Why do atheists hate God?: An article Dissection

[Ziploc Surprise]

No worries bud, just offering a taste of the usual fare round these parts. The trouble with defining who or what an atheist is in one definition is that we have no holy texts from which to make these distinctions. Counterpoint that with theists, who despite having such texts still elude easy classification, not that they ever seem eager to correct their texts where their beliefs are different in even the slightest of ways. That would poison their own well.

"Without gods" seems to be the only thing that could be said of atheists at large. Those atheists, such as myself, who made no "conscious choice" to be so wouldn't really qualify as "unaffiliated".
(Except, of course, in this specific argument and as defined by you for the purposes of this argument, I get that.)

From the numerous religious texts from various religions that I have read there seems to be one underlying theme. This theme is the texts are fuzzy enough to leave plenty of room for interpretation. This room for interpretation is a functional thing for theists. It gives room to fuck people over and justify it by their interpretation of the religious text. On a kinder note it also gives room to change with the times i.e. to keep your religion relevant.

As for conscious choice it sounds like you have made a conscious choice, but I could be wrong about this. I don't know you after all. I on the other hand feel I can not illegitimately call myself an atheist because my god flag still rests on one final hill. The hill of all the supernatural experiences I have had over my lifetime. I can say that I believe that there are scientific/psychological explanations for these phenomena. in other words the phenomena have a provable cause. They just haven't been discovered yet. I have decided that its a safe assumption that someday soon my hill will erode to nothing or my flag will spontaneously combust. Until that time I have to come to terms with it. A process that will take time. I do not accept glossed over explanations. It might be safe to say that I fall in a gray area (perhaps it ought to be the what the fuck? area) between conscious choice to be a theist or a non theist. With me specifically, when it comes to supernatural phenomena, I know that I don't know what the fuck is going on. Other people who have not made any conscious choice for either theiest or nontheist don't know and/or don't care about what the fuck is going on.

I admit my word "unaffiliated" could leave too much room for interpretation. I haven't had time to come up with a proper word yet.

[Jay1982]

I just saw this article on Conservapedia's front page and I thought I may as well try to dissect this article.

Recently, I have had a lot of conversations with atheists. Many express a strong hatred of God. I have been at a loss to explain this.

Have you tried asking?

How can you hate someone you don’t believe in? Why the hostility?
If God does not exist, shouldn’t atheists just relax and seek a good time before they become plant food? Why should it matter if people believe in God?

The point is that atheists are hostile towards religion (not God, by the way) because there are people who do believe in them who are dumb enough to engage in conversations with atheists and write articles trying to hypothesize why they "hate God" without even bothering to ask them. And they more or less dominate society.

Nothing matters if atheism is true.

Well, nothing related to religion does, anyway. Of course, there are other things that aren't related to religion.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), the brother of the atheistic evolutionist Sir Julian Huxley, advocated a drug-fuelled utopia. He gave the reason for his anti-Christian stance:

“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning … the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”

There's an article here which explains this quote.

Like Huxley, some people don’t like God because they don’t like moral constraints—you can make up your own rules, or have none at all, if God does not exist.

Well, people tend to do that whether or not they believe in God.

They hate God and Christians because they are actually not confident that God does not exist and seeing Christians may remind them that they are ‘suppressing the truth’ (Romans 1:18).

How are atheists suppressing the truth? Virtually every atheist in the Western World recognises that people of any belief system have a right to openly say what they believe.

What about atheists who had a church/religious upbringing? Some of them hate God because of evil things done to them by teachers in religious schools or by church leaders—people who on the face of it represented God. Antipathy towards God is an understandable reaction, sadly (although illogical).

Yes, atheists know it's illogical. That's why atheists tend to hate religion and not God.

Some atheists complain of Christian ‘intolerance’ in speaking about hell. But if those who spurn God’s forgiveness will suffer God’s wrath, as the Bible teaches, shouldn’t we Christians be warning everyone about the danger and how they can be saved? How is that ‘intolerant’?

Here's the problem: Hell is, essentially defined as infinite punishment. As Father Annan said in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man":

For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun.

