Atheists: Time to Come Out of the Closet!

You're terrified of this idea aren't you? Which is a bit weird as those that know there is no god or afterlife couldn't give a hoot about it.How do you reconcile that Dredge?Quite obviously atheists have meaning in their lives and act as morally as anybody else. So where is this imaginary problem?It's no good asserting that these things don't exist without your imaginary spook, because it's easily demonstrated that they do - I'm a moral being and I have meaning in my life yet I don't believe in your hocus pocus. I guess that means you're wrong. Who knew?

You're only off by one about the number of fake churches.--Percy

Are you saying there are no real churches? A church is represented by its members...not its fancy buildings or men wearing silly hats. Dredge is not showing a Christlike attitude towards other churches or atheists. Blame him, not his church. They likely have some people of character. I know of several.

You're playing semantic games. I used the same terminology as Dredge. He said all churches except the Catholic Church are fake. Whatever Dredge meant by "church" and "fake", I in effect said that the Catholic Church is also fake.Will you continue to ignore that Dredge called your own church fake and that followers like you are "too stupid or too mentally unstable or too intellectually dishonest to see the truth of Catholicism. One day, Christ will remove all false religion from the face of the earth - including your fake Christianity."--Percy

If this life is all there is and all life-forms are the product of some mindless natural process, the life of a human has no more meaning than the life of a worm ... or a rock, for that matter. If belief in God is a delusion, your belief that your life has meaning is also a delusion. You're barking up the wrong tree here - I never claimed that atheists can't act morally. All career criminals and serial killers are atheists, but not all atheists are career criminals and serial killers. Says who? If you ask me, atheism is immoral by definition and you support abortion and gay marriage, which I also consider immoral. Some people think homophobia is immoral, but I think it's a virtue. Without God, morality can be literally anything you want it to be - for example, the Nazis and Pol Pot thought it moral to murder millions of innocent people.

All churches are Man-made. All religions are Man-made (despite any claims of being based on supernatural revelations, the "resultant" religions are still constructed through fallible human interpretation and extrapolation performed by fallible humans.The problem is that so many believers believe in human INfallibility. T'ain't no such thing.

You're making a category mistake. Worms are not conscious, we are. Worms have biological drives, humans have consciousness, we are capable of creating meaning - including creating gods to give us meaning if that's what it takes. Bollox, prisons are full of professing Christians - including plenty of Catholics. Do I need to bring up the thousand of Catholic child abusers? Says me and everyone that knows me. So now you have to explain why I'm immoral yet acting moral and explain the difference Who made you the arbiter of morality? Of course it can't. Why would you say that, it makes no sense. Regardless of god - which god or no god - humans understand what is right and wrong and understand it at a very early age. I have no idea whether they thought what they did was moral - I suspect not, they were probably both psychopaths - but I suspect that we both agree that they weren't acting morally. And I'm apparently immoral so how does that work?

Human conciousness doesn't alter the atheist perspective - ie, that humans are just one more random organism roaming the planet and that their existence has no more meaning than that of a worm. Human conciousness can be used to create the illogical delusion of meaning, or it can be used to come to the logical conclusion that life is meaningless. No bollox at all, it's quite true - people who fear God don't become career criminals and serial killers.Here's an interesting fact: When someone is officially accepted into the Italian mafia (becomes a "made man") he recites an oath, which begins with "There is no God." That is true to a certain degree, but mostly humans are taught what is "right and wrong" by some higher authority - parents or society or religion.Humans can develop very diverse and conflicting ideas about what is "right and wrong". For example, if an equality-warrior went to a Muslim country and started publicly campaigning for gay marriage, he'd be promptly lynched by an angry mob (and rightly so). If you kill a cow in India for food, you could suffer a similar fate. A woman in Iran who doesn't wear a head-scarf can be jailed or even killed. As I said in my previous epistle, morality can be anything you want it to be. Without God to decide what is objectively moral, morality is largely, subjective. What you consider to be "acting moral (sic)", could be someone else's idea of acting immorally - support for gay marriage and abortion come to mind.

There's no such thing as an atheist perspective. Atheists don't have a belief in god(s). That's it nothing else. You can't say anything more about them, if that's all you know about them. Or that there's a god - it can make up any kind of nonsense, and it has - Catholicism being a fabulous example of made up nonsense. Wow... you're more delusional than I thought.From Bing
According to a report by Statista, approximately 38,184 prisoners in England and Wales identified as being Christian in 2023, the most of any religious faith among prisoners. A further 26,715 identified as having no religion, while 15,271 identified as MuslimsLooks like you're just plain wrong, yet again. Bollox it is. Morality is wholly subjective, always was, always will be. That's why it changes over time and differs between societies and civilisations. Sod all to do with invisible beings and ever changing Papal pronouncements.

I agree that we understand right and wrong from a very early age, but it seems like after that it gets complicated. To me it seems like at a simplistic level morality has portions that are innate (theft, murder) and other portions that seem subjective or relative (eating cows, wearing a hijab). But murder isn't always wrong in some societies, for example advocating it as punishment for capital crimes, as in some states in the US. And theft isn't necessarily wrong in all circumstances, such as stealing Nazi gold during WWII.But despite the complications I can't help feeling that some morality is innate for most people, almost as if we're born with it.--Percy

As far back as Darwin people imagined morality to be an evolved trait. Darwin thought it derived from empathy developed from social species.These days it's believed to be partly instinctual (Darwin was smart) and partly learnt behaviour.

The atheist perspective is that humans are a product of the same mindless, aimless, meaningless natural process that produced grubs and potatoes and viruses. Those statistics don't disprove my claim that people who fear God don't become career criminals or serial killers. Firstly, the vast majority of jail inmates are neither career criminals, nor serial killers. Secondly, a jail inmate may be nominally Catholic (thru baptism), for example, but may not hold any Catholic beliefs at all and therefore has no fear of God.As for all those jailed Catholic altar-boy molesters, it can be argued that none of them feared God ... bcoz they no longer believed in God and the need keep his commandments.

No True Scotsman fallacy

Atheism is not the study of human origins.The scientific perspective is that the human species, indeed all species, are the result of natural processes. It's interesting to see your claim evolve. You originally said, "All career criminals and serial killers are atheists..."If you didn't invent your claim out of thin air then you should have no problem providing statistics supporting it. In the absence of such statistics, the numbers Tangle offered render your claim extremely unlikely. Do you have a breakdown of the percentage of inmates by whether or not they're career criminals?Concerning serial killers, you may recognize these names (from Serial Killers, Murderers and their Religion / Faith): Why do I have a feeling that for anyone who doesn't fit your claim you're going to qualify it with "not a true Catholic and therefore an atheist."The real world is unlikely to oblige made up claims.--Percy

And throughout the centuries, the Catholic Church has thought so, too.