32 reasons to be an atheist (as opposed to a Christian)
- You don’t have to get up on Sunday mornings if you don’t feel like it.
- You don’t have to sing songs that are too high for your voice and leave you with a sore throat.
- You don’t have to fake smile at people all the time and pretend the god God is making your life wonderful.
- You can stop pretending that three gods are one god.
- You don’t have to worry about the bad angel, the Devil, tempting you and you can just go about your daily business like a normal person, making reasonable choices about your behaviour.
- You don’t have to obsess about not having thoughts that are natural, that would actuallylead nowhere (would lead nowhere if you don’t try and suppress them, that is).
- You can choose your partner or partners based on your attraction to them, not based on if you think the god God has made them for you.
- You can have sex at whatever time in a relationship you think is appropriate and not wait till you’ve made a vow you expect to last forever to find out it wasn’t worth waiting for but have to pretend it was so no-one thinks you’re weird and your spouse doesn’t get upset.
- If you get married and the relationship fails, you don’t have to worry about being a daily and disobedient sinner when you meet someone else you love and marry them.
- If you see a really hot person you are attracted to, you can think whatever you want without worrying about having committed adultery with them during that lustful look.
- You don’t have to worry about your god being racist, choosing initially only one small ethnic group of people to care about, and then deciding Europe and America are worth it only in recent years, but Asia is a lost cause for hell fodder.
- You don’t have to wonder how the god God would have saved your soul if you’d been born in a region of Papa New Guinea that missionaries haven’t got to.
- You can read what Jesus said and see if any of the nice things are useful for your own personal philosophy of living, without worrying why he killed a tree because he was hungry and in a bad mood.
- You can relate to animals as the marvellous creatures and clear relations they are, and not as as inferior soulless beings put on earth to provide you with food.
- You can say ‘Oh my god!’ like Janice from Friends without feeling guilty and sinful.
- You can make logical decisions about all your actions instead of consulting a rule book from 2000 and more years ago that relates to an entirely alien culture.
- You can make logical choices about your life decisions instead of looking for signs from a being you can’t see or hear and trying to figure out what of the many coincidences in life is a sign.
- You can put a nice statue of Buddha up in your living room.
- You can tell your parents they are being ridiculous and stupid if they are being ridiculous and stupid.
- You don’t have to look for interpretations of the Bible that agree with your view on life.
- If you’re gay, you can have a relationship that corresponds to your sexual attraction matrix without having to justify all the bits of the Bible that say it’s a sin.
- You can look at natural wonders and be truly amazed by them instead of thinking an all-powerful deity made them on a whim or plan.
- You don’t have to worry that every political shift in the world is a sign of the inevitable end times.
- You don’t have to worry about dying because there’s no sense that maybe you didn’t make it with your brand of faith (what if the Mormons are right?).
- You can let your children make up their mind about life, and not brainwash them from birth with a specific belief.
- You can deal with your children’s natural development phases in a relaxed manner and not put inconvenient behaviour down to original sin.
- You can face life like an independent adult and not keep clinging to an imaginary parent figure.
- You don’t have to try and reconcile your benevolent god God with the horrible things he did in the Old Testament.
- You can read the Bible as a historical text without feeling you should believe the ark was real or Moses spoke to a burning bush.
- You can admit that it’s not nice to tradesmen to have their business vandalised by an angry man with a whip who has a ‘moral’ problem with their established way of earning a living but won’t simply do magic (at this point) to prove he’s right.
- You don’t have to worry about the shocking under-representation of women in the Bible, and wonder why only men have the lead roles.
- You can delight in the fact that you are alive at a time when evolution has brought humanity to the stage where you have answers for existence in science, and you don’t have to succumb to your natural superstitious instincts that drive human curiosity about life. Theism is natural but atheism is the next rung on the ladder.
I like the first 32 of them;
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Glad to hear it! I was aiming for 50 but I figured I’d made my point and there was no need to stay up late.
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I like number 1 though I attend Sunday school in my house reading the bible as a reference material for when I have to interact with a christian :-D.
This list is almost exhaustive, maybe all I can add is you can say I don’t know and am willing to find out more. Supernatural explanations aren’t needed.
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Not having the need to get up on Sunday mornings was the first thing that popped into my head – I can’t imagine choosing to look at the Bible! I think the list could easily go on for as long as the Bible …
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How about these?
You can say ‘fuck the pope’ and not worry about eternal retribution.
You can forget what those judgemental people think, they’re crazy.
You can relax with the fact that you are in charge of your morals. It’s not as difficult as they make it out to be.
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You’re right that worrying about what other people think is something I forgot about – I think that’s a big problem for most Christians. I covered the bit about morals, but you’re so right about the part where it’s not difficult – they have the oddest notions in their heads about that! I find it kind of frightening reading some the Christian bloggers’ takes on morality and sin. They sound like they could be dangerous people.
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After reading all of them, I realise you could have easily thought of 100 more. But you have made your point already.
The one that struck me most is ‘smile all the time and pretend god is making your life wonderful’. This is one characteristic of what some people call the ‘happy-clappy christians’ that always filled me with horror. People smiling like uncomfortable, stressed-out monkeys and me knowing all the time there is an ulterior motive. 😦
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I was aiming for 50 because Ark copped out (it was his challenge) and used ONE which isn’t correct. But I also felt like I’d made my point and it was time to go to sleep – I’m very impatient with the ‘publish’ button and rarely leave a post to the next day. And I agree that the scary smiley Christians scream massive discomfort, it is kind of sad.
