I am an atheist (unless zombies plan to attack us tomorrow). I do not believe in God (or Zombies for that matter). God to me is just like the square root of a negative number - Imaginary. There are some myths associated with atheists and atheism, which I would like to address in this blog post.
1. Atheists are unhappy and angry people.
2. Atheists have no motivation to be good and morally right, simply because they do not believe in Hell or Heaven or Karma.
Firstly, I do not believe you need an external motivation to behave in a morally correct way. Secondly, if you are being good only because you believe the goodness will return to you or you will go to Heaven, aren't you being plain selfish?
Morality is "independent" of the existence of god. You should not be moral just because somebody is watching you from up there. Values,morality, sense of right and wrong come from people around us. It comes from the society we have created and it will evolve with time. Today everybody condemns slavery and thinks it is immoral. But it was a common practice in the earlier days. Whether you believe in God or not is immaterial. Most of the holy scriptures condemn things like violence, killing of innocents, stealing etc. It is because of the common thread linking all religious scriptures - the people. So atheists, just like other people, who are a part of the society, share the same sense of morality.
A fact : The countries with lowest crime rate are those countries where the majority of the population are irreligious.
3 .Intolerance towards other religion
Apart from Scientology, we are cool with other imaginary stories. We do not believe in them, but we are cool. That Xenu stuff is downright silly and hilarious dude ! We are not intolerant towards religion and we do not set out to destroy religious places (religious fanatics are doing it to each other anyway) but surely intolerant towards the violence that is caused in the name of religion.
4. Atheism is a belief
PS: We do believe in Spider-man, Superman and Batman.
5. Life is meaningless and without any purpose for an Atheist
False again. We do have purpose but we cannot beat Deepak Chopra to that. On the contrary we believe life is precious and is a one time opportunity to do our bit to make world a better place to live for our future generation (of course we don't believe in reincarnation and stuff like that) and we should make the most of it while we still exist.
6. Atheists are mass murderers
This is the one that cracks me up the most. Making Hitler and Stalin the poster boy for atheism, people often cite them of examples of what atheism can lead to. Hitler and Stalin are examples of the dangers of communism and fascism which themselves are too much like a religion and contain dogmas giving rise to cults. They were simply sick minds who were lured by the power of power. It is just a matter of co-incidence that they happened to atheists (although Hitler was a Catholic according to some sources, but I would never say its because of his religious belief he did what he did. He was simply twisted! ).
I find it more absurd to believe in God and thinking there is a higher force controlling everything than to believe that there is no God or higher force and we are responsible for our actions and its consequences. I do not need a psychological crutch or a consoling avenue to deal with failures and depression in life. I would rather prefer to analyze it rationally, learn from it and move on in life!
As Armand Salacrou once said - ''The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.''
No comments:
Post a Comment