10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On
|
The war that's coming between the fundamentalist Christians and the hard-core Atheists probably won't be the most violent of the holy wars. But it has the potential to be the most annoying. We'll, I'm going to try to stop it. So I'm running into this guy basically everywhere I go:
Not that exact guy. People like him. I recognize the type, I had to spend the whole first half of my life around the Christian version of those guys, people who worked it into every conversation. But now I'm running into these really aggressive, sort of evangelical atheists. Ever since 9/11/2001, in fact. The exact day a whole lot of atheists decided this religion thing had to go before it killed us all. These things never end well. But I think we've got more common ground than we admit. For instance, both my atheist and Christian friends (I seem to have an equal number of both these days) tell me they agree with the following statement: Celebrating the death of somebody you disagreed with pretty much makes you a dick.
So how about this: I'm going to throw out a few of these statements - things I think we have to agree on if we want to avoid disaster - and you can read until you see something you disagree with. We'll see how long we can make it last. Why? Because something's brewing. I wander around my local Barnes & Noble and they've got a whole special table set aside: 
But you start cheering his death, you've walked away from the one single baseline every remotely moral person has ever agreed on: the value of human life. And I know we all agree on that, because we can all think of people we could've otherwise stabbed and gotten away with it. And sure, there may be a few of my atheists out there saying that what Falwell was spewing was so hateful, that it surely inspired some murders (of homosexuals or abortion doctors or whatever) and that he thus deserved death on those grounds. But you don't want to live by that rule; you'll wind up in a world where gangsta rappers and video game programmers and political commentators and novelists are considered worthy of death just because some fans claimed their work inspired them to kill. That's the sort of thing a nut from the other side would say. Right? No, people got to have the right to express themselves, good, bad and ugly. Falwell had a family. Friends. He was a human being. You cheer over his corpse and you're just acting like a pecker. And that's another thing both sides agree on, that we hate this modern trend toward peckerfication. So let's see what else we agree on... (NOTE: Per international regulations governing all online religious debate, we are required to insert on each page humorous and inflammatory image macros such as the one below. To prove my objectivity, these have been carefully chosen as to be equally offensive to all belief systems. -MGMT )
We're putting aside the question of which belief system has killed more people by percentage of population, or whether a hypothetical world without religion would have seen fewer or more genocides than ours. We're not going to open a spreadsheet and try to count which belief system manufactures more murderous sociopaths per capita. All I need from you is agreement that it's entirely possible for either an atheist or theist world to devolve into a screaming murder festival. The religious leader sends his people into battle because he thinks God commanded it, the Stalins and Maos of the world do the same because they see their people as nothing more than meaty fuel to be ground up to feed the machinery of The State. In both cases, the people are equally dead. Yeah, yeah, I know the Christians are saying that the guy who fights an unjust or needless war is violating God's law, and thus isn't a good Christian. Meanwhile, the atheists are saying that Stalin was merely bloodthirsty, separate and apart from his disbelief in a higher power. Both believe, then, that it is a corruption of their belief system that allows unjust slaughter to happen. But for this project, All we need to agree on is this: it happens in both cases. And if the opposing belief system vanished tomorrow, war and bloodshed and terror would still take place. And can we further admit it's actually physically impossible to calculate whether, if your side had its way, the volume of terrible things happening would go up, or down, or stay the same? I know you have an opinion on that, and I can guess what it is. But we don't know, and can't state it like it's fact. Right? Everybody still on board? 
2. Both Sides Really Do Believe What They're Saying Christians do this thing that drives atheists nuts, where they talk like God is patently obvious to all mankind, and that atheism is therefore just petty, intentional rebellion against Christians. In other words, that atheists don't honestly believe what they say, and just say it because they're jerks. But atheists do something very similar, particularly when a Christian says: "Only the saved go to Heaven!" ...and what the atheist hears is: "I want everyone else to go to Hell!" It's the same thing, thinking that deep down Christians don't really believe this is the law handed down by a creator, and therefore Christianity is just a petty, intentional rebellion against the non-Christians of the world. In other words, that Christians don't honestly believe what they say, and just say it because they're jerks. But all that is just a way to make cartoon villains out of the people who disagree with us. And if we stop and think about it, we'll see it's asinine. Atheists, you know that Christians have freaking died because they refused to walk away from what they believe. That goes beyond simple human stubbornness. I mean, I can tell you first hand. I was raised in a Pentecostal church (like the one they visited in the Borat movie). 
