Did you hear? You all failed.

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I guess I should stop talking about Atheism and start discussing Christianity. One thing must be made perfectly clear: There is not ONE Christianity, but many. There are over 1000 different Christian denominations. All of them don’t believe in the same things, e.g. many churches deny the trinity and the virgin birth.
They don’t even read the same scriptures, the book of Enoch is e.g. read in the Ethiopian Orthodox church but it is not to be found in the bible of the western churches.
They don’t interpret the bible in the same way, as you probably know the bible does contain contradictions which leave ample room for free interpretation, odd translations and give upheaval to strange dogmas.
There are many different traditions that sometimes are more important than scripture. Traditions have evolved in different directions for 1950 years; the Catholic Church in the middle Age was not the same as the Catholic church of today.
There are individual differences, within all these different denominations you can find everything from ultra-conservatives fanatics to sinful liberals and non-believers. My own father belongs to the Lutheran church of Finland, but he doesn’t believe in God any more than you do. I agree with you if you think that sounds strange.

The suggestion that all Christians believe the same is not more or less of a generalization as the suggestion that all Atheists hold the same views. Since the atheists who take their lack of faith seriously are as few as they are, it is very easy to generalize. That there are many different Atheistic schools of philosophy doesn’t really matter, since there are many different Christian churches, organizations, denominations and sects too. All Christians don’t believe in God for the same reasons either.



I known all along that Atheism is not considered an ideology, but the term “Atheist” wouldn’t work unless you had something in common. You may be right, Atheism can’t really be compared to Christianity, but Atheism can be compared to Theism.

The word “Atheism” makes just as much sense as the word “Theism”. It requires a definition in order to be useful. I would describe myself as a Theist, but a Muslim could use the same word as well. I may describe myself as a Christian, but that doesn’t mean that I have anything to do with e.g. the Catholic Church. Since I’m not a Catholic I can’t be blamed for anything the Catholic Church has done over the centuries. I’m also an individual, which means that whatever church I belong to, I have to take responsibility for my own actions as an individual.

To say that I as an individual would have anything to do with crusades or witch persecutions is to make an absurd statement. I wasn’t alive centuries ago, nobody can know what I would have done if I would have been alive then.
Human nature seems to have a fascination for violence as a mean to achieve certain important goals. I admit, without hesitation, that I am human and that I’m capable of breaking the law and commit crimes. My original question was: Why would an Atheist be better?
Of course nothing can be proven, if you are going to treat all Atheists as individuals who don’t have enough in common in order to create an Atheistic identity, organization, and political agenda and use weapons in order to achieve their goals.

It is true that we all are individuals and that we don’t have any reason to pretend anything else, if you think that’s true then all Christians should be treated as individuals as well. If we are going to treat all Theists and Atheists as individuals with individual differences this discussion becomes impossible.

We can end the discussion here and agree to disagree. Otherwise I fear this will never end.

Last edited by Dreamer2 on 19 Nov 2007, 5:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I failed? Yay. Maybe I don't want to live in a world where there is one singular religion running everything. I will always support belief diversity.

But those scriptures or their codes that they follow still exist. The people that follow a denomination could still be united to fight for something if they really felt they were being pressed, or that's what their scripture tells them to do. All that's really happening is that you're splitting up Christianity into some different codes within itself--but it's still the same thing; they follow something if they chose to follow it in the first place, and still aren't thinking individually.



Yet, such generalizations of atheists have often left people of other faiths with the wrong impressions of atheists. So if it were true that atheists are easily generalized, then people should see that atheists are not immoral, war-mongering, hateful people who despise people of other religions, or are "evil", and get blamed for things that go wrong--in fact, they are decent people who are capable of individual thought not bound by things like religion. You might say that they might have been thinking these things because they didn't come to that conclusion objectively, but rather that their religious dogma told them atheists were evil, or that they didn't follow religion, so they must be immoral. Actually though, that says something about religion, doesn't it? I don't know whether or not you believe this to be the case, but I know there are people who think this way.



If being a theists means not following every rule in the book, then I suppose you're not the same as the people who do mindlessly follow the book--and it was them I was arguing about originally, and not the liberal Christians, as they might be called. If you wanted to know how many people are not theists but believe everything the bible says, I can say there are enough that want Intelligent Design to be taught in science classes, and enough that such ideas might even be passed in certain states. And certainly enough that shows on TV or on the radio about creationism or other fundamentalist dogma get funded and get enough coverage and success from other such viewers. Perhaps this argument might better be changed into "free-thinkers" vs people who follow faith strictly. If you don't follow everything in a book about a religion, why do you have any reason to defend it?



Atheists have no real goals to achieve in that sense--or at least they don't need to. You might just be talking about secular humanists though, but that's a philosophy, not a religion, and you can be an atheist and not be a secular humanist. But their only goal is to encourage free thought, and that can probably be done without political agendas or "weapons". At least I think they'd prefer not to use weapons, particularly for the kind of goal they want to achieve.



But what about Christians who do actually follow everything their bible tells them? They can't really be theists if they buy everything that's in the bible, and don't think for themselves.

However, I think we can agree on the differences between free thinkers and people who follow faith blindly.