Atheism or Theism: Which is Really Myopic?

So, while casting around once again for a topic to spur my to write more than 100 words of drivel (I can only claim this as more words, not less drivel), I found 2 Meaning‘s post about atheism being an indulgence – a short sighted one at that. Woot. Lets get going.

I’m going to leave addressing the claims that theism is necessarily more principled than atheism, and that atheists suffer a vacuum of conscience and start with this claim:

“Love your neighbor” becomes a chore best handed off to government as diversity of self-assertion escalates a focus on rights instead of sacrificial service.

There’s a desperate lack of historical knowledge on display here. The premise is that atheism is responsible for the necessity of government intervention in the form of social security. That this was being covered by loving neighbours prior to the intervention of the government. Needless to say, this is demonstrably untrue. I don’t believe that the increase in social democracy and welfare is correlative with the increase in atheism, but I am confident that before the advent and increase of social democracy these things were not being covered by loving neighbours. The rise of social democracy and welfare was because these loving Christians (still the majority, but back then almost completely dominant) were not sparing any thought for their neighbours. They were letting their neighbours die in their millions, starving and cold in the street. Welfare arose because a dominantly Christian society was not giving even the smallest portion of rat’s ass for their fellow man.

It would be nice to think that the decline in belief in theistic claims has led to a rise in government welfare – that individuals are caring more for their fellow man, willing to pay taxes towards a social pot from which they are protected and nourished. It’s not the case as atheists chime in just as vociferously as Christians when it comes to being against paying taxes. No one wants to pay for social welfare to be provided, but increasingly secular governments have seen that their religious majorities will not accept this burden, will not love their neighbours, so the state has had to.

Neither are we a match for the surrogate god of expanding government with its insatiable appetite for power.

This quote might well contain the nugget of insight into why the poster is against expanding welfare states – the expansion is into the power previously claimed by the dominant religion.

Material and political consensus alone cannot permanently prop atheism up, because atheism is the religion of self as god.

This is proof that 2 Meaning has not the faintest idea what ‘atheism’ means, what an ‘atheist’ believes. Atheism cannot be a religion anymore than clear can be a colour, or not collecting stamps can be a hobby. It’s the absence of belief, nothing more. Some atheists may well substitute an external god for themselves, though they wouldn’t be atheists any more as they believe a god-claim, so would be something else than atheist. Narcissistic maybe. Atheism is not a religion, as much as the theist here wants it to be so they can level all the claims against religion they have which they special-plead don’t apply to their religion. When one only has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

A hundred million selves trying to be god results in no civil structure able to rule effectively for long.

There’s a hidden premise here! The premise that there is one theism, not one per person. Everyone you talk to of a theistic persuasion will have belief in something different. Even from the same team of theistic claims, from people who claim the same theistic label, there are contradictory belief claims in play. There are a hundred million Christianities, at least. This supposedly can result in a civil structure ‘for long’, but the same claimed about something that 2 Meaning doesn’t like cannot possibly be true.

Violence increases symptomatically and exponentially.

I’d be interested to see this proven by study, I really would. The study would have to explain why the more secular a country is the less violent crime the country experiences while the inverse is also true, with more theistic countries seeing more violence. “Although some studies have found that religion does inhibit criminal behavior [snip citations] others have actually found that religiosity does not have a significant effect on inhibiting criminal behavior [snip citation] […] when it comes to more serious or violent crimes, such as murder, there is simply no evidence suggesting that atheist or secular people are more likely to commit such crimes than religious people. After all, America’s bulging prisons are not full of atheists; according to Golumbaski
(1997), only 0.2 percent of prisoners in the USA are atheists – a major under-representation.” – Zuerman, Atheism, Secularity, and Well-Being. It’s not hard to find a mountain of evidence that the claim quoted about violence increasing ‘exponentially’ under atheistic societal situations is, like the god 2 Meaning believes in, fictitious.

Peace is confined to a few generations coasting on the greased skid of previously implemented ideas that few were previously short-sighted enough to challenge.

As I’ve already said above, the chaotic are many times more likely to have religious beliefs and be theistic than they are to be atheistic without religious beliefs. To claim otherwise is to ignore reality and to lie in the name of one’s theistic belief. It’s dishonest to say that Christian’s are calm and peaceful when any glance at the history of Christianity will find that it’s drenched in bloodshed and violence, perpetrated by other theists against them and by them against other theists and atheists. I’ve never heard of, for example, an pro-choice atheist blowing up a clinic which refuses to perform abortions. I have read the reports of the contrary, Christians who’re more than prepared to bomb abortion clinics in the name of their theism.

The difficulty and violence of existence must eventually force people to turn back to consideration of God when circumstances are revealed to be undeniably beyond human control.

This screams of a ‘god of the gaps’ argument. There are circumstances beyond human control and only the intellectual shackles of god-belief can possibly hope to control them. It’s demonstrably untrue. The things beyond human control are no less beyond control when fictions are believed in than they are when truth is believed in. God will not stop or control anything, that has been shown over and over again throughout history. If god exists then it casually, even happily maybe, sits by and watches, allows all the worst things to happen to good and bad people with total indifference. The shackles of religion might be usable by the those in positions of power to control the thoughts and beliefs of the masses, but that’s not what is being hinted at above, because this is necessarily humans using ideas to control other humans. There’s no supernatural agency involved, just natural, human, material agency.

Jesus Christ shattered the self-as-god delusion.

There was no such ‘delusion’ around at the time. Judaism was prevalent in the area which he supposedly worked, other religions were in dominance everywhere else. There were scant few atheistic societies at the time and JC didn’t belong to one of them.

The message of required redemption and self-sacrificial love in the cross of Christ is relevant brutality for a blood-thirsty species bent on proving worth its own way from behind a guilty conscience.

The god of Jesus created people. It made them brutal and blood-thirsty (I don’t believe for one micro-second that people are necessarily brutal or blood-thirsty, by the way). It created every condition, possibility and predilection. All of them. If people are brutal it’s because god wants them to do. If people are blood-thirsty it’s because god wants them to be. People, shedding god, implementing their own intelligence, can only possibly get less brutal and less blood-thirsty by rejection of the Christian claims of personhood. Disbelief in theistic claims can only possibly make people less bad, less evil, less vicious and less crazy.