Atheist As&holes

So as part of my isolation rehabilitation I’ve gone out looking for some random online conversation. For the most part, this has been in the form of a few carelessly selected yahoo groups. One of these was some group of ‘Freethinker Atheists’ who claimed their group was a place where “[doubters] can become comfortable with those doubts.” I consider that goal in itself to be a little suspect but let’s put that aside at least.

In general, the group seems to practice simple hatred. The members clearly blame religion for all the world’s ills and they say so, often and in just so many words. While I don’t profess any religion myself and tend to look at most of them with at least a seed of suspicion I can’t say that I can in lay mankind’s woes completely at the feet of religion. Obviously religion has contributed significantly to the causes of human ignorance and given people newer and more perverse reasons to hate and kill each other but in general I think that lacking religion they’d find some other reason to do the same things.

Worse perhaps than their hatred is their pompous attitude about the whole topic. It is clear from their language and tone that they see absolutely NO possibility that they could be wrong about anything. Their approach to atheism is as rigid and dogmatic as the most conservative of modern religions that they argue against. They completely fail to acknowledge that they dabble in the realm of the unproveable and the ill-defined.

On a personal level I don’t really see what the big argument is about. If a person chooses to be Christian then so be it and the same with any other religion. All I ask is that you practice in a manner that’s self-consistent. If you choose to worship Satan then worship Satan all the time and not merely when convenient. Religion is a personal choice and one has to choose what serves best but one must do so without hypocrisy. The atheists seem to make their stand on the platform of reason and freedom but then give advice to new members that they should ‘pretend to be religious’ so they don’t draw attention to themselves. If there is a God, I can imagine no greater sin than such fundamental dishonesty with oneself and others.

Finally, I’m not really certain how a truly honest and intelligent person can completely discount ANY theory about the universe around us. Despite time-worn arguments to the contrary, it is entirely possible that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and all the evidence we see around us to the contrary is a mere sham meant to condemn us all to hell. It’s possible. Now, it doesn’t make any SENSE (at least from a human’s limited perspective on the issue) but it doesn’t HAVE to make sense to be true. In the past when things that didn’t make sense turned out to actually be true we changed our thinking to match. That’s called science. On a most fundamental level, everything is still possible. Everything. We could be all part of some God’s dream and not really exist at all. The Bible may be literally true. Life could have been seeded here from another planet by aliens who occasionally visit us and were interpreted by primitive peoples as Gods. All these are well within the realm of possibility. I can’t disprove yours and you can’t disprove mine. As I often amuse myself by saying:

“Everything susceptible to mathematical proof has no application to the real world and everything in the real world is too complex to be represented mathematically. So you can’t prove anything of any real relevance.”