Monday 24 September 2012

Anti-theism Justified Again


Another wonderful example of why I am increasingly anti-theist, because theism can lead to the type of morally bankrupt thinking we will see here.

On a Facebook page a discussion took place about prayer, started by a Christian by the name of Penny Amanda Stone. After the usual round of trying to explain that intercessory prayer has been shown to not be efficacious in studies and any other prayers that are 'answered' can be put down to confirmation or hindsight bias, I said the results would be the same if praying to a roadkill otter, the topic changed and so I challenged the Christian with a hypothetical moral scenario as follows.


Penny, think on this. 

If somebody pointed a gun at you and fired but I threw myself in front of you, saving your life but losing mine I would apparently burn in hell for my atheism. 

The gunman could repent before he died then you and he spend eternity in heaven whilst I burn. 

If you can make a moral argument for this scenario then you are morally bankrupt.


Her response says it all.

Well it shows that you miss the point of the gospel........ Because we are all sinners and the biggest sin of all is NOT admitting your sin to God and your need of forgiveness. If they gun man repented. He would of pleased God. Wheres you would of thought that your good deed entitled you to heaven.

We are all sinners and so if I selflessly sacrificed my life to save hers I would still deserve to burn in Hell for eternity because I have not admitted my supposed sins and asked for forgiveness, and it's perfectly okay for the man who killed me to repent and go to Heaven with Penny because he had pleased God?

How in the name of all that is sane can anybody consider this a moral scenario!

I have touched upon this issue elsewhere on my blog so I shall forego a long explanation of how all this teaches us is that the Christian God is nothing but a self interested, narcissistic, immoral scumbag who deserves nothing but our scorn and derision. That people, like Penny, would defend such a despicable figure is to me evidence of the moral bankruptcy required to follow him.

Any truly benevolent, loving or forgiving God, let alone a supposedly perfect one, would not require us to apologise for traits he gave us, nor would he judge us solely on our repenting rather than on our earthly actions.

It's sickening and helps make me ever more convinced my anti-theism is justified.


UPDATE:

After writing this post it was brought to my attention that somebody had asked Penny what would happen had Hitler repented before death, would he be in Heaven too. Her response is, frankly, unbelievable. I'll let you read it for yourself!


Amazing, isn't it, the depravity of the fundamentalist mindset that they can forego all morality to defend such an abhorrent teaching.


1 comment:

  1. I really don't get how some of these people think. It's really quite worrying that they can excuse any level of abuse aslong as they apologise to themselves for it.

    Although when it comes to pure *Headpalmfacedesk* moments, everything I have seen you post so far (and I havn't read everything yet) pales in comparison to Chad Elliotts utter drivel. If you havn't met him yet, which is unlikely given your occupation, I recommend avoiding his moronic batshittery.

    ReplyDelete

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