Why Do Atheists Criticize People's Beliefs?

[The Grand Nudger]

No, I don't.  I think that people who act out their religious beliefs in terrible ways are good people who have been compelled to do a bad thing.  The guy who slices up his daughters genitalia thinks he's helping her.  In your thought experiment, that's how it played out.  We had good people doing good things, and bad people doing bad things.  Then, with beleif, a good man doing a bad thing.  An anomalous point of data.  

If the question is what was more heavily weighted, belief or personality...in your thought experiment.......belief, and obviously so.  It was the only instance in which the outcome was not like the others.

If belief can be blamed in person A's case, leaving him blameless, why can't the same be done for C?  You're excusing A because you feel his beliefs compelled him.  Is C not under the same onus?  If we excuse people on account of them forming actions that are consonant with bad beliefs, then there is no one who will not be excused.  You've just redrawn the lines so that the person isn't responsible for their beliefs in one case, but they are in another.  That's inconsistent.

If belief can be blamed in person A's case, leaving him blameless, why can't the same be done for C?  You're excusing A because you feel his beliefs compelled him.  Is C not under the same onus?  If we excuse people on account of them forming actions that are consonant with bad beliefs, then there is no one who will not be excused.  You've just redrawn the lines so that the person isn't responsible for their beliefs in one case, but they are in another.  That's inconsistent.

Agreed (somewhat).  This is the fallacy of the whole "if not for religion, such and such a type of person would be great" argument.  It assumes that beliefs are more cause than symptom.  This is a baseless assumption.  If that were true, wouldn't you think that everyone with the same belief would be acting in similar ways?  That was the point of the hypothetical.  A and B have the same belief, but A reacts one way and B reacts completely differently.  Since both situations are plausible, the suggestion is plausible that belief is not the determining factor.  


[edit]people like Sam Harris blame Faith for ignoble life sacrifices like suicide bombings, but never credit it for noble life sacrifices like in war or emergencies.

C is under the same onus, as I already mentioned, when I asked what sense it made to call him a "non-believer".   However, if the point of the exercise, to me, was to show that it was personality over belief...I wouldn't make any such noise. Mostly, since it would then demonstrate exactly the opposite. That it was belief, and the contents of belief, that led inexorably to some terrible thing x. That with no other mentioned differences, it was a belief in some x in each case that led to a bad outcome.

It's a standard apologetic outreach argument, with a standard reply. Meh.

There just weren't any differences in personality described in the first place, a total "wtf" way to phrase a question. The entire point of example c is an example of "not a belief", "not like a" -but it's exactly like a...so?.