One of the silliest theistic claims about us atheists is that we know God exists, but we are willfully rebelling against Him. Below is a typical such comment from an anonymous (how typical!) commenter on Shalini's blog Scientianatura:
"Lets face facts, you don't mock and deny creation science because of rational reasons. You launch your childish attacks, your silly temper tantrums, because you hate God and want to live a sinful life without God's perfect morality."
I want to live a sinful life, huh? Well, let's take a quick tour of my daily routine and see how filled with sin it is. Mind you of course that I am just one individual and cannot claim that my daily routine is typical of every atheist.
I generally wake up on weekdays around 7 a.m. While I eat breakfast, shower, and get ready for work, my wife gets my children ready for school. Around 8 a.m. or so I drive my daughter to her day care and then park by the train station and ride the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station. During my ride on the train, I usually read a book or a magazine, though sometimes I avail myself of a nap if needed. After arriving in Penn Station, I take take the subway or walk to my office, depending on the weather and how much time I have.
I usually get to my office around 9:30 a.m. and go about my relatively unexciting job as a trademark paralegal. Around 4:30 I leave my office to catch the express train to Hicksville. I arrive back at Hicksville an hour later and pick up in turn my daughter from her day care and my son from his after school program at his elementary school. We usually get home by 6 p.m. After getting settled in, I feed my kids dinner, go over their homework with them, give them snack to eat, bathe them, and put them to bed. Afterwards, I surf the net for a while, do some dishes, take out the garbage, write out some checks to pay household bills and such, and then go to bed.
Well, then how about the weekends? Surely I find time to some sinning then. Okay, let's look at my typical weekend. I wake up around 8:30 or 9: a.m., not so much because I want to, but because my kids are awake by then and I have to make sure they don't fight or cause any trouble. I often have to help my mom by taking her to the supermarket, picking up her medication from Walgreen's, or assisting her in some other way. I do errands and chores, including grocery shopping, bank runs, post office runs, folding the laundry.
See all of that sinning I pack into a typical day! Does that read like some anger filled rebellion against God to you? And yet in the eyes of many Christians, not only will I join the ranks of murderous dictators like Joseph Stalin and burn in hell after I die, they gleefully salivate at the prospect of it.
7 comments:
Oddly enough, these people do exist. Usually, though, they're young adults rebelling against their conservative religion.
Here in Salt Lake, you sometimes get young Mormons who are confused by their doubt, declare themselves atheists, go on some silly drinking spree, puke a little bit, and then run back to the Church and their communities when they discover that hedonism has a price; never realizing that they never actually became atheists in the first place.
I for one don't have the energy for hedonism any more. More than four drinks in one evening, and my stomach starts doing somersaults; and I'm not small. I can't even conceive of staying awake until 5:30 AM.
In response to the commenter's statement about "perfect morality," in my experience, it's been a lot more difficult to actually think about morality, and answer tough moral questions, than it has to just take some other person's or organization's idea of a righteous life.
Tommy,
You are working too hard. You need to set aside some time for yourself so you can reconnect with your inner sodomite. :)
HJ
It bugs me when someone thinks I hate god. I don't believe in a god so how can I hate it? Okay, old argument, living a sinful life? What about all the priests and religious people that are "sinning?" They aren't atheists.
It bugs me when someone thinks I hate god. I don't believe in a god so how can I hate it?
tina, it bugs me, too. It's really annoying when they know full well that we don't believe their god exists but they still have to say stuff like that because they cannot accept the fact that there are those of us who do not and cannot believe in their imaginary friend.
Like you said, you can't rebel against something that doesn't exist. We are just going about our business of living life, raising our families, happy for the good times, struggle through the bad (with the help of ourselves and family & friends). They just cannot accept that we can live life without believing that mythology is reality.
And that idiotic concept is the sole argument of such brilliant, original, luminary apologists as Dinesh D'Souza.
"Ooh! You hate God because you want to have perverted sex and hurt people all day long!"
All I can say is, "Good brain work, Shemp."
It's just one facet in a long line of things that theists just don't have the cognitive capacity to understand.
If I hated everything I didn't believe in, I wouldn't have time to hate things that do exist, and deserve my hate, like Britney Spears and William Donohue.
atheism is rational thinking.
I actually do like living my life in what xtians would call sin. You know, premaritial sex, drinking and cursing, that sort of things. I also like leading people astray from that path that supposedly leads to jesus.. I'm such a bad bad person.
Although I didn't know it was because of that I became an atheist, I thought I became an atheist because I found everything else disturbingly irrational.
I'm not even gonna adress the God hating issue. Seriously. gah.
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