Monday, November 11, 2013

Why Complain About a God I Don't Believe In?

There is someone on twitter that I have been having a friendly back and forth with lately (well, lately as of starting this post, took me quite a while to write it). He recently asked me an interesting question which touches on some topics I've been meaning to write up anyway, so I figured it would be a good time to get it out. First, here's a few of the tweets he sent me


I think this is a really good question, why do I bother complaining about a God who I don't even think is real? Ultimately it is the same reason any atheist would have a blog, or care about any of this stuff at all, it's because Christians think this God is real. Their belief in God affects their actions in ways that I believe are negative for society overall. A simple example is that we have to fight tooth and nail to get evolution taught in schools, it's a proven science, but people see it as a threat to their faith and do everything they can to prevent it from being taught to children. (I'm sure that's not quite they way they would put it, but that's the way I see it)

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(Photo credit: Tom Paton)
But this question is a bit more focused than the simple "why blog about atheism?" that we get so often. I tweet a lot of bible verses showing horrible things in the bible, much of which involves God directly. Why do I do that? Christians are more than willing to describe their God to us, they describe a God who is loving, merciful, generous, and just. They will also say that this is the God described in the bible, they are wrong. The God described in the bible is very different from the God typically described by the average Christian. The Bible God is a monster, and I think most Christians aren't aware of what is in that book. When I was a Christian I certainly wasn't, and if I had been confronted with these verses it would have prompted me to rethink things, and that is really what I'm after. In fact, much of what I do is aimed at a younger version of myself, these are the kinds of things that would have gotten my wheels turning when I was a Christian, so it is the kind of thing I like to put out there.

One last thing, when I say that the God described in the bible is a monster, I'm a little concerned that it might sound like I came in with this bias. I started this project with no idea what I was going to come across, I knew that Christians will generally reference good things from the bible and atheists will generally reference bad things, but I had no idea how how much of each there is in the bible. I honestly came in prepared for the possibility that the atheists were being super biased and the vast majority of the bible was really positive stuff, that's just not what I have found.
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10 comments:

  1. CephusNovember 11, 2013 at 1:28 PM

    I don't typically complain about God, any more than I complain about Voldemort. God doesn't matter. It's the idiots out there that DO believe in God that are the problem. I'm much more apt to complain about the believers and their absurd beliefs than I am to make fun of the imaginary friend in the sky they believe in.

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    1. HausdorffNovember 11, 2013 at 1:50 PM

      But if there was a huge group of people who were constantly talking about how awesome Voldemort is, I could see myself saying "but Voldemort did X!"

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    2. CephusNovember 12, 2013 at 3:27 PM

      You can't say Voldemort did X because Voldemort never actually did anything, he's a character in a series of books, just like God is a character in the Bible. I honestly don't find myself complaining about God as much as I complain about his idiot followers.

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    3. HausdorffNovember 12, 2013 at 9:30 PM

      Sure, but if people thought the harry potter books were nonfiction, and claimed that Voldemort was good, I would point to passages in the books where he is clearly not good. I suppose you could argue that I'm complaining about the believer, both that he believes in Voldemort and that he thinks he's a good character. But I would just be focusing on the fact that he's really evil rather than trying to convince him that Voldemort's not real.

      Although, if the person did not claim Voldemort was real, but just said that the fictional character was good, I imagine the conversation wouldn't be terribly different on my end :)

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  2. ChristianNovember 12, 2013 at 4:04 AM

    For me it really comes down to the fact that these gods are affecting peoples decisions in politicial and social life. Its these decisions which make my life and others harder, so that’s why I complain.

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    1. HausdorffNovember 12, 2013 at 1:11 PM

      I agree completely. Those types of things are what motivated me to start my blog in the first place. Although that does get back to Cephus' point a bit, focusing on the believers in the God rather than the God himself

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    2. ChristianNovember 12, 2013 at 6:11 PM

      That I can understand. But if we address the idiocy of the texts on which these beliefs are based,we break the whole structure down. Then the fundamentalists which could start up again can't as they have no idiotic texts to base it on.

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    3. HausdorffNovember 12, 2013 at 9:31 PM

      Totally agree :) That's part of why I like attacking the character of God in the bible, even though I don't think he's real.

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  3. AnonymousDecember 10, 2013 at 11:45 PM

    Maybe I'm doing it the wrong way, but the way I handle it is to say, *if* your god is the way he is described in the Bible, then he is a "moral monster" (quoting Richard Dawkins) not worth worshiping. Then I try to refrain from saying something like, "If you worship a 'moral monster' who actually exists then you are yourself immoral." The closest I came was when I talked to a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses and I said that refusal to give a blood transfusion to a child to save his or her life is morally reprehensible to me." Then she tried to say that science has shown that blood transfusions are dangerous to life, etc. Another time, two Jehovah's Witnesses wouldn't even talk to me when I said I am an atheist. They weren't rude, but only said, "then you won't be interested in what we have to say" (he was wrong, but I wasn't going to force him to debate with me, LOL). My name is Daniel, but my computer has a tendency to hiccup when I try to log in to comment (partly because of No Script).

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    1. HausdorffDecember 11, 2013 at 9:07 PM

      Thanks for stopping by Daniel. I don't think you are doing it the wrong way at all. I think there is an important distinction between criticizing a person and criticizing an idea they hold. Often it gets mixed up so it is worthwhile to point it out.

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