Hello from Belgium

[mrlmichael]

Hello,

I stumbled across this forum tonight due to my frustration that I have to go to a baptism tomorrow. I am actually American, but living in Belgium with my wife, whom I met while serving in the Army in Germany.

I was raised Catholic but am now Atheist and try to avoid entering churches like the plague. However, I am not going to be able to wiggle my way out of this one because the child being baptized is my wife's god child.

What is most frustrating about this entire scenario is that nobody in my wife's family is religious. I am not sure if her sister (the mother of the child being baptized) believes in god, but I am pretty sure she and her husband do not. I know for a fact that they, nor anybody in her family attends church ever. My wife informs me they do this simply for "tradition". I find that extremely silly. Oh well, I hope to find some great discussion on this forum.

Btw, totally unrelated, but what counter arguments do other atheist here use when a religious person tells you, "if there was no religion in the world, people would just find something else to fight about". I get this response frequently when in a discussion about how I feel like the world would be better off without religion.

[Tempus]

Sounds like you basically have to go to a boring party - that's how I'd look at it anyway. As long as the people involved aren't nutcases I wouldn't mind, despite being an atheist. Churches usually have nice architecture; just look at that and tune the nonsense out

Btw, totally unrelated, but what counter arguments do other atheist here use when a religious person tells you, "if there was no religion in the world, people would just find something else to fight about"

I would say "yeah, you're right." But that doesn't address the problems religion does cause. Let's use different problems to highlight the reasoning:

Person A: "Drugs can cause problems."
Person B: "Oh yeah, well people would still be murdered if there were no drugs!"

It's a form of ignoratio elenchi. Take care not to be distracted; it's easy to get tricked into arguing irrelevant points of a subject.