Monday, June 18, 2007

Don't worry, I'm not going to kill you!

A conversation that I had with my wife the other day got me thinking about those evil villains in American society that we refer to as Atheist. Being that the large overwhelming majority of Americans seem to claim some sort of Judeo Christian faith it comes as no surprise that the myth of the “Evil menacing Atheist” exist. After all if someone doesn’t believe in God, then how can their life have any meaning, and how could your life mean anything to them? By this line of reasoning we should be terrified of Atheist. After all they could snap and kill you at any moment and they wouldn’t feel the least bit bad about it.

The idea that one cannot have any sort of “moral behavior” without a God can be easily refuted through the theory of “memes. Regardless of any refutation though, the Savvy Christian has been trained to chime back the phrase “BUT THAT IS MORAL RELATIVISM.” The truth remains that you should be more terrified that a Christian is going to kill you than an atheist regardless of your beliefs about who is wrong and who is right about their individual belief systems.

If it is true that Atheist have no god to answer to for their behaviors then they would inherently know that they are themselves directly responsible for any actions that they take. If I kill you then I will go to prison and likely be killed myself. A Christian on the other hand has a few ways to view this. First and foremost the Christian has a free pass to break any rule they want. Jesus died for their sins and will forgive them no matter what they do. A Christian can kill you for any reason and as long as he asks for forgiveness before his execution, he will go to heaven. So this Christian could kill someone, before they accept Christ, and inadvertently send them to hell, while he himself gets to go to heaven! Sounds fair, doesn’t it?

A Christian could also believe that God has told them to kill someone. We see this in the news all of the time. People kill their kids, spouses, friends, all because they believe that God has commanded them to do so. I have yet to see a story of an Atheist who killed someone because he felt that some invisible force commanded it.

Typically what I see of atheist is that they care about the world, people, and the direct environment around them. They try hard to take care of things because they know that it is all that they have. They try to take care of themselves because they know that they only have one pass through life. I can’t tell you how many fat slobs you will see in any given church. (try going to the south a.k.a. the bible belt) On average Christians don’t take care of themselves as well as naturalist, humanist or atheist do, because their worldview tells them that this life is not all that important. It is but a flash in time compared to the eternity in paradise that they are going to spend in heaven!

Here is an interesting equation to top off this thought process. Out of the closet atheist only make up about 3% of the American population. If they are truly indulging in all of the evils in our world then they should also be making up a large portion of the prison population in our country as well. Suprisingly an astonishing 90%+ of prison inmates claim to be Christian while less than 1% claim to be of no religion. Take this information into account alongside the fact that all of these criminals are processed through our Christian prejudiced judicial system and you would expect the number of Atheist inmates to rise to at least 10%. It doesn’t though!

My real problem with this topic is that Christians love to claim the good and ignore the bad. When science finds a cure for a disease, when a relative is saved from a horrible incident, when crisis is averted, the Christians say “Praise god, He is good.” But when disaster strikes, when friends are taken from us needlessly, when HIV and malaria are spread like wildfire then suddenly events are the cause of man’s sinful nature. If God is the author of everything good, then he is also the author of everything bad. If this is true, then this makes God’s influence on the world no better than a chance roll of the dice. And we are back to square one!

1 comment:

tina FCD said...

I just really have a problem lately with the politics/religion thing. I think I'm getting past the typical religious person and am focusing on the extreme fundamentalists.