You can say they're wrong. You can say it all day, you can etch "YOU'RE WRONG" into the surface of the moon with a giant laser. But you'll have a lot less angst if you remember that the thing they're wrong about is something they honestly believe, down to their roots. I guess you could just call them crazy, but it's a little silly to use that word when believers are the norm in human population. But either way, it's not something they intentionally chose just to annoy you. Christians, same deal. Every one of you have got friends and family who aren't believers. And I bet some of them are good people. Earnest people, thoughtful people. Charitable. Kind. So... doesn't that kind of kill the premise that these people are avoiding God out of sinful rebellion or fear of having to live a godly life? After all, you've got people who are doing the hard part (self-sacrifice, patience, giving up all sorts of sinful pleasures) but are avoiding the easy part (praying and listening to a preacher talk for one hour a week). If God and the danger of Hell were that obvious, why wouldn't they just go all the way with it? No, if there is a God, it appears that some good people honestly don't perceive him. For whatever reason. And there has to be some tolerance in God's rules for the Honest Mistake. Has to be. Otherwise we're all going to get screwed by that thing with the Sabbath being on Saturday instead of Sunday. 
|
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Digg
Del.icio.us
FarkRecommended for Your Pleasure
-
15 Words You Won’t Believe They Added to the Dictionary
965,678 views -
The 10 Coolest Foreign Words The English Language Needs
by: Aston R.950,003 views -
6 Real Islands Way More Terrifying Than The One On 'Lost'
826,942 views -
10 Divorce Stories Too Strange to Make Up
801,248 views
Sweet frosted Christcakes, I wrote a damned essay. That was NOT my intent.
Huh. I think I've figured it out. Clearly, David Wong (if we're looking at it as a spectrum of belief, and not just something you can opt out of) must fall SOMEWHERE on that spectrum, and yet here he is saying something useful to people on both sides. I do believe that if someone showed me a book that was entitled "How to be an Awesome Person" and below that it said, "By: David Wong", I'd be inclined to either buy it, or at least check it out from the library. But it wasn't until this article that I figured out what it was about these articles that rubs me the wrong way.
There seems to be a TON of relativism in there (though in this particular one, of course, there'd have to be - but in ALL David Wong articles, I mean). I agree, for instance, that we shouldn't be assholes to each other. I come from a religious family, and I was pants-shittingly amazed to find that when I told my mother I was an atheist that she wasn't overly bothered by it. We accept each other while still being absolutely unable to comprehend each others' points of view. If we were assholes to each other, that'd just be one more thing in life to suck. And who needs that? But while I do dislike religion, you have to understand that at no point have I ever thought (or known anyone to say) that Christians 'don't actually believe what they're saying'.
But since relativism is such a common point of view in Mr. Wong's articles, and since Christians pretend that atheism is just petty rebellion, then it must be mentioned in the opposing context as well. I'm certainly not going to say that it's never happened in reality. What I will say, though, is that in 33 years, I have never personally seen an example of it. Not in real life and not online.
Don't get me wrong; some things, like morality, could go both ways. "You're an atheist, so you have no morals!" OK, I can accept that people say that, and that that's a dick move. "You're a Christian, and therefore you only act morally when you fear punishment!" I KNOW I've heard that one, so I can accept the same thing. However, I've never heard a Christian call someone stupid for being an atheist. At least not intellectually stupid. Of course, it certainly does happen the other way around. And by that token, perhaps there are some things that religious people do rather commonly that we don't do back - and vice-versa. Perhaps not EVERYTHING is reflexive. Just throwing that idea out there.
This is the crux of my issues with David Wong's writing. To look as his writing, it appears that if 'b' feels a certain way about 'a', then it must work the other way as well. If that's not the specific argument being made, then it comes down to the idea that if 'b' feels a certain way about 'a', then 'b' MUST accept if 'c' feels that way about them. For examples of the former, see any of the above list. For examples of the latter, see David Wong's Paris Hilton->American Hobo->Nigerian Hut-Dweller argument, wherein a hobo complaining about the amount of money Paris Hilton has is then subject to ridicule for his foppish ways from a Nigerian hut-dweller who lives on 3 U.S. dollars a year (even though the Nigerian hut-dweller probably has more wealth relative to his nation's cost-of-living than the hobo does).
I know that Mr. Wong didn't think that all 10 of those examples would pertain to everyone, or even that any one of them would pertain to a measurable number of people on one side or the other. Hell, despite the sound of it, I'm not complaining about the content of this article at all. Heavens, if there IS one atheist out there who says, "Christians are just saying they believe for some weird reason!" then by all means, have at them! I'm just saying (and maybe I'm in the minority, here, I'm just throwing my point of view out there) that some of those things maybe didn't really apply to atheists, so much as theists, and vice-versa. That perhaps the attempt to force examples for each one going both ways was a little . . . over-the-top.
