So your an Athiest

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Just got back online. I read the posts, and see I made a mistake. I do not believe athiests hate God. I should have said a parent would not doom their child if they did not believe in them.

If I had children, the last thing I would want to do is doom them. Doom is what happens to children who are taught by religious people, particularly Christians. They are taught from their earliest days that they are doomed to be sinners who displease their god, and will suffer eternal punishment for being what they were born to be if they don't try and atone for it and make like their parents do in their "relationship" with their nonexistent Big Bad Daddy In the Sky.

Teaching a child that he is naturally bad is nothing like passing on the shrewd observation that we are not perfect and all of us make some mistakes. It can really rake some children's self-esteem over the coals, especially if they are having difficulty adjusting or have learning disabilities, while other kids often go with the lies and learn how to use dishonesty as a major item in their personality toolbox. Show me a car salesman who isn't religious, and doesn't have similar personal traits to the aggressive evangelical preacher, and I'll show you a flying pig.

Children who are raised religiously are far more prone to spend their entire lives living in fear of their own biological nature, living with shame and guilt for traits which do not cause anyone any harm, terrorized by fear of supernatural bogeys needlessly - I would not doom any child of mine to such a fear-ridden life, this is the worst form of child abuse! The children of atheists are far more likely to grow up doom-free than those who are raised religiously.

As I said, I am not an atheist basher, but i'm sure you guys get a lot of it, so I understand the defensiveness.

You'll never get an atheist on the defensive, because he has no ideas to defend. Any ideas which he believes never required apologetics games to make them believable, they have been vetted by empirical evidence, not argument.

On the contrary, it's the religious believer who makes the unfalsifiable claims in place of evidence-backed ideas, and it is he who must argue to defend them. This is entirely what the Christian apologists do, it's all defensive argument (spun with bombastic aggression to make it appear authoritative), with no substance. They post virtual reams galore of such nonsense, none which stand up to the hard light of reason - it's quite an uphill battle for you to maintain beliefs which are most probably not true at all, and were most certainly invented in other people's heads, and that is why they rally each other to fight unbelief as if they were in some kind of war. It's why they are so vociferous and loud in their proselytizing, political meddling, and educational sabotage. They need the public affirmation, and they need to repeat publicly their ideas, and even more so they need to hear agreement from others, because that's what it takes for them to believe those ideas are true.

You can come here and argue all you like as long as you keep your end of the dialogue level, but you probably won't see us on religious forums because we don't need to recruit you in order to keep our own ideas. However, the world would be better if more people made their decisions by the sobriety of critical reason, and that's why a lot of us are happy to talk to the believers who come around.

I still believe God does not care if you believe in him or not. And the lack of evidence is so we can determine our lives in a way that would not be possible otherwise. Once again, I did not say anything about evolution, holy books, or whatever else most of you guys are used to hearing.

You're right that god doesn't care, nor does Osiris, Odin, Thor, although possibly the Flying Sphagetti Monster does (I try and make a sauce donation every so often just in case).