Reasons you may be a Fundamentalist Atheist

[wyguy]

Reasons you may be a Fundamentalist Atheist

You became an atheist when you were 10 years old, based on ideas of God that you learned in Sunday School. Your ideas about God haven't changed since.

Although you've memorized only a half a dozen "proofs" that He doesn't exist, you still think you're God's gift to the ignorant masses.

You think questions like, "Can God create a rock so big that He cannot lift it?" and, "Can God will Himself out of existence?" are perfect examples of how to disprove God's omnipotence and ultimately how to disprove God. When someone proves to you the false logic behind the questions (i.e. pitting God's omnipotence against itself), you desperately try to defend the questions, but then give up and go to a different Christian site to ask them.

Related to the above, you spend a great deal of your spare time writing to Christian websites asking them these very questions.

You spend hours arguing that a-theism actually means "without a belief in God " and not just " belief that there is no god" as if this is a meaningful distinction in real life.

You consistently deny the existence of God because you personally have never seen him but you reject out of hand personal testimony from theists who claim to have experienced God as a reality in their lives.

You can make the existence of pink unicorns the center-piece of a philosophical critique.

You insist that "the burden of proof is on he that alleges/accuses", and "it's impossible to prove a negative", then state "That's what Christians do. They lie. Their most common lie is that they were once atheists." When reminded about the burden of proof bit, you reply with, "Well, prove Christians don't lie!"

You adamantly believe that the "God of the gaps" idea is an essential tenet of orthodox Christian faith espoused by all the great Christian thinkers throughout history.

When you were a child, someone came down with a deadly disease and prayed and prayed for God to take it away. God did not remove the disease and your friend died. You ask other Christians why they had to die when they were such a nice person and never harmed anyone. Dissatisfied with their answers, you suddenly decide that there is no God and that all Christians are nothing but lying, conniving con artists and hypocrites....all that is except for your friend who died.

You call a view held by less than ten percent of the American public "common sense".

You're a spoiled fifteen year old boy who lives in the suburbs and you go into a chat room to declare that, "I know there is no God because no loving God would allow anyone to suffer as much as I...hold on. My cell phone's ringing."

You attack your fellow atheists, who hold the "belief that there is no god", calling them "liars," and state that, "I do not deny the existence of any god. I just don't believe in any." Then you tell someone that their God is "made up." When someone calls you on this, you state, "I never made such a claim."

You believe that if something cannot be touched, seen, heard, or measured in some way, then it must not exist, yet you fail to see the irony of your calling Christians "narrow-minded".

You say that there is no God and that those who believe in God do so in blind faith, yet your claim that there is no God also rests on blind faith.

While you don't believe in God, you feel justified on bashing God or attacking those who believe in something that you KNOW doesn't exist, fighting against or even discussing about a non-existent being are the symptoms of mental illness!

You complain when Christians appeal to their emotions when justifying their belief in God yet you feel justified on appealing to your emotions for lack of belief in God.

You blame God for the starvation, sickness, pain and suffering in the world...when, indeed, it is MAN's greed, politics, selfishness and apathy that not only causes, but also ignores the sick and the starving masses. We aren't our brothers' keepers....but we should be.

You believe that planes, computers, calculators, compasses, etc, were "all obviously designed," yet the human body, being intricately more complex was "obviously a product of biological evolution." It seems the more complex the apparatus, the more obvious the "fact" that it was not designed.

You claim that evolution and the big bang are two entirely separate theories that explain different aspects of the universe, yet, in what school of learning can you find any real separation or distinction between the two?

As a member of the Skeptic's Society you pride yourself on being skeptical of extraordinary claims. You also pride yourself on silencing everyone who is skeptical of the extraordinary claims of evolution.

Isaac Newton does not count as an example of a great scientist who believed in the Bible since he died before the Origin of Species was published.

When you watch a punt returner run a 93 yard touchdown, you marvel at what evolution has done for the human race. But when someone gets cancer, you blame God for it.