Actually, there was one little thing that bothered me - the notion that for some reason I need to abandon the English language because I believe in logic ("Oh, can't say 'love' without believing in a soul!" What? I think that I can still use words that describe emotions when I feel them without believing in an invisible floating spirit) or that literally billions of neurological reactions in a boiling brain stew are somehow 'totally deterministic and the exact opposite of free will'. Both of those are just a little forced. Examples like those really did detract from the points that were being made, for me. If a word has spiritual connotations for someone else, that doesn't suddenly mean that I can't use it, and instead must throw out the whole wordy definition of it instead, like suddenly I'm no longer allowed to describe emotions with single words just because I think of them as chemical reactions. As for the second example, there's not even any point to arguing against the silliness of it. There is no serious person who thinks that we currently understand biology, biochemistry, physics, psychology and quantum mechanics well enough to actually call human behavior 'deterministic' to the point that it can be predicted, thus the difference between that and 'free will' is pretty much nil.
But then again, that's just simple common sense. And I don't think that Mr. Wong is an unintelligent man (quite the contrary), so perhaps those points weren't FOR me, or people who think like me. Maybe those were meant to create examples for more religious people, based on how they might believe atheists think. Likewise, maybe there are points in there that a religious person would say, "s**t, that's a complete parody of my beliefs! I don't think THAT at all, and no one I know does!" but they got brought up and I accepted them without question because they were playing off my own beliefs of what a religious person would think. I suppose the author would know best.
So in that case, there you have it. Mr. Wong! If ever you read this: great article. But sometimes your attempts to equate one side of an argument to the other side (or to create equivalent arguments) come off as forced - unless that's what you were intending, in which case: fine work!
A f*****g amazing article.
There aren't many things that can change my mind about much, if anything, at all. Fortunately for my peace of mind, logic is one of the things that can do it every time, and leave me aching for more. Here I find a great deal of said scanty commodity. I won't find it impossible to leap in elation at the announced death of anyone ever again, just a tad more difficult. And by the way, "If you want people to live their life in a certain way, based on a certain fact, you can't substitute a threat for evidence." is as putting as simply as one can, yet the words seem to escape me every time someone tells me I will burn for my beliefs. I usually just say I can't just decide to believe, like its a choice as simple as picking between my red striped and green checkered boxers. Belief doesn't work that way. Either you do or you don't. And I, for one, don't.
You know, David. Sometimes I think that Cracked is just a fairly entertaining, somewhat educational, and often hilarious humour website, but then you publish something like this and I have to re-evaluate.
Well done, chap, well done.
I'm an atheist, and won't get into the flame war that I assume is going on (haven't read any comments)...but I do have to say, that regardless of how wrong I know it is: Some part of me will be made to feel warm when any member of the Phelps family dies, particularly Fred.
Yes, I'm real. I'm not just a part of your LSD induced imagination.
What, is that administrator dude for real?
Hey, this is fun. I like all the hate in here.
Well anyways, I just think I might be an extremist. I don't have ANY morality, to me human value is only equal to that of how much I can sell it for. It's called pragmatism. And yes, if you're wondering, I DO think if I die not much value would be lost, that and I don't delude myself into thinking that I'm worth a flying f*ck. If I die, I KNOW the the rest of the world will just keep spinning, that a few tears from siblings and friends is all I'll get for all my bitching about religion. I honestly don't give a damn about my value, because I know that unless I come up with a way to make my existence (not life) better, than I will consider myself as valuable as the dirt in my closet.
I don't understand all this rationalization everyone needs to make. I mean, why SHOULD there be a meaning to your life? If I kill a baby, was the meaning of it's life to die by my hands? If so, then I'll kill all the babies I need to fulfill that meaning. If not, then hooray.
Also my little question about christianity: if god hates homosexuals and all such people and (s)he gives us our soul, why would he create gays and lesbians? For fun?
So trunks, your only reason for being a Christian is that you're scared of being burned up in eternal hellfire? Not a very good christian, if I do say so myself.
Someone comes up to me and says if I don't put a rubber chicken up my anus every day after breakfast, the flying spaghetti monster will rip me in half and defile my innards with all of its noodly appendages for the rest of eternity.
Should I do that every day on the off-chance that it will happen?
What if Islam turns out to be the correct religion? I've just wasted my entire life doing something I hate, and I'm still eternally punished by the end of it.
I see no reason why I should follow a God I don't believe in when its just as likely that any other God (or none at all) is the correct one.
If one of your loved ones was taken ill, or hit by a car - what would you do? Take them to a doctor? Or just leave them and pray the Lord will help them?
I wonder just how much God will help you then?
