A question for Anti-Theists

[The Grand Nudger]

Sin taxes? What do you mean by sin taxes? Taxes on tobacco, alcohol and pollutant products? At least in Fiscal/Tax Law we use the 'Sin taxes' terminology for these kind of taxes, but they have several justifications behind them. Do you have more relevant examples behind taxes?

And gambling...and pornography......and any other thing our devoutly religious forebears managed to root into our pysches so deeply as wrong. It's easy for us to justify these taxes - in part because we have already accepted that they carry a negative ethical weight. A negative ethical weight that I don't think is so easily demonstrated. We might say things like "let the smokers complain..they're poisoning our air! Well, Mr Smug..so are the tomato eaters....and the perfume sprayers....and the flatulents. If we thought that tomatoes where a moral or ethical evil (and we actually did once...google it) then we would find that we had all sorts of reasons to subsidize our country off the backs of those poor tomato eating schmucks. I'm not sure why you don't think this is relevant, help me to explain?

I too think deism is still wishful thinking, the same goes for agnostic theism (without religious beliefs), but these people are still not hurting anyone else

Just because a gun is sitting on the table not being used to shoot someone - does not mean that it cannot be used to shoot someone. That's an extreme analogy, granted, but it makes my position on the issue of "they're not hurting anyone, geesh man" crystal clear. People who do hurt people go through vast stretches of time where they are not actively hurting people. We're talking about terrible people here - they still manage not to be the worst possible permutation of themselves -all of the time-. The same, I think, is true of belief in god or gods.