reasonablysunny

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reasonablysunny

a blog about video games, academics, economics, literature, feminism, recipes and let's be honest,
anything else i find interesting at the moment

4 months ago
23 January 2012
Reblog

43

waffleguppies:

bessonnitsa:

panadonia:

This sign pisses me off. Just because I can live without religion I’m gonna end up like Stalin? Wow…just wow
My question is, when will they have a billboard up with all the people who have done evil in the name of God?
Btw, I’m not claiming to be atheist, nor am I claiming to be a Christian.

So by this logic, I’m going to end up like Stalin, or even worse, Hitler? Yeah, sorry Alabama, not gonna scare me into religion.

Stalin imagined a world with no religion.Stalin caused the deaths of millions of people.Therefore all atheists are mass-murderers.
This is a brilliant example of affirming the consequent, a piece of fallacy employed worldwide with people who replaced their brains with cream cheese shortly before joining the advertisement industry. It’s a great tactic because it creates ominous and dramatic statements that worry people who aren’t that used to critical thinking, while proving to everyone who is that you shouldn’t have been let loose with a crayon, let alone a sixty-foot billboard.

It’s an utter fallacy to say that the actions of one atheist prove atheism is evil. It’s also an utter fallacy to say that the actions of one religious person prove religion is evil. Religious people and atheists make these sorts of statements, sell books predicating this sort of argument, and it’s udder twaddle.
It particularly bothers me - and I am a Christian, I should mention - when Christians say these sorts of things, as if a world filled with Christians would automatically be a functioning utopia. But of course that’s utter twaddle, too. For one thing, there are entire books of the Bible, written within the first hundred years of the church’s existence, written about (among other things) the need to resolve disputes among believers, not just about theological issues - we’re talking lawsuits and affairs, here. And in the gospels, the disciples were still bickering like schoolgirls while Jesus was around, while he was standing, like, ten feet away.
The whole experience of my life indicates that the problem with any community, no matter what the ideas it was founded on, boils down to people. People are just people. And even though I believe that God can and does change people, I don’t know anybody He’s ever made perfect, and that includes Christian authors.
As my friend Jon to me once, when I was complaining about church, “Of course Christians are what’s wrong with the church! Who did you think it was going to be, Christ?”