Atheism should not even exist. It’s an absurd term and reactionary, really. I like to think of atheism as ‘thinking critically about God’. Instead of believing, I choose thinking and thinking just so happens to leave me with an absence of belief in God. Even the most rational Christian apologists can’t fully rationalize their belief in God because that would forego faith. They may get close, but doubt is always around the corner. Their logic may be good enough to counter petty arguments about God, but the moment they claim God exists when asks, that is a moment absent of thinking. They can think before or after, but not during the moment they assert God exists. To me, the desire to thinking indicates life. I say desire because there are moments when we don’t think at all where something immediately grabs our attention or when the fight/flight response kicks in, for example. But when given the opportunity to think when asked if God exists and the answer is a resounding ‘yes’, that is willfully suspending your desire to think and now you call it ‘faith’. If God can be reached through thinking, then there is no more need for faith. On another note, if people didn’t assert a god or gods exists, then atheism wouldn’t be a thing. Atheism doesn’t even qualify for having a burden of proof because like Matt Dillahunty has said, “It is the rejection of claims that have not met their burden of proof.” No atheist can actually reject God. Sure, arguments can be made about the actions of the god of the Bible but not arguments disproving God. As an atheist, I’m not deciding to ‘not believe’ either because that would be akin to saying that I choose not to believe in winged rabbits. It’s like saying that my favorite hobby is not-going-fishing. I’ve had this non-fishing hobby for a few years now, I enjoy it very much.
There are two main types of Christians: those who take the ‘doom & gloom approach’ to clobber others with the Bible such as nonbelievers by weaponizing it, and those who only who only preach the ‘positive’ side of the Bible such as “Jesus loves you!” and “You matter to God, salvation is possible, don’t lose hope!” The first type is obviously direct, provocative, and confrontational. Many Christians will agree that that is not the proper way to approach nonbelievers. So instead they think they have a better way which is focusing on only the positives. But these types of Christians are the worst and most insidious kind because it allows them to save face while (knowingly or unknowingly) dragging the other person down.
To make one thing clear: You can be condescending while saying kind things. This is exactly where the phrase “There’s no hate like Christian love” comes from. When these Christians play it off as if they’re looking out for us, because they care about us, because we can be saved…is an insult to those who already have a good head on their shoulders. You see, spreading the gospel only works on vulnerable people. If you’re the direct type of Christian of “you’re going to hell”, guess what, you would succeed with most kids because most kids get scared easily. And if you are the ‘Jesus loves you’ type, it would work very well on those who are already depressed and miserable, in desperate need of help.
How do I know that more often than not, that’s what it is? Because I have had more than enough ‘Jesus saves’ Christians begin to slowly lose patience and turn into the direct type resorting to clobbering via the Bible. And no, I never fired back at them with a hostile attack after they were telling me that ‘Jesus loves you’. It would be an answer in kind much like, “Oh I don’t feel the need to be saved.” They then get this attitude of, “You need to stop thinking you’re perfect, because you’re not. You’re a sinner!” as if I declared I was perfect or something. And my answer usually ends up being, “If this is more about your attempt to guilt trip me to feel some type of way and not about just plainly informing me that I’m not perfect, then you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Most of us atheists actually know we aren’t perfect. And that is exactly one of the main reasons why we don’t believe in God because we don’t want the superiority complex that comes with asserting that God exists. Because God by definition is a perfect being that also transcends time and space. To even conceive of the notion of ‘God‘ is already pure arrogance. Because who would we be as imperfect, finite beings…to dare proclaim the existence of that which is perfect and beyond space-time? Because the Bible says so? Because of ‘so-called evidence’ we choose to decide to count as evidence? Because we choose to declare that Jesus is God or twisting what Jesus said in order to support our belief that he is God? Because we think the universe is obligated to ‘make sense’ to us? We haven’t even ruled out all possibilities for the universe and we are already putting the cart before the horse by declaring, “God!” We still have yet to put a human being on Mars and we’re just going to say that God put all of this here?
And to really take all of this a step further, a truly humble person would admit that they don’t know. To solve the dilemma of needing to think of yourself as good or needing to think of yourself as a sinner, we can just refrain from doing either. WHY does it HAVE to be a conflict between giving yourself a pat on the back and having to repent? It is so incredibly stupid to pigeonhole yourself into seeing yourself as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, perfect or imperfect. Why decide on what to be when I ALREADY am? Whether I tell myself that I’m perfect or not, it does not affect my existence in this moment, right now. Forget being good enough or not good enough, just being is enough because you already existed prior to having any thoughts about yourself. You can’t think yourself into existence, because existence is prior to any thoughts. At best you can think of an idea of yourself into existence, but it only remains an idea. And I don’t think Descartes was dumb enough to believe that you exist because you think, but rather that thinking is a sign of existing, a symbol of sorts if you will.