When you're discussing the origin of the world, the phrase "uncaused cause(God)" is a stupid, meaningless thing to say. You will, however, settle for "uncaused effect(the world without God)".

You think that humans are products of chance but when it comes to human reason we can believe in logic! (Think about it )

You think you arrived at your position because you are a free-thinker who rationally weighed the evidence, and then freely chose atheism over theism. YET, you also believe that your thinking and actions are nothing more than the FIXED reactions of the atoms in your brain that are governed by the Laws of Chemistry and Physics.

You love to castigate Christians for being "anti-science" if they deny evolution from goo to you via the zoo, and to preach that they should adapt their thinking to the "science" of our day. But you also castigate the Church of 400 years ago for being anti-science, when it DID adapt its thinking to the science of ITS day, i.e. Ptolemaic cosmology, then joined with the Aristotelian scientists of the universities in rejecting Galileo!

You think that some guy named "Dr Dino" with no scientific credentials represents mainstream Evangelical thinking and scholarship about evolution and creation, and thus by spending inordinate amounts of time attacking him you are somehow dismantling the arguments of scholarly dissenters from evolution, creationists with earned Ph. D.s in science, and of advocates of intelligent design.

You claim poker-faced that "social Darwinism" and its spawn of eugenics have absolutely no connection to the biological theories propounded by Charles Darwin in "On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"

You have recently stuck a Darwin fish on your car in the hopes the people with the Jesus fish on theirs will be offended.

You also claim that not only is there no connection between Darwin's theories and the doctrines of social Darwinism and eugenics (despite the fact that the term eugenics was coined and advocated by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, who acknowledged his debt to Origin), but that none of these philosophical positions have any connection to the modern fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

You can claim with as straight face on sites like Talk Origins that "Evolution does not have moral consequences" despite the fact that prominent evolutionary advocates like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett vehemently assert that evolution does transcend biology in a way that has a profound effects upon ethics.

When the Pope says that God may have used evolution, he is an enlightened religious leader whom Christians should listen to. When the Pope preaches on the sanctity of human life from conception, and thus denounces abortion, he's just a senile religious bigot who should keep his opinions to himself.

Concerning the origins of life, you feel that though the chances of life forming without an intelligent creator are small it DID indeed happen that way. And yet you don't believe me when a rock, coming from my direction, hits you in the back of the head and I tell you, "I didn't throw it. There was a sudden shift in the earth's gravitational pull and the rock levitated into your head...Sure the chances are small but it DID happen that way."

When you're shown that your view of origins is silly, you can only respond, "Well...at least it's better than believing in some invisible SKY DADDY!"

When a Christian points out the impossibility of a biological system (or feature) forming by pure chance you accuse them of invoking a "God of the gaps". YET, when you are asked how a particular feature could come about solely by chance you invoke "Evolution of the gaps" (i.e., we don't know HOW but we do know that Evolution MUST have done it!)

You claim antibiotic-resistant bacteria is proof protozoa evolved into a person.

You insist that science is completely partial to all ideas, is not dogmatic and researches all possibilities -- except creationism and/or intelligent design.

You claim Creationists don't research on evolution websites before debating against it. Luckily you caught this useful weapon against Christians at the evolution site you learned all about creation doctrine from.

You think that every scientist who believes in Creationism and doesn't mindlessly accept evolution as a fact is a "kook," but you believe that Francis Crick (Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA), who reached into his nether regions and pulled out the "theory" of Directed Panspermia (which states with absolutely no support that aliens seeded the earth with life - see the movie "Mission to Mars"), is a great evolutionist scientist.

When a creationist points out problems with the evolutionist model you claim that the whole point of science is to answer problems like these. But if you can point out even one problem in the creationist model it should instantly be abandoned as absurd.

You are a person who absolutely believes that life came from nonlife, yet absolutely deny the possibility of anyone (Jesus) rising from the dead.

You won't bet $10 on the football game because a 50/50 chance isn't good enough, but you have no problem gambling with your life on the nearly impossible odds of a cell randomly generating from nothing.

