What if the baby has the devil inside of him/her? Some would consider the practice of exorcism torture, well, a baby certainly would.
Does torturing and killing children count? Because God does that in the bible. You know, those little scallywags calling a prophet baldy and then God having them mauled by bears? Lovely.
Anyway. Co.Inkadink you actually seem to hold a lot of misconceptions about atheists, particularly for somebody who's listened to atheists quotes for years and years. Your first mistake:
The words 'atheism' and 'atheist' are NOT capitalised, unless they're at the beginning of a sentence. Pick up a dictionary, you will realise this. Why am I picking this up? Because it's actually a fairly important. Why is it? Because the capitalisation affects how the term is applied. Atheism is
merely the non-belief in any deities, like a theist has belief in one or more deities. You apply the word 'atheism' to a person in order to describe a property, their lack of belief; 'atheist' is a concrete noun.
Capitalisation on the other hand turns it into a proper noun, or as teachers in primary school teach it, "naming words". 'Atheism' isn't the name of something and 'atheists' don't belong to a named entity. Atheism capitalised implies 'atheism' is an organisation, maybe even a selections of ideals. Christianity is a proper noun, it describes a group of people who associate themselves with the teachings of Christianity. What does this misconception usually result in? The assumption that 'Atheism' is a religion or comparable to religion. Please stop using 'atheism' as a proper noun.
No Purpose, no evil, no good, sounds like an absence of meaning. I can quote other famous Atheists who say pretty much the same thing. I've heard this for over 20 years it's not a new concept.
You must have been selective about your atheists. What you're describing is closer to Nihilism, whilst
some atheists may take this stance, but you must understand 'atheism' is JUST the opposite of 'theism', no collective ideals or anything like that. The numbers of differences between me and a Nihilist is perhaps like the differences between a Christian and Hindu (both are theists, but their religions are significantly different). Though you say you
can quote, so why don't you? I'd be interested in seeing which atheists you've been basing generalisations on.
No Purpose: My life was given purpose when I was born into a family who wanted me.
My life was given purpose when I first set myself goals to achieve.
My life was given purpose when I decided how I'd life my life.
The meaning of life is to give life meaning, not because some deity create me. No, God didn't create me, my parents did. Why can His creations have meaning and my parents' creations can't?
No evil. No Good.: Granted 'evil' is a religious term, however, we do have 'immoral'. Why on earth would we have morality if some supreme being isn't dictating them to us.
An explanation is 'instinct', each species of animal on the planet has an instinct for their species to survive. Basic morality can be put down to that. Humans are a species who are socially dependent. They've evolved their greatest strength to be their sociability. So we must be able to co-exist and live happily, probably hence we also have the trait, "empathy". As we've grown creative in thought and came to reason we've reasoned out what we should call 'right' and what we call 'wrong'. Is it subjective? Yes, though it may not be subjective for all - as they may use rules already given to them, perhaps by a parent who raised them or by the law. But then that seems to be working out a LOT better than some of God's moral absolutism. I assume you've read the bible, I also assume you can read my signature. You see, by the standard of morality I've reasoned, what I've quoted from the bible is sick and immoral and society's laws would also agree. Biblical law on the other hand...God's law. God's law is subjective to God...well, it would be if He existed. And often or not God's laws is interpreted by His so-called followers. Funnily enough, the bible actually tells you not to interpret it for yourself (I believe it also commands you to kill those who do). The disturbing thing is that the true defiers of the bible are the ones who
are moral, who aren't doing sick and twisted things...well, to be fair, only somebody with a multiple personality disorder could successfully follow the bible because of its numerous contradictions. Imagine trying to be the most extra (and violent and bigoted) conservative in the world AND being the most extra liberal person in the world...at the same time.
If people actually took the bible's commands seriously, I would be dead and so would everybody I care about. I say fuck biblical morality, I'm sticking to a mutual subjective morality based on what is beneficial to us as a society & species and not specific individuals or to an imaginary psychopathic tyrant God.
How is he a psychopathic tyrant?
New Testament:Numerous teachings from Jesus:
He's not come here to abolish the laws of the prophets but to enforce them. (A big shout out to the Old Testament there)
Do not disregard the word of Moses. (A big shout out to some of the
worse teachings in the bible)
Not a single word will be changed from the old laws. (This is pretty important, because if you try and ignore the old laws, you will be denied the Kingdom of Heaven)
It's made pretty clear that the Old Testament is God's law.
Old TestamentLeviticus & Deuteronomy, two books from Moses. They contain some of the following:
Kill witches.
Kill homosexuals
Kill non-believers
Kill people who do not listen to priests
If a priest's daughter fornicates, kill her
Kill false prophets
Kill adulterers
Kill women who are not virgins on their wedding night
If a woman is raped in a town but does not scream, she is to be killed.
If a man is caught in the act of raping a single woman who is not yet ready to be betrothed, the rapist must pay the father and marry his rape victim
Invade the cities of non-believers and kill the inhabitants
And there are Christians still engage in that crap. If you don't believe me, I will post each biblical quote and describe their context for you.
