Those who believe in God often exhibit certain attitudes that are incorrect and unhelpful, in my view. The first one is to think that no intelligent or rational person could be an atheist. We do a great disservice to others when we ridicule the atheist. I do not think atheists are crazy or deluded, I simply think they are mistaken. But their doubts ought to be taken seriously because we all have doubts. The second bad attitude is to think that atheists are immoral. That is just not necessarily true. There are immoral theists! An atheist might have practical reasons to be good and decent and many do live decent lives. I simply think they are mistaken on the grounding of moral values. The greatest problem we have is not with atheists who live as if there is a god but with believers who say there is one but live as if there is none. Why? Because by giving a bad example, they close the doors of the Kingdom to others! At times I have been treated in the most insulting and nasty way by some people who say to be Christians simply because I do not agree with some parts of their theology. There are people who will be sorry atheist or theist... The final one is failing to empathize with atheists. Their questions are real and often there is anger at Christian’s bad example in the background. Others have been taught things by people they trust at universities or elsewhere. Their views ought to be respected and they often are correctly angry at the actions of theists! Do not feel a sense of defensiveness at every accusation from atheists because they are atheists! Use reason rightly to examine all and retain the good. Be open and honest and kind to them. But there are also bad habits of atheists. One is the idea that if you are religious you cannot believe also in science, as all religion contradicts science. One thing is to say that certain beliefs of religions might contradict science and another is that religion per se is anti-science. Here too some Christians err by confusing the rejection of a certain theory or biblical interpretation with a rejection of God. Evolution is one of these points. Thirty years ago it was the atheist who would call the “big bang” theory religious fantasy and now some Christians are the ones who call it “atheist fantasy.” Go figure… Another bad atheist attitude (or mistaken logic) is to confuse a rejection of the Bible (as interpreted by themselves) with a rejection of the idea of God; two different subjects altogether. Others say that if you were born in India you would probably be a Hindu, therefore, religion is based on geography. This is a logical error that proves nothing. If I were born before Einstein, I probably would accept the ideas coming from Newton. Does that mean scientific discovery is worthless and we cannot ever know anything? If you were born in 502 in the Arabic world you would probably have accepted slavery as normal and if born in the Soviet Union in 1950 you would have thought capitalism is evil. The key is not geography but the rationality of the arguments. Another atheist error is to think theists simply insert God wherever we do not have yet an explanation for something. The god of the gaps theory is another fallacy out there trying to convey the false idea that theists do not want to know of natural causes for things. The fact is that theist thinkers mostly depart from what we do know (not from what we do not yet know) to conclude that the best explanation is God. Big difference... Finally, another atheist bad habit is thinking that one believes in God because one is stupid or uneducated or ignorant or wanting to hold on to what mom told me. Yes, the same as with some theists about atheists, they try to psychologize with psychobabble the ideas of the other. The new atheism’s “contribution” to the discussion on the existence of God has not been any new insight but this type of arrogance, as in calling themselves “brights”, as if a believer by definition is dumb. But some Christians descend into the same arrogance, branding themselves useless, I think. This is wrong, illogical and absurd no matter who says it and it boils down to arrogance, not enlightenment. We must all avoid this mistake.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 13:22:23 +0000
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