People seem to run into a lot of problems (whether they realize it or not) when they try to criticize atheism and I’d like to help clarify the problem with a little metaphor.

Imagine a bowl. Everyone has their own bowl, but every bowl is essentially the same. This bowl is our desire to know and understand the things about our world around us and our history that we can’t explain. We all have this. Some of may have larger bowls than others, but other than that, the bowls are the same.

Now we put some food into this bowl. The food is our religion, our explanation. There are limitless numbers of combinations of food to put into this bowl. Some food is very different, like Islam compared to Taoism. Sometimes the food is practically the same, but with a different sauce, like Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 compare to the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912. Everybody seems to find the flavor they like best and they stick with it. Most of the time, people just seem to eat what their parents gave them. Everyone always assumes that they’ve found the best bowl of food. They often argue about why their bowl of food is the best. They usually do this without even looking at another’s bowl of food. But they all seem to agree that the atheist has the worst bowl of food there is. Some say the food tastes awful. Some say the food smells awful. Some say the food looks awful. Some say the food feels awful. Some even have the audacity to say that it sounds awful. These people keep getting all upset whenever the atheist tries to defend their bowl. And they can never seem to fully understand the one thing atheist tell them.

The bowl is empty.

There’s nothing there. It can’t taste, smell, look, feel or sound awful if there isn’t anything there to taste, smell, look, feel or sound awful. Now this isn’t to say atheism is above criticism. You can make all kinds of arguments that having nothing in the bowl is a terrible thing. But before you can articulate a decent criticism of atheism, you have to understand the basic principle; there is nothing in the bowl. This doesn’t mean there can’t be anything, it means there isn’t anything. It is a void. You can’t point to a particulate facet of the food in the bowl if there is no food with any particular facet. This means you can’t suggest that any particular political view of atheism is wrong, because there is no political view. Some atheists are pro choice, some are pro life; some atheists support marriage equality, some don’t. Regardless, none of those atheists hold those beliefs because of their atheist view.

Now, sure, you can say that the most important thing in your life is the food in your bowl and that it must be terrible to have an empty bowl. You may think an empty bowl is the worst thing you can imagine. The atheist however says they just use that bowl as a decorative centerpiece while they eat regular meals of knowledge.

Hop this helps clarify the odd looks you get from atheists.

The short joke about this concept is this: Telling an atheist they are going to hell is like having a hippie threaten to punch you in your aura.