Lazy Atheism?

[The Valkyrie]

No, I think "lazy" is the right word. You're arguing in favor of your atheism with the easiest possible arguments.

Do you really think that a literalist reading of Genesis is essential to Christianity? If you think "the world wasn't created in six days" is sufficient to make all of Christianity unbelievable, then I think that's a bit too lazy. 


Well, sure... If you focus on the simple stuff you can knock down a straw man or two and then go home satisfied. But you've made it too easy on yourself. 

You know the Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't believe in a literal Genesis, and is quite aware that arguments against sodomy or abortion are not clearly stated by Jesus? Non-lazy people might look into the theory of natural law, which is used by many Christians (since at least the time of Thomas Aquinas) to argue against certain practices, even if there is only tenuous biblical support for this. 

You don't have to learn anything about the history of Christian thought. Lots of people have long happy lives without knowing anything about it. But if you're going to be making claims about the believability of what Christians have said, it might make sense to know what the smart ones think.

All religions more or less take the same form:
1. There is a guy called the god or gods.
2. One day, for some reason, they decide to create this universe/Earth combo.
3. They create the visible lifeforms: trees, humans, cats, giraffes, etc.

All ancient people were curious and they all had the big questions:
Why do I exist?
Why does all this stuff around me exist?
Who made it?
What happens when I die? What happened to my dead friend? My dead child? My dead grandparents?

The natural, most obvious solution for a priest is to claim that the gods created them one day for reason X.
The guy who made up the Genesis story and his colleagues who modified it over time know very well that they are making it up.
The listeners would not be told that it is a metaphor. The listeners would be literalists and the listeners would be in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions over the years.

In other words, the people want a scientific answer, an exact answer as to what happened in the past. They don’t want a fairy tail or some 3 little pigs story.

It is the majority’s beliefs that are important, not the handful of priests who regarded the story as metaphor.
And I already checked a link that you gave. None of those non-literalists from thousands of years ago accepted the Big Bang theory, Evolution theory.
They were just arguing why it would take their jewish god 6 days instead of 1 nanosecond.

In other words, all of them, including the priest class were young earth creationists.

Religion was the science of the old days. Religion was more than that. It was at times politics, history, philosophy, moral laws, biology, geology.

I take issue with one point: cats didn't need a creator.

I suspect they just kinda showed up one day...