Got a live one in the comments of one of my posts yesterday.

JT, Love Your Work.

Thou shalt not bear false witness…

Atheists like you insure that Atheism will remain the irrational hate movement that it has become.

Zing! The guy who believes someone rose from the dead 2,000 years ago called people who don’t believe that irrational. Now I’m sad.

And you call atheism a hate movement. To an extent, I guess you can say that it is. We hate irrationality and think it’s something to dispel from the human condition. We hate the results of institutionalized unreason. We hate food banks that require church attendance before they will feed the poor. We hate the suppression of equal rights for all. We hate how misinformation and needless hate can be spread under the banner of love because of some gut-wrenchingly stupid ideas from a time of comparatively great human ignorance that have been enshrined and made durable by suckers like you.

We should hate these things. We should fight them with all the breath that’s in us. I wish more atheists were unapologetic in their hatred of these things. My gripe with religion is that it is the most nourishing force on earth for these practices.

Church members are being taught what they have forgotten…and that is what Atheists who acheived political power did to believers of all kinds.

Ooooooooooooh, nice and vague. Leaves me nothing to rebut.

But even if I grant this nebulous little attempt at a dig, what can we take from it? Religious leaders have done some wicked shit. Leaders who didn’t believe in god have done some wicked shit. What’s the causal link? It can’t be disbelief in god, because believers have been bad too. However, something they all have in common is that the underpinnings of the ideologies that drove virtually every horrific tyranny in history were steeped in unreasonable beliefs about what would make the world better. Ignorance, lack of reliance on the facts, and unreason were the heart of brutal political landscapes like Maoist China and paved the way for the Crusades. It should be obvious to anybody from this that being reasonable is nothing short of a moral obligation.

This is what allows the atheist to equally condemn horrific leaders whether theistic or not: we can look at their reasoning and condemn them for acting illogically or on poor information. Just as Torquemada was flagrantly irrational, so was Joseph Stalin. We convict both for being unreasonable. Therein lies the difference between Christians and the atheist movement. For us, irrationality is our stated enemy. Are some atheists irrational? Sure, and they’re just as wrong for it as the Christians. We seek a world where being reasonable is a social expectation, not an option.

Conversely, Christianity tells us we must accept things on faith. The message of Christianity is that it is not only ok to embrace the cognitive failure of unreason and accept impossible stories of ancient miracles, but that god will punish us if we don’t. Christians praise each other for believing in things for which they have no evidence and for drawing conclusions from their feelings rather than their intellect. It is hard to fairly convict Torquemada for abiding by the same standards for reasonableness you consider virtuous within your congregation. In this, religion is the force maintaining that the sickness as the cure.

The believer may say that they’ve reached different conclusions about the will of god than faith-driven monsters of the past, but they can’t say that theirs are any more reasonable. In this, it doesn’t matter if your conclusions about what god wishes are different. If they’re no more likely to be true, you’ve lost the power to say that Torquemada was wrong. Merely being different from you is insufficient to make a person wrong, it only makes them different.

Consider the following conversation.

Person A: Terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. I know this because we have video evidence and a long list of other evidences that confirm this fact. Anybody believing something to the contrary is incorrect.

Person B: Terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers on 3/13/1989. I believe this on faith.

Person C: Terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers on 12/2/1958. I believe this on faith.

It does Person B no good to say of Person C “Their belief is not my belief! My faith is different!” Who cares? Yes, their positions are different in their conclusions, but they’re not different in the way that matters: whether or not their position is more likely to be truth. Person B & C are the same in that they’re both wrong and they’re both wrong for the same reasons. That is what should concern us. This is what the atheist is saying of all religious people from Rob Bell to Arnaud Amalric: you’re all wrong and you’re wrong for the same reasons.

Now let’s add a fourth person to the mix.

Person D: Terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. I believe this on faith.

Should Person D get a free pass? No! It is possible for lousy reasoning to land you on the conclusion confirmed as correct through reason and evidence, but that’s not good enough! The truth is important, and if we’re ever going to get people on the same page we need to support methods that actually support one conclusion over another, not the ones that could lead to any conclusion under the sun.

So when a religious person says to me “I support equal rights for all!” I must also examine their reasons. If they believe this for the long list of perfectly sensible reasons available, great! If they believe this because they have faith that it’s god’s will, then I must still criticize them for their endorsement of the same lack of reasoning that allows other people to believe we should not allow equal rights because it is god’s will. Even though the nice Christian shares my conclusion, they are protecting the methodology that keeps its antithesis alive.

The concern over reliability is what separates the atheist movement from religion. We see what corrupted the monsters of the past both atheist and theist, and the atheist movement insists we should all erase those failures from ourselves and from society. On the other hand, Christians continue to embrace the same cognitive errors and insist that doing otherwise is punishable in a pit of fire. Mao showed us that atheists are certainly capable of being irrational (plenty of atheists nowadays do the same). The difference is that we’re the ones saying irrationality is a poison. Religion insists that irrationality is the key to paradise.

Trip you memory and read the classic, Tortured For Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand.

Don’t tell me to read a book. If you got a good argument from the damn book then use it.

If you are up to debate, let us know.

I’m afraid not. I’m simply too scared. You might tell me to read a book or try the moral argument on me, and how would I ever answer that?