Why Do Atheists Criticize People's Beliefs?

[Valyza1]

. So can a non-believer.  

Can he, I don't think so...I think that the person you're calling a "non-believer" has to believe in something...pretty damned hard...to burn his house down mit children.  That or...you know, just terrible and crazy.

He believes pretty hard that the world is a terrible place for them and not worth keeping them alive for. How crazy that is is irrelevant. It's what he believes. I meant non-believer in the sense that he doesn't have any particular religious beliefs, but he still has beliefs. Everyone does. There's no reason to think he's any crazier than person A. Person A would still need to be the same level of crazy as Person C to actually do that. Belief is just an excuse if it's bad, and just a compass if it's good.

They both want what's best for their families and they both think that killing their families is what's best for them.  A thinks his family is going to meet Jesus in Heaven, C thinks he's sparing his family the pain of living in this terrible world.  It isn't necessarily the case that without religion, A is a better person than C.  Christopher Hitchens offered this same situation in a different form, and it seems to presume that religious behavior is not a product of a person's character and is entirely due to the religion.  That if only the religion didn't exist, this need on the person's part would not be filled by some other equally powerful belief system.  There's actually no reason to presume this.  And there's no way to test it, either, because we only live in one reality, and can't observe two alternate ones.

That's an interesting revision of the thought experiment you proposed, but it doesn't help.  In the case of the non-believer who truly -believes- (lol?) he's doing his family a service...he has no god crutch to fall back on and still -be- a decent person in light of what he did.  The religous man, A, does.

That's basically where we disagree. You seem to be implying that someone like A wouldn't be someone like C without his religious beliefs. I'm saying that's a baseless implication.