You teach the belief in evolution only held by 28% of Americans, as truth beyond any shadow of a doubt because only educated people believe in evolution. Yet of course, you ignore that fully educated scientists in most other nations have proof against Darwinian theory. Like the Chinese paleontologist who reportedly says: "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin."

You think man evolved from monkeys but get mad when somebody calls you one.

You demand that Christians study advanced evolutionary biology before making claims about natural selection. You then claim that their theological ideas, which you have never examined before, are pure nonsense.

On the other hand, you demand that Christians who have NOT studied evolutionary biology ought to go ahead and publicly commit to arguments about it, because you want to trap or embarrass them with your own knowledge of the subject, which is limited to quoting Gould and Futuyama.

You claim that the 'God' mentioned by Albert Einstein and Steven Hawkings is nature and that they were atheists, then claim that you have no religion, which is defined by the dictionary as "Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe."

Any scholar who believes in a historical Jesus must be a theist. If they are an atheist, then they must secretly want to be a theist.

You insist that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", then claim that Jesus never existed.

You contend that no war in history has ever been created by non-belief. Yet, when you are told that 176 million people lost their lives in wars during the last century, created by non-believers like Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Hitler, to name only a few, you reply that those wars fought were fought in the name of ideology and not 'atheism' as atheists "

[wyguy]

My personal faves:

You feel that Christians who go into atheist chat rooms are "shoving their beliefs down people's throats", and that atheists who go into Christian chat rooms are only trying to "educate."

You think God was cruel for killing all of those innocent babies in the flood, and that Christians are cruel for opposing a woman's right to abort her baby.

You believe that nativity scenes should be banned from public view, but that anyone objecting to pornography only has to look the other way.

[nebula]

You think that humans are products of chance but when it comes to human reason we can believe in logic! (Think about it )

[winsomebulldog]

I especially liked:

It is OK for atheists to express their godless opinions but the moment Christians do the same you email the ACLU.

So blatantly ridiculous, but utterly true.

And:

You can't understand why people don't see the logic in your arguments, so they MUST be lying!

I've had personal experience with this one. I was on a forum discussing smoking and talked about how I blame it for the deaths of both of my parents and my sister as well as the asthma that I developed as an adult and will be living with for the rest of my life. Mostly I was trying to convey that people who smoke often try to claim it is no one else's business because it is their personal choice. It was certainly my business when my mother died at barely 50 from pneumonia and I was just 17. (There were other factors involved, but I have always believed that her smoking didn't make it any easier for her and probably made the illness far worse.) My father died 3 years later from complications of pulmonary fibrosis. (Lung scarring.) And my sister died at 43 from lung cancer. All of them smoked their entire lives.

Next thing I knew, I was being ripped to shreds by a smoker (who was also an atheist and apparently bi-sexual to boot). He flat out called me a liar and claimed I was making it all up. He defended his smoking by saying, basically, "We all have to die sometime."

I guess that kind of logic is just beyond my ability to grasp!

[~candice~]

Nice work Wyguy.

Your only knowledge of The Bible comes from searching 'bible contradictions' in Google.

You pontificate about the Bible as if you are an expert in theology, textual criticism, ancient languages & cultures and much more besides, when your knowledge of the Bible is just cut and paste from atheist sites which cut and paste it from other atheist websites which cut and paste it from embarrassingly unscholarly rantings by the likes of Messer's Freke & Gandy and Acharya S, etc.

[LeonaWithHumility]

Wyguy's next topic: How to cure typer's cramp.

Those were spot-on for atheists and other small-minded, big-mouthed people. I've encountered more than I care to remember.

[Guest]

Interesting list.

It describes many of the responses I get in discussions with folks at the University where I work, sadly enough.

Where did you find that, if you don't mind my asking?

[pwfaith]

Wow!! Good job! That is spot on!

[Trusting Jesus]

I can't believe I read the whooollle thing! They are so right on - sad but true.

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Nathele

[Guest]