Atheists, tell me, a Roman Catholic: why should I become an atheist?

[robvalue]

Well, yes. An all loving being who creates a place which serves only to torture people? That's such a raging contradiction that I don't know how anyone can handle it.

[Chas]

I definitely can see how many consider the Christian God to be morally horrible. Obviously (and expectedly) Christianity teaches us that God is the complete opposite of that...anything he does that we as humans perceive as evil or wrong supposedly has a "perfect" justification for it. I won't deny that this seems like it could merely be a convenient way to justify claims that God is purely good -- but of course growing up with a mind conditioned to interpret every single one of his actions as absolutely perfect makes it hard for me to accept the opposite. I'm sure this is at least partially why so many theists are so confident in their faith in God's goodness, regardless of if God is real. The theist mind is trained to immediately interpret events in favor of God/their faith...whether their interpretations are rational or irrational.

God's "need" for love/worship again seems to be in accordance with his supposed nature. He wants us to worship Him so that we may grow closer to Him, strengthening ourselves morally by obeying Him. Why exactly God would send us to Hell for not sufficiently worshipping Him (rather than making it optional to live "immorally" without the consequence of Hell)...I'm not sure, and I don't even know if any theists I ask will have an answer that extends past simply claiming something like "we don't know, but God has a perfect reason."  

As for Heaven, I've had thoughts in the past about how we'd feel knowing so many people would burn in Hell for eternity. Christians justifications claim that in Heaven, even though we can't understand it right now, we'll be completely without negativity/negative emotions. We'd fully understand God's reason for sending so many people to Hell and be able to move on. Of course, this is based off of the basic ideas of Heaven and doesn't necessarily support the idea of Heaven.

Instead of trying to work those things out, go back to square one and consider the fact that there is no actual evidence of the existence of gods or hell or heaven.
You are wasting energy on things that likely don't even exist.

[Whateverist]

Well, yes. An all loving being who creates a place which serves only to torture people? That's such a raging contradiction that I don't know how anyone can handle it.

That is right on.  Unless everyone you grew up with wasn't telling you this stuff was real and important all your life you'd think any fundamentalist preaching heaven and hell was a crazy guy .. which, in fact, they kind of are.

[Jehanne]

It's crazy, but I used to believe in that stuff, way back in the Dark Ages that we now refer to as the 1980s.  Little wonder that zealots such as the Duggars will monitor and restrict their kids access to the Internet; they don't want them knowing that many enlightened people in the Western World consider their beliefs to be absolute horseshit.  Better to be praying upon (and with) the illiterate of Honduras.

[brewer]

Haha, ok. I thought you were serious! I'm sorry.

Never! Catholics are the sexiest

[The Grand Nudger]

You said it there.  I've talked to so many "believers" in so many things and they all have flawed ways of thinking.  One of the most common things in the UFO community is to determine what a UFO IS by proving what it IS NOT.

Over 2 millennia ago, Julius Caesar said:  Men willingly believe what they wish. 

The question is, why are they so eager to believe it?

To get through the day.  Bare /w me, but, if our minds are hueristic machines...then they assume that -something- is true for no reason at all, just a practical necessity.  They wouldn't work otherwise...or, at least, we don't understand how they -could- work otherwise.

[Tonus]

Bare /w me,

Not in this weather!

but, if our minds are hueristic machines...then they assume that -something- is true for no reason at all, just a practical necessity.  They wouldn't work otherwise...or, at least, we don't understand how they -could- work otherwise.

Yeah, I think that our need to know is very strong. Along with such a large part of our brain dedicated to automated processing, it leads to an organism whose quirks become more pronounced as we become more sophisticated.

[comet]

Dude died, woke up, and flew away?

that's a biggie right there..

they get you to believe that as a literal event they can get you to do anything they want and you won't know how wrong you are until its too late.

[brewer]

[Balaco]

Looking through Luckie's links last night as a reference, I began investigating the teleological argument as presented to me by a Catholic (who copy-pasted it from a video). I'm told that this particular explanation of the teleological argument doesn't necessarily represent Aquinas' teleological argument, so I'll have to look into that as well.

Here's what I was mainly going off of.

A second argument is the teleological argument. The teleological argument states that since the universe displays such an amazing design, there must have been a divine Designer. For example, if the Earth were significantly closer or farther away from the sun, it would not be capable of supporting much of the life it currently does. If the elements in our atmosphere were even a few percentage points different, nearly every living thing on earth would die. The odds of a single protein molecule forming by chance is 1 in 10243 (that is a 1 followed by 243 zeros). A single cell is comprised of millions of protein molecules.

Through my research so far, I've found that this doesn't necessarily point to God. A lot of these points came from some threads on this site...for example I believe Rob presented the dice analogy. I presented the following posts to the Catholic Forum to see what their defense was.

--

Objectively speaking, unlikely events, such as our existence, don't necessarily point to God. Even though some parts of the universe are precise...even if a small percent difference would've stopped us from existing, it's not impossible these things could've happened on their own. 

Human existence didn't have to happen, but it did. It ended up being the event that happened out of the many events that could have been possible.

A simple analogy I've found involves the roll of a die 1000 times over. Every last combination of the numbers produced by the die is equally as likely; equally as unlikely. The order being something like "2, 4, 6, 4, 3, 4, 1, 1 etc." or just "2" over and over is extremely unlikely, but just as extremely unlikely as any other outcome. It just so happened that, out of all the possible outcomes, that one occurred. 

I've also seen the lottery or disorders being used as analogies. There are billions of people in the world, each as unlikely to win the lottery or be born with a rare disorder, but it happens. 

Of course, human existence is (probably) much more complex than rolling a die or winning the lottery in a sense. Though if we look at it without immediately assuming that we had to or have to exist, the analogies remain relevant. For all we know, that small percent change in the elements would've led to the existence of radically different beings, rather than us humans.

Some other users also claimed that it could also be possible that the odds of us existing were 100% (without God existing)...but our knowledge is currently too limited to comprehend this. There could be a branch of physics/science that explains this, but we haven't learned it yet.....or our incomplete human minds are overthinking things. These last points here aren't exactly provable so I'm not necessarily defending them past their possibility.

--

What kind of surprised me was that no theists really tried to refute it. One person admitted that the teleological argument isn't "absolute" proof of God and conceded that these points show that. 

Actually this person feels that it proves God is highly likely to exist, and that "atheists are putting a great deal of faith in the tiny sliver of a chance that God doesn't exist."  I don't really see how this argument necessarily proves either of these two; I laid out how it's scientifically possible that humanity didn't have to exist...though I suppose the theist mind in this case likely doesn't focus on how we didn't necessarily have to exist, as God's existence would answer that. I suppose other arguments for God's existence may reinforce the confidence in theists, which strengthens the validity of the teleological argument for them. I'll probably ask this guy for some clarification and then see if I can refute him.

Another simply mentioned that (as I said) Aquinas' teleological argument is much stronger than this one. 

The only other person who responded claims that the teleological argument, among every other single thing in the world, points to God, and supplemented that with an analogy on how there's many ways we don't believe in God. Wasn't really relevant to the discussion. I guess this might be another case of jumping to God for an answer rather than attempting to find a logical answer, though to be fair I don't know anything about this person's knowledge.