I think Christian fundamentalism is an underdeveloped form of Christianity that was filtered through dualistic Roman thinking. It’s primitive, black and white, lacking nuance. It is more about conformity and survival than actual love even though ‘love’ appears many times in the Bible. It emphasizes the classic psychology of reward vs. punishment. Humans have taken ‘love’ and confused it with pleasure or the opposite of anything that’s bad or evil. But even as an atheist, my understanding of love is that it is a neutrality that transcends the duality of good and evil. Fundamentalists have a very hard time wrapping their heads around this because their idea of love is splintered into a duality between love and truth. They are afraid that by only emphasizing the ‘love’ part, that it is foregoing or compromising Truth because Truth is supposed to be the bedrock of ‘love’. My point is that a higher level of understanding is that this duality of love and truth is an illusion. The very division between love and Truth just as two separate words alone, implies that they are not unified just as the division between “God is way over there, and I’m a person over here.” Perhaps there’s neither truth or love, there’s just isness or pure beingness with all the rest being a play. Perhaps our mortality is not a curse and we are the ones making it one. Why this desperate need for eternal life? That is a clinging on to life and an avoidance of that which is also part of life: death. How can you truly enjoy life by hating on death and seeking eternity when death is what makes us alive? Perhaps we are already living in the timeless and don’t see it because we are looking for it somewhere else.
There are two main types of Christians: those who take the ‘doom & gloom approach’ to clobber others with the Bible such as nonbelievers by weaponizing it, and those who only who only preach the ‘positive’ side of the Bible such as “Jesus loves you!” and “You matter to God, salvation is possible, don’t lose hope!” The first type is obviously direct, provocative, and confrontational. Many Christians will agree that that is not the proper way to approach nonbelievers. So instead they think they have a better way which is focusing on only the positives. But these types of Christians are the worst and most insidious kind because it allows them to save face while (knowingly or unknowingly) dragging the other person down.
To make one thing clear: You can be condescending while saying kind things. This is exactly where the phrase “There’s no hate like Christian love” comes from. When these Christians play it off as if they’re looking out for us, because they care about us, because we can be saved…is an insult to those who already have a good head on their shoulders. You see, spreading the gospel only works on vulnerable people. If you’re the direct type of Christian of “you’re going to hell”, guess what, you would succeed with most kids because most kids get scared easily. And if you are the ‘Jesus loves you’ type, it would work very well on those who are already depressed and miserable, in desperate need of help.
How do I know that more often than not, that’s what it is? Because I have had more than enough ‘Jesus saves’ Christians begin to slowly lose patience and turn into the direct type resorting to clobbering via the Bible. And no, I never fired back at them with a hostile attack after they were telling me that ‘Jesus loves you’. It would be an answer in kind much like, “Oh I don’t feel the need to be saved.” They then get this attitude of, “You need to stop thinking you’re perfect, because you’re not. You’re a sinner!” as if I declared I was perfect or something. And my answer usually ends up being, “If this is more about your attempt to guilt trip me to feel some type of way and not about just plainly informing me that I’m not perfect, then you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Most of us atheists actually know we aren’t perfect. And that is exactly one of the main reasons why we don’t believe in God because we don’t want the superiority complex that comes with asserting that God exists. Because God by definition is a perfect being that also transcends time and space. To even conceive of the notion of ‘God‘ is already pure arrogance. Because who would we be as imperfect, finite beings…to dare proclaim the existence of that which is perfect and beyond space-time? Because the Bible says so? Because of ‘so-called evidence’ we choose to decide to count as evidence? Because we choose to declare that Jesus is God or twisting what Jesus said in order to support our belief that he is God? Because we think the universe is obligated to ‘make sense’ to us? We haven’t even ruled out all possibilities for the universe and we are already putting the cart before the horse by declaring, “God!” We still have yet to put a human being on Mars and we’re just going to say that God put all of this here?
And to really take all of this a step further, a truly humble person would admit that they don’t know. To solve the dilemma of needing to think of yourself as good or needing to think of yourself as a sinner, we can just refrain from doing either. WHY does it HAVE to be a conflict between giving yourself a pat on the back and having to repent? It is so incredibly stupid to pigeonhole yourself into seeing yourself as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, perfect or imperfect. Why decide on what to be when I ALREADY am? Whether I tell myself that I’m perfect or not, it does not affect my existence in this moment, right now. Forget being good enough or not good enough, just being is enough because you already existed prior to having any thoughts about yourself. You can’t think yourself into existence, because existence is prior to any thoughts. At best you can think of an idea of yourself into existence, but it only remains an idea. And I don’t think Descartes was dumb enough to believe that you exist because you think, but rather that thinking is a sign of existing, a symbol of sorts if you will.
I think Christian fundamentalism is an underdeveloped form of Christianity that was filtered through dualistic Roman thinking. It’s primitive, black and white, lacking nuance. It is more about conformity and survival than actual love even though ‘love’ appears many times in the Bible. It emphasizes the classic psychology of reward vs. punishment. Humans have taken ‘love’ and confused it with pleasure or the opposite of anything that’s bad or evil. But even as an atheist, my understanding of love is that it is a neutrality that transcends the duality of good and evil. Fundamentalists have a very hard time wrapping their heads around this because their idea of love is splintered into a duality between love and truth. They are afraid that by only emphasizing the ‘love’ part, that it is foregoing or compromising Truth because Truth is supposed to be the bedrock of ‘love’. My point is that a higher level of understanding is that this duality of love and truth is an illusion. The very division between love and Truth just as two separate words alone, implies that they are not unified just as the division between “God is way over there, and I’m a person over here.” Perhaps there’s neither truth or love, there’s just isness or pure beingness with all the rest being a play. Perhaps our mortality is not a curse and we are the ones making it one. Why this desperate need for eternal life? That is a clinging on to life and an avoidance of that which is also part of life: death. How can you truly enjoy life by hating on death and seeking eternity when death is what makes us alive? Perhaps we are already living in the timeless and don’t see it because we are looking for it somewhere else.
