order to test them, in order that may freely choose to love him then what kind of a sick mind is that? Likewise a god that creates an evil enemy in order to liven things up a bit, isn't that self-indulgent in the extreme?
Love me, believe in me (while I hide) and obey me or die in everlasting torment. Come off it, I’m not that sick. I used to imagine godlike powers for myself many times but in the end I always came back to the point at which I was heartily disgusted with myself. It wasn't that behaving like a god is above the power of my imagination, far from it, it was fairly easy to imagine. God can do magic, God makes the rules. It wasn't that I felt guilty trying to think into the mind of God or a god. God isn't real and I am so he's the one who should be looking up to me and fearing my judgment. Creating a world or universe is simply not the behaviour of a person I want to be or to know.
I find the concept of life then an afterlife to be absurd from the point of view of a god. What would any self-respecting god want or need from thousands or millions of sycophant zombies? And if the afterlife is anything worth being in why bother with this dusty, messy, stinking, painful life first? Why do souls need to be grown in bodies? Why do some bodies have to go on living for many decades in pain and ever-dwindling mental and physical faculties? When did God grow his soul and get his experience and wisdom? Why is the most important thing that will earn you entry into heaven belief in God? If I ran an afterlife belief in me would be the least of my concerns, if they didn't believe in me before they would pretty soon start to believe in me I can tell you, and watching that might even be fun. No, if I was running an afterlife I would be looking for people who were smart, kind and good company. The idea of spending eternity with the most pious and obedient believers would turn it into hell for me! What has a pious believer got that any god might conceivably lack or want?
For every beautiful butterfly or sunset there is an earthquake or a wasp that lays its eggs in the flesh of another living animal. The universe is a wonderful place to observe, a little dangerous to inhabit but a thoroughly disreputable thing to have designed and made for yourself to live in, to run or to judge. The only decent thing a god could do is create life or the strong probability of life and then go away and leave it alone.