Are you glad there is no heaven?

Are you glad there is no hell?

Are you glad that God’s a fiction—

Just some stories people tell?

Are you glad we have no purpose?

Are you glad to come from chance?

Are you glad you’re just some random link

In evolution’s dance?

Are you glad there was no Adam?

Are you glad there was no Eve?

Are you glad there are so many things

In which you don’t believe?

Are you glad that what they’re selling

Isn’t something you will buy?

Are you glad you are an atheist—

And if you are, then…why?

My aggregator throws some strange stuff at me sometimes. Today, a post on a religious person’s blog, reporting on “One Question I Ask My Atheist Friends”. The author notes that this is her own experience only, and does not claim it to be anything broader than that (indeed, it is not my own experience at all, which is why I thought I’d open it up to what is likely to be a wider audience of atheists than she will get). But the question, and her usual answer, go something like this:

“Are you glad that atheism is the truth?”

Whenever I’ve asked this question, the conversation has usually gone something much like this:

“Let me ask you something totally unrelated to the evidence for God and Christianity.”

“Sure.”

“Are you glad that atheism is the truth?”

“Of course I’m glad it’s true! Why would I argue for its truth if I wasn’t glad about it?”

“What makes you glad that it’s true?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s the only way that humans can have genuine free will. Under Christianity, there’s no free will, there’s only God’s will. Under atheism, I choose how I live my life.”

This response is psychologically revealing, theologically erroneous, completely out of step with materialism (the philosophy that nothing besides the material universe exists), and frankly, absurd.

For me, the atheist answer there is strange, twice. First, being glad atheism is true is like being glad the gravity is turned on. Glad has nothing to do with it. Second, unless you are defining “free will” vastly differently than I do, I don’t think it exists, much less exists only under an atheist view. Third (ok, I lied), we all, believer and atheist, choose how we live our lives. We don’t choose freely, but we choose.

So anyway, I am a very different atheist than those who are friends of this blogger.

But I may well be different from you as well. So… how would you answer her question?

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