Think of it this way: Adolf Hitler was responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and countless goyim (and this isn't even counting the many who died on the Western Front of World War II.) The amount of suffering that Hitler has caused must be astronomical, but still, it can only be finite. And for this, Hitler has been considered the most evil man in history. Hell, if it exists, is worse than any concentration camp. And one doesn't even need to do anything near as bad as Hitler to get into there. All one has to do is fail to kiss God's ass enough in one's lifetime to get sent there. And people expect absolute fealty to him? If God existed, then he wouln't someone who demands our fealty. He'd deserve to be the victim of a coup so massive that it would make September 11, 1973 seem like a schoolyard fight.

Many complain about hell; they are angry at God because of hell. I understand that teachers in certain church-based schools, and parents in some ‘religious’ homes, commonly used the ‘fear of God’ to make children behave. “You are bad; you will burn in hell if you don’t behave.” But such a simplistic works-oriented approach not only trivializes this most serious of subjects, it negates the Gospel of God’s grace. (We are all ‘bad’ in God’s eyes, and ‘behaving properly’ will not save us—only Jesus can.)

One question: If works are irrelevant to salvation, and salvation is the main point to Christianity, then why bother to give moral instruction?

The Gospel (good news, see p. 41) is missing from all this. The Bible tells us that God is in the business of salvation.

So, basically, God is in the business of saving people from creating a situation of eternal torture that he himself created. How does this not sound like a protection racket?

Though His wrath regarding sin is all too real (as seen in the Fall and Flood judgments; pp. 12–14, p. 15), we need not suffer it. Those who come to Him in repentance and faith will not be turned away (John 6:37). See also pp. 33–34

If his wrath is real, can you provide unambiguous evidence of it in the real world.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

So, basically, God sacrificed himself to himself to change a rule he made himself. That makes so much sense.

It is strange that people hate God, who loves so much.

He loves people enough that he is willing to cause people to be deluded into thinking wrong so he can send them to Hell. (2 Thessalonians 2:11) This is, of course, assuming that the Bible is true.

Some atheists complain of Christian ‘intolerance’ in speaking about hell.

Atheists complain about Christian "intolerance" when they talk about wanting to silence other views. When talking about Hell, intolerance is too mild a word.

But if those who spurn God’s forgiveness will suffer God’s wrath, shouldn’t we Christians be warning everyone about the danger and how they can be saved? How is that ‘intolerant’? It would be extremely unloving not to tell others of this.

So, basically, be a Bagman for Christ.

A gift of Creation magazine might be a good place to start.

Wow. Way to self-promote your magazine against people who would never read it except to write responses to their articles over the internet.

nice dissection. I was just wondering if you dropped the author of the article an email or gave him a link to your dissection?

[justthetruth]

How can you hate what you don't believe in? An atheist is a person that has more faith in what he believes than a Christain. He has to because if he is wrong hell will be his eternal reward. God will send people to hell because that is where their god Satan is going. It is a freewill choice. You can pay God now, or you can pay him later. He does not want anyone to go there, but if people choose to go there by rejecting his Son's sacrifice, he will not run after them and try to change their minds. It's not rocket science, it is simple repentance that gets it going in the right direction.

[Faith No More]

You can pay God now, or you can pay him later.

That's funny, I don't remember buying anything...

[thesummerqueen]

justthetruth, you're in preaching territory. Please reframe your answers in a style more suitable for discussion in the future.

[The Grand Nudger]

When I get a bill for services niethered requested nor rendered, I disregard.

[Rev. Rye]

nice dissection. I was just wondering if you dropped the author of the article an email or gave him a link to your dissection?

I've discovered that his name is Dr. Don Batten. I've found no link to his email address.

[The Grand Nudger]

LOL, Dr. of what?

[Rev. Rye]

LOL, Dr. of what?

Plant Sciences.

[ThomM]

I just saw this article on Conservapedia's front page and I thought I may as well try to dissect this article.
Recently, I have had a lot of conversations with atheists. Many express a strong hatred of God. I have been at a loss to explain this.



Sorry - but this statement is simply nonsense

No atheist expresses a strong hatred of "god"
An atheist does not believe a god exists
No god - no hatred of a god

They may express a hatred of the human created nonsense of religion and the HUMANS who attempt to spread it . THAT xtians interpret that as hatred of a god is simply erroneous interpretation.