From: "Truth Liberty"
Subject: Re: Atheism

People are being taught to supress their conscience's untill it no longer exists. People refuse to believe in God simply because if there is a God then they have to be accountable, and thereby convicting their life-styles. I find it hard to believe that atheist's would think that Godly priciples would be anything but good for our world today.

Personally, I don’t know of any gods that exist and, therefore, don’t know of any gods that have principles that would be good or bad. I do know of god-believers who proclaim principles they attribute to their god(s) and I can say with great confidence that quite a few of them not only wouldn’t be good for our world today but would, in fact, be so horrible that they would undermine modern society (which is, in fact, what many would like to see happen).

It is simply nonsensical to insist that people don't believe in some particular god simply because they don't want to be held accountable to that god. Do Christians disbelieve in Zeus because they don't want to be held accountable to him? Do Muslims disbelieve in Kali because they don't want to be held accountable to her? Of course not — that's so patently absurd that Christians and Muslims would laugh if it were seriously suggested and they might even be offended.

Why, then, do so many Christians (and some Muslims) insist on saying much the same thing about others? I think that it might be a product of their own personal attitudes towards their religion. It's a common feature of many people that they tend to assume that others are pretty much like themselves, at least in the most important things: same desires, same motivations, same fears, same hopes, etc. It's not always an unreasonable assumption, but at times it can be. People need to learn how to place themselves in the shoes of the "Other," a person who can have radically different desires, motives, fears, hopes, etc. while still being a decent human being.

I think that this attitude manifests itself in part when religious believers assume that atheism is a religion. After all, their beliefs are a religion and therefore anything that seems to take the place of them must also somehow be a religion. Perhaps something similar is occurring in the above: if a religious believer places their moral "accountability" in the center of their relationship with their god, then they might assume that others place a similar emphasis on being morally accountable. Why, then, don't they believe in this god? Because they don't want to be morally accountable — they want to be free to sin and do evil things without guilt.

Perhaps I am way off the mark here, but it is the most generous explanation I have for what is a patently absurd assumption to make about atheists that one doesn't know and has never met.

 

When people violate any of the first four commandments in the bible, which dealt with their relationship with God, God's judgement comes swiftly. Japan's defeat in World War II is a good example of this truth. During the war, the emperor of Japan proclaimed that World War II was the war between the Japanese god of Amateras and the God of the Christians. Because Japan had thus profaned the holiness of God, God made that nation the victim of a horrific atomic bombing, and it finally had to surrender. Likewise, the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler produly claimed that later history would record him as a god, if there was any such being like a god. And God struck him down. For decades the communists have been arrogant. They have blasphemed God and denied his existence. They have devastated churches, prohibited education about God and forbidden the worship of God. So we are not surprised to see it's downfall and disapperance from this stage in history - for they too have attacked the very nature of God. We are now seeing the same occurance in Iraq.

Arguably I violate the first four commandments all the time — yet, somehow, "judgement" hasn't come very swiftly at all. I find it interesting that TL would cite Iraq as an example of people who "attacked the very nature of God" because it is a Muslim country. Even Saddam Hussein seemed to find some use for religion in the last few years of his reign, although that use was rather cynical. The accusations that TL is making here about other nations mirrors those made by Muslims about America. Even America of the 1950s was regarded as a locus of depraved sin and ungodly behavior — precisely the 1950s regarded the "golden age" for religious conservatives in America. Who is right?

The similarity in rhetoric used by the Christian Right and Muslim extremists is striking at times. By "rhetoric" here I mean specifically the attacks made on modernity, liberalism, feminism, secularism, and other aspects of contemporary culture that have moved away from traditional religion. Their recipes for solving these "problems" are also depressingly similar. Tragically ironic about all this is the fact that the Christian Right regards America as the instrument of God and God's plan for humanity while their Muslim counterparts regard the same America as the instrument of Satan.

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