Re: Why do atheists and theists debate ?
No offense I'd rather see it this way. I don't think the atheists can refute Christianity and rule out the possibility that it's a possible truth.
Now for the sake of argument, in the case that Christianity is a truth then what would happen.
Atheistic arguments usually possess a faith-shaking effect, as it's an attempt to refute what is said in Christianity. So put it short, in the case that Christianity is a truth (which you can't rule out its possibility), atheists arguing all the times in public forums are thus in effect murderers. The last question remains is, are atheists ready to accept this in the case that Christianity is a truth.
Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to threaten. Instead I am trying to open possibilities to those who may have overlooked or missed out what is lying behind the scene. I do so because I speculate that, again no offense, they don't actually know what they are doing.
I am assuming you equate advocating atheism as equal to murder because you worship a god who will ‘kill’ atheists in the afterlife (I understand Christians are divided on whether the ‘second death’ is annihilation or eternal torture, but either way), so to the extend that we succeed in convincing someone to join us in our skepticism (otherwise it’s just ‘attempted murder’?), we are responsible for their ‘death’? There’s lots of problems with this. I’ll just outline a few:
1) Murder requires intent. We have other words for accidental death: manslaughter etc. if we don’t believe in judgment day, it can hardly be our intent to send someone to judgment day in a bad state. So let’s leave ‘murder’ off the table as being sensational but inaccurate.
2) If debate can be construed as murder depending on the outcome of a free speech exercise, then are you not guilty of murder every time you fail to provide a compelling reason for atheists to believe your stories? You’re sending us to annihilation or eternal torture by being so unprepared to demonstrate the veracity of your faith. It seems that if you can pin this on us, turnabout is fairplay.
3) These ‘what if you’re wrong’ arguments generally rig the game by assuming that there’s dire consequences if the atheist is wrong but no consequences if the Christian is wrong. But if you’re allowed to invoke hypothetical dire consequences, I should be able to offer a few: some perhaps more likely than others. For example: an alarming percentage of young people in America are being taught, for religious reasons, to deeply distrust scientists and the scientific method. Who’s to say that religion isn’t depriving us of the kid who would have grown up to cure cancer? Let’s say you win the argument and I join a church that teaches tithing, and I give 10 percent to the church instead of investing in my retirement. With the power of compounding interest, this could be the difference between ending my life in abject poverty versus relative comfort. Let’s say you win the argument and I join a church that teaches blood transfusions are an abomination and me or a family member gets into an accident and I deny medical care so as to avoid grave sin. In my state, we had a vote on gay marriage: say you win the argument and my new pastor preaches that I need to vote down this proposal - now I’m denying perfect strangers the same rights I enjoy based on a lie. My point is that our beliefs inform our actions, and having wrong beliefs can have real consequences. Any of the above would be too too high a price to pay for a lie.
4) I don’t see how you could absolve the god of ‘murder’ for setting up a system where belief in the existence of the god is a requirement to avoid that god casting you into hell, but then failing to provide any evidence that it exists. This has the effect of making gullibility (believing without evidence) the highest possible virtue, and punishing critical thinking as the worst possible Vice. The system seems morally bankrupt to me, and blaming the atheist for not being able to prove the god exists when the theists can’t even prove it and the god, if it exists, is disinterested in proving itself seems a very misplaced blame.
5) if a god cast someone else into hell because of something I said, is this not also unjust?
6) This type of argument is about skipping the interesting question of ‘is this actually true’ and jumping to how bad it would be if it were true and we made the wrong call. But is this a good way to make decisions about what’s in fact true? If I told you there was a monster in your closet, would you just wear the same clothes every day because the consequence if I’m right are too dire to consider? Or would you need some evidence of a monster in your closet before you forsook your clothes?
Well, I’ve written more than I planned to. I just find this kind of blame shifting and vilification of the atheists on the un-argued assumption that you are right to be very weird.
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The topic is in the OP:
