Serious Problems with Atheism

[Mister Agenda]

You don't even get to first base, do you.  Religion (all religions, not just yours) is merely bullshit.  Religious people can be - and the higher up they go in the chain the more frequently they are - miserable sons of bitches.  As the saying goes "no one has ever been stoned to death by atheists."

Well if we want to look at the moral argument, when people blame religion for bombings and wars in general, they seem to ignore the tragic history of the 20th century, which saw more deaths from acts of violence and oppression than all previous centuries put together. These were systematically inflicted on millions of people by their own governments. Names like Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot have become infamous, all atheists. So to say that atheism is this harmless belief system, is very flawed indeed.

Of those, I would only agree that Stalin was an atheist (though he went to Catholic school). Mao referred to being 'called home to the great God' and Pol Pot referenced 'the will of heaven' and seems to have been a particularly strict Buddhist.

Atheism isn't a harmless belief system because it's not a belief system at all. Neither is theism. The belief system in the cases you reference is totalitarian communism.

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Oh... is it time to bring out the Hitler card?
Can I? Can I?!
PLEASE!!!!!

Even Christopher Hitchens has said the Nazis were obviously Pagans, Not Christians.

A tiny percentage of Nazis were pagans. The vast majority were Christians, mostly Lutherans and Catholics, reflecting the religious demographics of Nazi Germany.

And again, for those who ask how do I know God exists, Its a simple look at the Evidence, The Universe cannot "pop" out of Nothing, the fallacies of Krauss notwithstanding,

There is probably a Nobel waiting for you if you can prove Krauss's work is fallacious. What's the supposed fallacy? Note that 'the universe cannot 'pop' out of nothing' is a scientific claim, so what's your evidence for it? Please don't tell me that if things can't pop out of nothing within the universe that the same applies to the universe itself...that would be fallacious.

the DNA is obviously a Code with information Even Dawkins admits it;

[T]here is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 115.

To encode Information ALWAYS requires Intelligence and to deny this obvious observation is to deny reality.

That it ALWAYS requires Intelligence (with a capital 'I' yet!) is a claim. When we see something that clearly derives its 'code' from the environment rather than a designer; 'but it MUST be done by Intelligence because we KNOW it can only be done by Intelligence!' isn't an argument, it's a whine. There's no sign of the 'Intelligence' you say is required actually being needed in the case of DNA, which can be observed to change in response to environmental conditions in real time: We don't have to design a new strand of DNA in bacteria cultures to get them to get better at digesting a medium they don't do well in, we just let time, mutation, and natural selection take their course until we have a population of e. coli that can grow aerobically on, say, citrate. The inability to grow aerobically on citrate was previously considered one of the defining traits of e. coli. It took over 30,000 generations in the lab for the new trait to appear, once it did, the bacteria began to do much better in the medium. A new mutation, which increased the reproductive fitness of the bacteria, and was therefore conserved by selection pressures. If you think an 'Intelligence' waited 30,000 generations and decided to invisibly step in to 'code' the new trait, I'd like to see some evidence that supports that.

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I knew the moral argument would turn to "How bad Christians were with their acts of violence, and how benevolent atheism is 

Atheism is neither benevolent nor malevolent. It is an opinion on the topic of whether any gods are real. Theism is also neither benevolent nor malevolent, but an opinion on the topic of whether any gods are real. You need to get past that one opinion to find out why people are being benevolent or malevolent. To my knowledge, liberal Quakers and Jains don't have any atrocities to answer for and Quakers in particular have done a lot of good. Totalitarian communists who are almost always atheistic have a poor track record when it comes to benevolence; but I have no more in common with Stalin because he was an atheist than you have in common with Osama bin Laden because he was a theist.

and how it had nothing to do with Atheistic governments killing hundreds of millions, they did it for other reasons".

You're smart enough to figure that out, but not smart enough to keep your mouth shut about it.  

The issue is if Christians kill in Unjust wars they are acting AGAINST their religion. 

If their religion doesn't stop countries where they're the majority from engaging in unjust wars, what good is it, morally speaking? I'm in a minority (humanist) that is absolutely against unjust wars and works to prevent them over and over; but failing because we don't have the numbers. In the USA (for instance) we have a large Christian majority, yet have only had 21 years of peace since its founding. Countries where atheists are a large part of the demographic organically (as opposed to it being imposed by communist rulers) tend to be peaceful countries (not because they're atheists, of course, but because they tend to be de facto humanists).

 If an Atheist leader believes there will be no consequences in the after-life for his atrocities, that he is just helping evolution 

Evolution doesn't need help. Scientific theories are descriptive, not prescriptive. They don't tell you what you should do, only how things are. 'Promoting evolution' would be falling to the naturalistic fallacy.

along by performing "natural selection", then yes that will be borne out in his acts, and it's illogical to believe that's not true.

Your lack of charity concerning people you don't understand well is noted. Your opinion in this matter says a lot about you. There are certainly plenty of Christians who manage to not project evil intent onto us, but the ones like you do more to promote atheism than the atheist minority ever could. Thank you for doing your part to make the world more atheistic. Please pass your opinion on this to your children if you have, or ever have, any. One of our best 'recruitment tools' is when people's kids meet atheists and find out their parents were talking out of their ass about them.

As the 2007 atheist suicide-murderer Pekka-Eric Auvinen from Finland, said;  

‘Today the process of natural selection is totally misguided. Modern human race has not only betrayed its ancestors, but the

 future generations too.’ ‘It’s time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on track!’

So you're the kind of person who looks for murderers in a group you despise and then quotes them as examples of the 'group's philosophy'. That's at least bordering on sociopathic.

Anyway, back to my original post, why do so many of you who are atheists, disbelieve R. Dawkins who said good and evil don't even exist, are you dissenting from this "great" atheist thinker??? Why is killing wrong for an atheist in view of the teaching of the "greatest apostle of Atheism" in our time??? If you just say "Good and evil are constructs in our minds we choose to follow, even though they don't objectively
exist"; isn't that living a delusion???

One, we tend to have good reading comprehension, and are able to understand that Dawkins claiming that the universe not being good or evil doesn't mean people can't be good or evil. Two, Dawkins isn't that great a thinker when it comes to philosophy, he's better at zoology. There are plenty of prominent philosophers who are atheists, but they tend not to produce best sellers. Dawkins is good enough at it for a layman, and has done a good job of popularizing the basics. Three, there are objectively better and poorer ways to run a society, I wouldn't want to live in one where people were free to murder me all willy nilly, would you? I don't want to be murdered, I don't want people I like to be murdered, I don't even want people I dislike to be murdered. If you can't figure out why it's a bad idea to kill people without religion telling you not to do it, please stay religious.

[Thumpalumpacus]

So my point is we innately know that there is Good and Evil in this Universe because we have a Conscience which is simply 

irreducible to random electron collisions in our skulls, and it requires the stubbornness and closed-mindedness of a Dawkins to

 deny the obvious.

Repeating your claim is not supporting it. Until you support it with reasoning (in the case of your claims about conscience) or evidence (when claiming your god exists), it's simply piffle, and like other religious claims, unworthy of my time.

[Edwardo Piet]

If you have an alternative hypothesis that successfully demonstrates that evolution is false why are you here on an atheist forum and not getting your Nobel Prize already?

[Mister Agenda]

Tazzycorn, you seem to be STRETCHING the truth somewhat (Atheism has no rock solid basis for morality so i am not surprised) ok Ill quote more from Dawkins and see if you can by some miracle extract from this fuller quotation that I was wrong and Dawkins in fact believes there is Good and Evil in the Universe

Theism has no basis for morality either, Christians, Muslims, and human-sacrificing Aztecs: all theists. You can't just use Christianity and theism interchangeably. And when you compare atheism to Christianity instead of atheism to theism, you're comparing rutabagas to oranges. Either compare theism to atheism (which takes about 30 seconds) or compare a theistic religion to an atheistic philosophy. And if you pick a philosophy or ideology which hardly anyone here holds to (like totalitarian communism), that would be like expecting you to answer as a Christian to our criticisms of Islam. Try Christianity vs. humanism if you're actually serious.

"In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”   Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

The universe as a whole is indifferent, but we aren't, or hadn't you noticed that? It's something any human being should be able to look around and observe. The only purpose denying that we acknowledge that things matter to humans is to dehumanize us. Fortunately I think you may have missed the boat on organizing a pogrom against us (despite having some professed Christian politicians who might fall in line for it); though Hitler was quite proud of having stamped out the 'atheist movement' in Nazi Germany with a few surgically precise executions, that might have been a better time to play 'atheists are necessarily immoral' card.

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Ah ok we are resorting to abuse, yes that's typical of Atheists, seen it all before, nothing wrong with abuse in a Universe with No good or evil right?

I'd retort that you're displaying a typical Christian love of victimhood, but that would be overgeneralizing. It is, however, fairly popular among Christian fundamentalists in the USA who seem to equate not always getting their way with being oppressed.

I will say you're setting the bar for whining about abuse so low that I expect you'll whine every time someone takes offense and responds in kind when you insinuate that they're lying.

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Which of the Ten Commandments worked its way into the laws of the United States? Thou shalt not kill? In 1918 the so-called anti-lynching bill (H: R. 11279) was introduced to Congress and struck down by the same. Similar laws have been periodically introduced, but to this day there is no federal law against murder.

The first several commandments are just about how to worship your imaginary god.  Nothing resembling profound revelation proceeds that.  

Long before the Ten Commandments humans followed the Instructions of Ptah, the Precepts of Ma’at, the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, Iwa Pele. The writers of  the Ten Commandments had a wealth of human moral instruction to draw on.

American law is largely based on the English Common Law, which began before Christianity was introduced to the British Isles, and funnily enough, already had punishments for killing people before the Christians got there. But it doesn't count, 'cause the 10 Commandments were written on their hearts, even though for some reason God supposedly had to write them in stone for the Hebrews.

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I was going to say we don't reject their god. We simply don't believe he exists. But that's a moot point. Even if the draconian psychopath did exist we would still reject him.

If it's real, it's probably not nearly as bad as so many of its followers make it out to be.

[Cyberman]

Ah ok we are resorting to abuse, yes that's typical of Atheists, seen it all before, nothing wrong with abuse in a Universe with No good or evil right?

Even if that were true and not simply a pathetic attempt to poison the well, so what? You expect that from us, you think it's what we believe and how we behave. So why complain about it?

[Mister Agenda]

Ah ok we are resorting to abuse, yes that's typical of Atheists, seen it all before, nothing wrong with abuse in a Universe with No good or evil right?

Even if that were true and not simply a pathetic attempt to poison the well, so what? You expect that from us, you think it's what we believe and how we behave. So why complain about it?

Yeah, implicit in the rebuke is the idea that we're the kind of people who would feel bad if we realized we were abusing someone; as an insult it kind of refutes itself: the only reason to use it is to provoke us to feel bad about what we've done, but it states that we are not the sort of people who see anything wrong with what we've done. There's certainly a disconnect between the premise and the actual insult.

[Asmodee]

If you have an alternative hypothesis that successfully demonstrates that evolution is false why are you here on an atheist forum and not getting your Nobel Prize already?

[Cyberman]

Also

BUMPETTY BUMP

God gives meaning to our lives by His very existence; with God existing, we have a chance at Eternal Life and Love, those are the Only things that give meaning to our otherwise pointless lives that end either in a hole in the ground or cremation oven.

How do you know this?

The silence is deafening. And so very revealing.

[Pulse]

Also

BUMPETTY BUMP

God gives meaning to our lives by His very existence; with God existing, we have a chance at Eternal Life and Love, those are the Only things that give meaning to our otherwise pointless lives that end either in a hole in the ground or cremation oven.

How do you know this?

The silence is deafening. And so very revealing.

We know this from the beauty of the Universe and from His Divine Revelation, our sins are what mar this world, sins which are "evil" which Atheism can't explain.

[Cyberman]

Well, we're not discussing atheism in this context so that's a red herring.

Now, how do we get from "the beauty of the Universe" and "divine revelation" to "God gives meaning to our lives by His very existence; with God existing, we have a chance at Eternal Life and Love, those are the Only things that give meaning to our otherwise pointless lives that end either in a hole in the ground or cremation oven"?

What I'm getting at is how do these things point unequivocally to your god as an existent explanation and no other? What is your citation for all this?