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I am still coming for the photographs. This one would be beautiful even without the hummingbird. I have Durga on my shelf, beside my hand-painted “Angels at Mamre” imitation.
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Ark invited Christians over to his spot to give five reasons to be a Christian rather than atheist. There are some nice ideas, especially those by Cindy (although obviously I wouldn’t recommend anyone I like have a go at commenting). He was arguing with one of the Christians (surprise?) and blurting out he could easily come up with 50 reasons to be an atheist but he chickened out and published one. So I felt I should take up the slack for the cause. It was fun. Anyway, I’m glad you’re still coming for the photos. 🙂
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This is awesome. It’s such a relief to be free of all that baggage.
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Isn’t it? The whole sin thing in particular is just such a load of unhelpful and damaging nonsense.
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I thought we went through this: theism is NOT natural. A tendency to fall for supernaturalism seems inevitable (for now) but that doesn’t make it natural.
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Did you pick up on that? I just threw it in at the end to annoy you and your buddy. Oh, and because it’s true. 🙂 Come on, you know you’re wrong but it’s gone on for so long it’s embarrassing to issue a retraction. For every person in the world, an innate sense of supernatural, something beyond what we can see or know, is natural. Well, perhaps not for every single person, but definitely the overwhelming majority. In a theistic culture, theism is natural.
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Cheeky. You said “theism” and that’s wrong… now you changed it to supernatural. Cheater. Yes, a tendency to the supernatural may be considered ‘almost’ natural. the natural state is (as i labored to demonstrate) paranoia, which leads to false casual associations, which leads to superstitions. Now go and write that out ten-thousand times, using your toes…
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Mmmm, good work.
My thoughts:
1. Which is why I’m not Catholic.
2. Harmony ftw.
3. Very good point. Friends ftw.
4. Never have.
5, 17, 23. Which is why I’m not a charismatic.
6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 26, 29, 31, 32. Which is why I left fundamentalism.
11, 12, 24. Which is why I doubt exclusivism.
13, 14, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30. These are reasons to be an atheist?
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Thanks for your thoughtful reply! Do you think I missed anything out? I think I could have gone on for quite a bit longer, but it was late.
I’m concerned you only ‘doubt’ exclusivism. To help nice Christians like you, I’m going to give my interpretation of what a nice Jesus would have meant when he said ‘no-one comes to the Father except through me’ (or whatever it was). He didn’t mean you have to be baptised Christian in your physical life, clearly, because that would be ridiculous given what we know about the world. This is the perfect place to use your supernatural trump card and say that this could easily mean ‘everyone goes to the Father through me, no strings attached’.
I think the two (maybe there are more?) stories that slipped through the carefully embroidered net of published accounts of Jesus, that reveal a darker, unpleasant side, cast significant doubt on the absolute loveliness and clever chap of a god he was supposed to be. I also think that relation to animals is really important to understanding our own characters and to understanding the continued and generally unacknowledged harm that humans reap. Poor, lovely animals who have little control over their destinies being ruthlessly exploited as unnecessary nourishment and entertainment by greedy, willfully ignorant humans. I think there is a definite arrogance in ‘I’m human, I’m special, so a god must have created me in his (?) image’ ugly taint that Christianity has brought to our societies. I also believe that one of the attractions of Christianity is the extension of parenthood and it’s part of an unwillingness to grow up and face reality – fear of responsibility if you like. And huge advantage of atheism is that you do feel much more responsible of your life and those of others around you (an effect that the imaginings of Christians seem to curiously muddle with their morality and sin nonsense.)
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I’m sure you could have gone on for a lot longer!
Here’s a fun exercise. Why don’t you (and Ark/John/others if they’re willing) try to give five sincere reasons to be a Christian, and I’ll try to give five reasons to be an atheist (and recruit Mark and others if I can)? I’m game if you are.
I’m concerned you only ‘doubt’ exclusivism. He didn’t mean you have to be baptised Christian in your physical life, clearly, because that would be ridiculous given what we know about the world.
Baptismal necessity is an extreme minority view, if if actually exists at all. Even the Roman Catholic Church said this about people who are saved without being baptized:
That’s from Vatican II. So not even Rome is wholly exclusivist. The Bible is not inconsistent with a view that people can be saved by Jesus without knowing the Gospel.
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So why do you only doubt it?
I gave my sincere reasons to be Christian earlier this morning back on Ark’s site. I meant them all, but I see problems with them all too.
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Whoops, let me check
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By doubting it I mean I don’t think it’s true.
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Ah, but you’re not sure. So your benevolent god might be burning most of Asia in Hell? (or just have them crying and gnashing their teeth because they’re eternally separated from the nice place)
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Nothing is sure. Probability is all that matters.
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There’s great material for my blog here. Thanks. 🙂
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Thanks for the inspiration! 🙂 https://wp.me/p2wzRb-rT
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What particularly inspired you?
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#1, 3, 4, 11.
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You’ve come through for me AGAIN. Thanks! https://wp.me/p2wzRb-ti
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