Sunday, September 30, 2007

Theistic Athiests

I am looking at this ad for an upcoming event sponsored by the Students for Free Thought titled Ask an Atheist. The ad goes as follows.
Ask an Atheist
Why not believe in God?
Do Athiests have morals?
Does life have a purpose?
Isn’t life without belief in God just dreadful?
Do you know someone who is an atheist?
Want to know what atheists REALLY believe? Ask questions and get answers from our panel of five friendly atheists. It might not be what you expect.
What am I not supposed to expect. Yes one can make a rational case that God does not exist. Yes there are atheists who are extremely moral people. Yes one can still find purpose in life without believing in God, it is called Existentialism. As your life can still have meaning even without God, no life will not become just dreadful without God. And now for the big shocker Atheists Can Be Friendly. You can even see five of them on display.
Is it just me or do these atheists sound a lot like Christian missionaries? I am quite certain I have seen ads for Christian groups amounting to the same thing.
Ask a Christian
Why believe in God?
Can Christianity Help Me Lead a More Moral Life?
Does Life Have a Purpose?
Doesn’t believing in God make life dreadful?
Want to know what Christians REALLY believe? Ask questions and get answers from our panel of five friendly Christians. It might not be what you expect.
Take a look at the Mormon Church’s website and this is almost exactly what you will find.
If atheists really want to claim intellectual superiority over theists then why are they offering the same sort of sentimentalist claptrap that that theists tend to offer? Why do the Students for Free Thought not offer weekly study groups on David Hume or Nietzsche? Instead what we have is the traditional appeal to emotions as opposed to reason. Come to our group. Our people are friendly. We offer you a belief system to give order to your life and will help you become a more moral person. Why should we care if atheists are friendly or that they are moral? Either there is a good case against God’s existence or there is not. If we do not have any reason to assume that God exists then we are obligated to give a good Richard Dawkins style stiff upper lip and accept the fact that God does not exist. If atheists were a pack of murderous Huns out to use your scalp as a loin-cloth that would still not make God any more real. If, on the other hand, we were to decide that there is a good case for assuming that God exists then we would have to keep that same stiff upper lip and accept that he exists. Being a believer in God gives you an advantage here because you can still declare yourself in opposition to him. If God were simply an immoral Mafia Don threatening to destroy anyone who did not serve him then we could take the moral stance and reject his rule.

No comments: