RagingRev

In order to fight my ever present writers block, I have decided to start a series of blog posts on different arguments and fallacies that the atheist may run into in his/her dealings with religious folks, specifically creationists. The purpose of these posts will not only be to argue against these common points of contention, but to also to attempt to make sense of why these arguments seem conducive to the believer. I fully intend to use my experience as a former believer and apologist to explain what I now know to be illogical and unreasonable. In my experience with atheists there is a tendency to think, “how stupid are you?” when confronted with some of these arguments in favor of creationism, and the atheist is more prone to uncontrolled outbursts of anger and frustration, often leading to a worthless tirade against the opponent. Not only do these arguments give atheists a bad name, but they also ruin the environment of discourse. Though I, too, have been guilty of such dismissive tirades, these posts will attempt to give atheists a more involved and intelligent means of discourse when dealing with religious people and creationist worldviews.

I know that many current atheists are also former believers, and many were quite devoted to their faith. As true as this may be, I think that I represent a very rare breed of atheist in that I have, as I have explained many times before, experienced god in ways that seemed entirely logical at the time, yet I was able to comprehend my own psychological failings in order to reject my faith and the inane arguments of creationism. Creationists do not lack reasoning all together; they simply lack the desire or ability to accept a point of view that endangers their belief in god. I have been through such a dilemma myself, and as much as I regret the years I spent in service to god, I must pull from that experience in order to better defend a realistic understanding of the world.

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Let’s face it, the New Atheism is a major movement now. We have our prophets telling people to “come out” of our Atheistic closets, Atheist conventions happening, and even Atheist Apologists defending the science of evolution against the fantastic ideas of “Creation Science”. We have gone from an unheard minority to a powerful force in the world and our numbers are growing. Only time will tell what our movement may  become, but one thing is for certain, we are here to stay.

I come  from an evangelical Christian background where my main goal in life other than “seeking gods face” was to “lead people to Jesus” . Maybe this is just me, but for some odd reason, I feel just as urged to spread the “gospel” of Atheism as I did to spread the “godspell” of Christ. I can’t fully explain it, but I imagine it comes from my desire to see people freed from the bonds of religious servitude, indoctrination, and guilt…I feel free and I want others to feel free. I suspect many of my peers feel much the same way, which explains at least in part why there are so many Atheist bloggers popping up and so many Atheists joining religious discussion forums and talking about religion so openly (Some trolling and others trying to be productive members of the forums).  Even if they don’t admit it, my Atheist peers want to leave their mark on this world in an attempt to improve it to the best of our ability, seeing as how we only have one life and no eternal life to look forward to we often attempt to make the most of what we do have rather than hoping for something after we die.

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As I was making my daily rounds the other day on Facebook the status of one of my friends caught my eye. Because Facebook and especially statuses are incredibly bad places to hold sensible debates I have decided to post the comments that occured after that. If it is hard to follow I am sorry, but I truly hope that the participants might join in and begin commenting here in order to continue hashing this out…now that we have Intense Debate installed at RagingRev these sorts of things should be MUCH easier to facilitate. 

note!: I am changing the names of anyone that may not want to be identified…Just stuff I am making up

as you can see, it’s long, but I hope it will be worth it and I truly hope those involved will join in on the comments. Note also that I did remove a small side conversation and one other part but they were not important…we are at over 5000 words here.

Here is what it said:

Erich’s Status:  It’s Atheist Day! (The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”)

Bill says:

I am an atheist, but I am not a fool. Your statement is exactly backwards, because who is the bigger fool? One who uses logic and reason to define their way, or one who blindly believes in superstition, (faith)? Now, I don’t go around calling all of my religious friends “fools,” but you seem to have no problem dishing out such an insult.

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Recently our friend over at The Atheist Blogger wrote an interesting piece on Religious Child Abuse. In it he posted a video from a BBC Documentary about the Drapper family, a fundamentalist Christian – home schooling family in the UK.

In the Documentary posted in 6 parts below; Deborah Drapper, age 13, is extensively profiled. The cameras follow her around while she goes about her daily activities , interviews her about her faith, and even goes with her on a trip to her brothers college apartment. Deborah is naive…very much like I was at her age…She is an intelligent young girl, my intention is not to call Deborah stupid  here, at all.

When I was about 15 years old I decided to start living my life for God again…I had been “saved” at the age of 6 just like Deborah claimed to be.  At these young ages both Deborah and I claim to have understood 1: That man was depraved and doomed to eternal torment and 2: That Christ died on the cross as a scapegoat for our sins – thereby saving anyone that accepted this belief in Christ and his sacrifice from the eternal furnace. Do you think we could have possibly understood this? Do you think that we could understand the Biblical fall of man or the doctrines of Atonement? I truly don’t. I think at the earlier age we were merely repeating the things we had heard from church, or in Deborah’s case – her parents.

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