Every atheist thought has been thought, which makes the freethoughtblogs just a place to hear the same thing you’ve heard before, at least, when we’re not talking about all the other kinds of stuff we talk about. But sometimes one pops into your head and you’re like, when was the last time I heard this? It’s striking me novel in the moment, even if it’s so rusty it’s dust, therefore, I set it before you, like a child’s bean-bedecked popsicle stick, and beam with pride.
If god made me, he made me incapable of believing in god, and whose fault is that?
Incidentally, I was reminded recently that during the recruitment surge when I was brought on FtB therre were slymers and kin creeping in the comments. Haven’t seen a hater in a dog’s age. Anybody know if they still haunt some other blogs?
–
I haven’t seen any slymepitters for a long time either, don’t miss them.
I had a conversation with a fanatical fundie Christian at about 16-17 years of age (both of us). This was shortly after the Iron Curtain was lifted, before internet was available to the public at large, long before the new-age atheism, and before I read anything much about apologetics and counterarguments about religion.
She insisted that her god is all-loving and also all-knowing and that he will definitively send non-Christians to hell. I asked her if he knew that I won’t believe in him even before I was born and she said yes. I asked her if he loves me, and she said yes. I asked her why god caused me to exist if he knew in advance that I wouldn’t believe in him and I would be tortured forever. She replied with a simile she clearly learned from her preacher – that god is like an orchard keeper who plants many trees and loves each of them even though he knows that some will die of frost or be destroyed by pests. My reply was that the analogy makes no sense because the orchard keeper does not know which specific trees will die and if he knew, he would not bother to plant them because it would be a waste of resources. She shut up after that because she ran out of learned responses and had no thoughts of her own. AFAIR it was my first encounter with Christian apologia and a religious fanaticism.
Much later in my life, I discovered that Christian apologetics is still trying to pass off as valid arguments that were disproven hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years ago (I had a contemporary Catholic seriously trying to dazzle me with Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways to Prove God). All my conversations with religious people run along the same template as this first one – they say/write something logically inconsistent or detached from reality or both. I respond with counterarguments. The conversation progresses for a bit until they run out of memorized responses and either shut up or accuse me of being disrespectful and mean.
There are no new arguments for atheism because religious people can’t come up with any new original thoughts that would require us to make them.
So…predestination, is it? As I understand it, popular answers include:
1. You are capable of believing in God, you’re just being lazy or a coward or resentful or demonstrating learned helplessness or something. Try harder!
2. You just haven’t gone to the right church, or read the right version of the right scripture, or listened to the right person showing up at your door to proselytize, or…something. Basically the theological equivalent of your dad saying you’ll forget all this “queer” nonsense once you meet the right person. It’s just a phase!
3. It’s your ancestors’ fault, because the Fall.
4. It’s because of God, but it’s not God’s fault because nobody deserves salvation anyway. Be grateful he was gracious enough to call some folks to him, while the rest of us wallow in the darkness we deserve.
5. You do believe in God! You just call him love, or conservation of energy, or the federal tax code, or whatever else I can think up which is too big or small or abstract or psychological to be seen directly. That’s still God, so really you’re a believer just like me, so I can stop listening to whatever you’re saying about God and mentally replace it with whatever I already believe. And now you’re so much easier to get along with!
6. God needed someone to serve as a cautionary tale so everyone else could see why they should believe, or else suffer the horrible fate of being you. We appreciate your sacrifice.
7. God likes to mess with people. He’ll say hi to you after you’re dead and you’ll slap your forehead and then have a good laugh together.
Which ones did I miss?
“You do believe in God! You just call him . . . the federal tax code”
LOL!
Thanks for the giggles, Prax!
brilliant comments. guess it pays to hit the subject FtB is about occasionally. but i should bring my A game next time, to avoid embarrassment.
GAS, I think the slymepitters have mostly moved on to social media. I hear Xitter will now throw one into comment jail if one dares to use the word ‘cisgender’ because lonE skuM is being shamed by his trans daughter and he don’t like it.
it’s so wild that one fucked up asshole could seize a social media company that had become that deeply entrenched in society. there are still millions of people who lack the will to leave xitter, even people who now spend all day every day tangling with nazis on there. depressing.
