By I. Tawt Itawapuddytat. January 2011Another forwarded email, this time the joke about April Fool's being the Atheists religious holiday. Actually that is funny, even to atheists (I imagine), as it can be taken two ways.
Here is a related article by Benny Reppond titled "An answer for non-believers" on DailyWorld.com
This article unwittingly exposes the central hypocrisy of Fundamentalist Christianity, if you try to follow the logic. Starting with the statement:
"People do not want to believe in God for a simple reason: They don't want to be held accountable for their actions."OK So far that's a plausible statement, if you assume that God holds people to account for their actions.
Then some explanations and examples of the above statement that you can read in the original article linked above. But next comes the unravelling of the argument with:
"How can you escape the judgment of God? It is very easy."Was Pastor Benny Reppond asleep during his Logic 101 class at Bible School? He is now promising an easy way out of God's Judgment, apparently blissfully unaware of what he just wrote a few lines above about atheists. He continues:
"All you have to do is to believe that Jesus is God's only begotten Son and to ask Jesus to come into your heart and forgive you of all your sins and to guide your life through this journey on earth.Well in the end, it seems that we have a toss-up. This is on the central idea of Fundamentalist Christianity, not some insignificant fact like how many animals were on the ark. We are told atheists don't want to believe in God because they don't want to be held accountable for their actions. But the exact same thing is also true, people like Pastor Benny himself believes in God as an easy way to "escape the judgment of God." So apparently nobody wants to be held accountable for their actions.
When we ask Jesus into our hearts, then He pardons us from all of our iniquities and transgressions against God."
I sometimes wonder how on Earth people can come to such absurd contradictions. I heard one yesterday. Somebody's grandmother was just told that a friend of hers was starting to use a walker. "Thank God", she said "that I don't need one yet." Except that not only does she have a walker, but that she never goes anywhere without it. Nobody is going to call this bulls**t of course. So this person can and will carry on with the delusion. But when we have delusional religions like so-called Christian fundamentalism, trying to take over the government and the schools, and trying to launch an apocalyptic nuclear Armageddon, and make Jesus out to be a warmonger, somebody needs to speak up against this. It might even be blasphemy.
Picture: Random kitten off the Internet. No connection to this article unless the Kitten is an atheist or born on April Fool's day. But kittens are so cute, and all the other pictures I had were stupid.
The contention that atheists choose not believe in a God because, 'They don't want to be held accountable for their actions,' is a hoary old chestnut. Shame on anyone who trots that out as an argument in the 21st Century!
ReplyDeleteIn the 'olden days' before law courts, enforceable statutes and professional constabulary, the primary means of enforcing social order was through, literally, the 'fear of god.'
With the advent of those civilizing social institutions, religion as a means of controlling social behaviour outlived its relevance.
Religion lingers on as the anachronism it is largely because we still tolerate that form of child abuse which permits parents to brainwash their young children into their own superstitious beliefs.
Atheists, on the other hand, accept the scientific facts. There is no 'soul' independent of the electrochemical activity - which ceases totally upon death. And that society cannot function properly without a set of (man-made and logically consistent) laws and the means (cops and courts) to enforce them.
Conversely, atheists reject the contention that some members of our society have special powers and privileges granted to them by supernatural beings who have authorized them to dictate and enforce the rules by which the rest of should live.
It is primarily those people who remain afraid to accept the reality, and all the scientific evidence, that our lives are limited by the laws of chemistry, physics and biology, and who fear their own eventual extinction, who are willing to cast aside all the evidence and adopt a superstitious stance that posits, in the memorable words of that great 20th Century philosopher, George Carlin:
'... that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
'But He loves you.'
The top moral commandment would be "Thou shalt not kill" which we like to add the standard disclaimer "except in war time, and except criminals or terrorists".
ReplyDeleteThe second moral commandment would be "Thou shalt not steal" with the standard disclaimer that it is not stealing if your God told you that this property is yours.
Put them together, and you have the Israeli Palestinian dispute.
George Carlin tried simplifying the ten commandments to two, here is number two:
"Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you."