Today Christian, has a list of “10 Questions For Every Atheist”.
They claim that these are …
Some Questions Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…
Hey, this should be fun, OK so let’s take a look, here are my immediate answers (no google, just a direct brain dump) …
1. How Did You Become an Atheist?
There is no universal answer here and everybody will have a different story. In my case, over a period of time I slowly slowly let go of utterly absurd religious ideas until finally one day I realised that I had broken surface and was out.
2. What happens when we die?
We stop existing. Any claims for something else have exactly zero evidence, in fact everything we have clearly points towards the human mind being a product of the human brain … mess with the brain and you mess with the manifestation of that mind.
3. What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!
Ah yes, Pascals wager … to which I can perhaps ask, what makes you so sure (as a believer) that you have picked the right god and the right myths?
There are thousands of gods to choose from, so if you are sure that there is something else, and you pick the wrong god, then you are still more or less scuppered. Incidentally the majority of humans on the planet today do not believe in your specific god concept, with over 7 billion humans there is no one universal god concept that 3.5 billion can agree upon.
4. Without God, where do you get your morality from?
Exactly the same place everybody else does, our cultural inheritance and our basic human empathy.
Christians might indeed claim the bible, but it has been my experience that the vast majority cannot even tell me where in the bible the 10 commandments are, or for that matter articulate all 10 correctly (without looking it up) which is all rather odd given that this is supposed to be the most important set of rules they have. I’m also rather relieved that they do not actually get their morals from a book that is pro-slavery from cover to cover and contains explicit instructions on whom you can own and how to correctly beat your slaves.
5. If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?
Actions have consequences … no your cannot murder or rape without then facing the consequences of doing so. It perhaps might also be worth pointing out that as far as Christianity is concerned, good deeds do not matter because you don’t earn you way into heaven. If a good decent human being does not believe, they burn in hell, but if the most obnoxious tyrant accepts Jesus, then off to heaven. Nope, that is a truly abhorrent unjust resolution, and is also complete fiction anyway.
6. If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?
We all find meaning in different ways … from those around us, those we love, from coming to a true understanding. What meaning does a life truly have if it is expended in the pursuit of a religious fantasy that does not have a single jot of credible evidence for it, now that is a tragic waste.
7. Where did the universe come from?
I don’t know, and neither does anybody else. Making up religious answers might indeed satisfy some, but such answers are not based upon any credible evidence. If some do indeed wish to believe a supernatural entity did it all in seven days only 6,000 years ago and planted dinosaur bones to test faith, then decided to wipe the lot out and start again because it was all a big mistake and so got a 600 year old guy to put every animal on the planet into a boat … well what can I say, but good luck with that idea. The rest of us will stick to what the evidence tells us.
8. What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?
There are claims, but nothing has been verified … ever. Humans are easy to fool, illusionists, magicians, and fraudsters leverage this fact. Now pick a card, any card at all … and …
9. What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?
They are all guys who have written a few books that have influenced many … not with threats (you are going to hell), nor with sugar (believe and god will have a place for you), but with facts, evidence and reason.
10. If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?
Why have there also always been some humans who simply do not believe?
Humans have been naturally selected to attribute events to external agents. Imagine early humans out on the savanna when there is a rustling sound in the grass – those that assumed wind, would have been eaten if it was a lion. Your ancestors will have been the ones that assumed lion (even if it was the wind) and then ran off and so survived. We have been naturally selected to attribute events to external agents, it gave our ancestors a distinct survival advantage.
So there you go then.
I somewhat suspect that whoever composed that list is not really interested in the answers at all, and that this is simply a tool used to persuade some that a specific cultural god concept is just the right one. In the end there is stuff we know and stuff we do not know. When faced with things we do not know, sticking in mythological religious claims does not really answer anything at all, it simply muddies the water.