Well, that’s capitalism, right? Just because a huge community created a platform, its market, and all the content that makes it worthwhile doesn’t mean it owns that platform. If you valued Twitter, you should have become a billionaire so you could buy it yourself, or something like that.
When it comes to my disbelief in the ridiculous, I just use the words of some long dead theologian, “I can do no other.”
Charly@1:
What, the obvious next iteration didn’t happen?
(Counter: maybe the first tree along some traversal order will be destroyed by pests no matter what, and not planting that one just means it’ll be a different tree that gets it. So there needs to be one sacrificial tree.
Counter counter: it’s freaking GOD. There doesn’t have to be a sacrificial tree if he doesn’t want there to be one. He can decree that all the trees thrive, and it isn’t very loving of him to do otherwise. The orchard keeper and that first counter make sense only if God were omniscient, but not omnipotent.
After that, theist is now flummoxed even if smart enough to come up with the first counterargument above. Your mate, but in one more move.)
@Bekenstein Bound #9,
Counter counter counter: he can’t decree that all the trees thrive, because free will. All he can do is plant them and hope that they choose to thrive. Forcing them to thrive would be counter to his love and benevolence because free will is supremely desirable and morally significant and without it we’d be, uh…*checks notes* zombies? Robots? Puppets? Just pick whichever horror movie monster you find most unpleasant and we’d be that one.
Counter^4: But believers credit God with altering human beliefs and emotions all the time, from Pharaoh’s hardened heart to the Mark of the Beast. If he can do that stuff, why can’t he grant us all the one belief that will apparently keep us out of hell?
Counter^5: Well because ineffable and mysterious ways and we need to be humble and not pretend we have all the answers. It doesn’t count as being flummoxed if I act serene about it!
Ah, but also, omniscient implies the ability to predict environmental boundary conditions that will cause them to choose to thrive, and at the very least, in combination with omnipotence, to give them a safe paradise environment where failure to thrive would require a sustained, deliberate effort with no obvious motive … serpent-free, natch.
The theist saving throw is always “one of God’s minions went rogue and messed with the plan” but this runs into the original argument’s flaws, as those minions don’t have free will and could be programmed or designed not to go rogue. Unless you decide that the Halting Problem is beyond even God, which means compromising on the whole “omniscient and omnipotent” thing. Indeed is a slippery slope to accepting a “God” who is bound by the same laws of physics and mathematics as everybody else, not supernatural at all but just plain natural, and therefore fallible and indeed even mortal. At which point it’s not really God any more at all, just sufficiently advanced aliens who were here before us.
@Bekenstein Bound #11,
I’m aware of two common counters to this.
Counter #1: There are no such boundary conditions, even theoretically. Free-willed beings will often perversely choose to sin with no external motivation whatsoever. In Christian mythology, angels were created to live blissfully in heaven, close to God himself, and Satan was given one of the most honored positions among them. He and a third of the angels still chose to rebel, because nothing was good enough for them. So even an omnipotent God can’t create a world without a certain percentage of hellbound unbelievers.
Counter #2: “Thriving” is only meaningful in the face of adversity and temptation. Leibniz was big on this one. We live in the best of all possible worlds, and it includes various evils so that we can act virtuously in response to them, which is a higher-order good than just living in a paradise where no choices have significant consequences. You can’t have charity unless there’s deprivation to alleviate; you can’t have courage and self-sacrifice unless there’s suffering to endure; you can’t have faith unless there’s doubt to overcome. Some people will fail these trials, but that’s still better than if no one has the opportunity to succeed.
Both of these arguments fly in the face of modern educational psychology, but conservative believers know that’s all Satanic nonsense anyway.
Not according to most Abrahamic theists.
Christians and Shia Muslims generally believe that angels have free will. Jews and Sunni Muslims generally disagree, but Sunnis still believe that jinns have free will, and since Iblis was the first of the jinn, he could go rogue like the Christian Satan.