What's the payout for being an atheist and putting in all this time in educating people that you have found the right answer. Do you get Atheist points for enlightening people about your Philosophy. I don't get it. Just what if all these "crazy" Chrisitans happen to be right, and your left to face a Holy God. Was your meaningless life of say 60 or 70 years of defending you theory worth it??? Why wouldn't you at least play the odds "just in case" At least accepting Jesus Christ in your life has a payout (both eternal life and a relationship with the Creator of the Universe). I mean you guys want to believe in something so badly, you cant face your problems; you would never believe that a God would do such "bad things" and you landed on this. Atheism??? For how smart you guys all say you are, it doesn't make much sense to me whatsoever. If you decide to believe in God and your "wrong" or you believe in No god, you'll die and thats it... Either way its the same. But if you put your Faith in Jesus Christ, you'll soon see that the payout is worth it. And go ahead keep God out of schools, pretend He doesn't exist. You guys are complete fools. I don't care if I step on your toes, it seems like atheists are just mad at the world, hiding behind their little theories haha. Im sure that your views on atheism really help you get through the day, they help you during times of crisis, or when your sick. Thats awesome!!! It seems like what your doing is working!!! Stop kidding yourself, just face it! And I know that the fact that I am praying for you will only build your case stronger against why you hate God or Christians, but come one. You are obviously searching for answers or you wouldnt be on this website in the first place hahaha. God will tug on your heart this week and youll get shaken up. He will receive the glory. I mean you either can bow now, or bow later...
You all need to be educated, and if you want to hear you morality questions answered read or re-read "Mere Christianity by CS LEWIS"
Mr. Wong, you are like G.K. Chesterton with c**k jokes. And please believe that I mean that in an absolutely complimentary sense. I love the c**k. (I mean, not in a gay way. But--well--yeah.)
"The mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it."
#4: Christians who believe in the Bible must believe "there is none righteous, no not one, not one who doeth good."
To the Christian, all mankind is corrupt, evil, vile, stinking, rotten, dispicable scum to be tossed into hellfire. The only person righteous to a Christian is Christ, and by extension whatever scum believes in Christ so that Christ extends his righteousness to them. Thus Christianity is incompatible with the belief that atheists can be good people.
Only atheists or other non-Christians can believe there are people on both sides who are good.
No. 2:
I really don't know ANY atheists that don't believe religious people actually believe what they believe. However, I have read BOOKS, popular books, whose whole claim is that atheists know deep down that God exists. In fact, if you believe in the Bible, you HAVE to believe atheists know that God exists, because the Bible says everyone knows God exists, that it is apparent from "creation", and that only a fool would say there is no God. That's directly from the Bible. NO person could agree with #2 and simultaneously believe in the Bible. Only atheists can believe in #2, and most every single one of them does.
No. 1, while true, seems to be a straw-man argument. Most atheists books I've read make the point that religion is dangerous not to prove religion invalid, but to prove that religion's exclusive claims to morality, or their claims that "religion makes people better" are bullshit. It's not a "who killed more people?" question, it's a "does the evidence really support your claims?" question.
Oh come on, posting snarky comments on a website forum is completely incomparable to picketing a funeral, or "celebrating" someone's death. If your idea of a "celebration" is posting a sentence-long entry on some stupid internet forum, I feel bad for your kids at Christmas-time.
I just wanted to say that, as a (very dedicated, or at least as dedicated as I can be) Christian, I thought this article was absolutely fantastic. We need more people stating the plain facts that everyone should be able to see if they step out of their own skin once in a while.
jacky5, sorry to say, but you're generalizing. many friends, and myself too(only 1 of my friends is christian, rest atheist) thought this was a great article.
to be fair, neither 1.5 billion christians nor 1 billion non-religious people(aprox. both numbers from wikipedia) can be generalized into one 'group'.
yes, there are horrible atheists out there, and people who will use this article(or any article) to say religion sucks. but theres also great people who are inspired by this article to lead by example.
same for religious people. there are some assholes that claim to be religious, or are religious, yet loads of religious people try to make this world a little bit of a better place.
generalizing never works, especialy when the group you're trying to generalize has 1/10th or more of the worlds population.
More on Weird World
-
17 More Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped
1,440,447 views -
7 Clearly Fake News Stories That Fooled The Mainstream Media
1,030,628 views -
The 7 Most Bizarrely Unlucky People Who Ever Lived
1,011,423 views -
6 People With Amazing Abilities (That Are Totally Useless)
968,296 views
- Zombies
- Celebrity Baby Names
- Boobs - New
- Japan
- Bacon - New
- Star Trek - New
- Christopher Walken
- Beer - New
- David Caruso
- Vampires
-
Stuff Talks: The Most Terrifying Comedy Premise Ever
by: Genius Camp24,502 views -
A Series of Poor Decisions: The Twitter Song
by: Cody Johnston24,541 views
-
Articles
-
Videos
-
Columnists
-
More Cracked
-
About
Copyright © 2005 - 2009 Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. CRACKED, CRACKED.COM and the "CRACKED" logo are trademarks owned by Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.
Its obvious that this was written before the gay marriage controversy got into full swing. Boy, those were great times! Back when I thought only the crazy religious zealots like Phelps didn't like gays...