The Scathing Atheist

by Noah Lugeons

I sometimes argue with Christians. If my goal was to actually change their minds, I’d consider all of my past debates to be failures. If my goal was to incite virulence and face-reddening anger, I’d consider all of them to be successes. But in truth my goal lies somewhere in between. I don’t argue to change minds or to invoke rage, but rather in the futile hope of someday understanding the opposing viewpoint.

Christians are not generally swayed by logic or reason. They tend to notice logical contradictions without realizing that they fatally handicap an assertion. They seem to think that evidence and the scientific method have validity only insofar as they prop up their own arguments. They love to run to the safe “base” of nonsense terms that place god’s ways far outside our feeble understanding and thus negating any reasonable assessment of His viability as an entity.

I think it’s rather fair to simply say that when logic is applied to god, there can only be two possible outcomes and I don’t see a lot of religious folks embracing either of them. The first, of course, is that god simply doesn’t exist and that he is the remnant of pre-scientific attempts to understand the world. The other and far less likely is that he does exist and he’s a complete asshole.

What else could you say about a deity that empowers us with such noble potentials as love, self-sacrifice and reason but then holds gullibility as the metric for our goodness? What else can you say of a deity that demands our love and then actively orders his world in such a way as to strongly suggest that he doesn’t exist at all? What else would you say about an omniscient, omnipotent being that still chooses childish responses like jealousy, bigotry and vengeance? How else could you describe a beast that would demand the sacrifice of his own son to tamp down his own obsessive and bitter need for revenge? What else can you say about a deity that would give us freewill on the condition that we choose not to use it? What more apt way could you describe a deity that would fill our brains with such powerful sexual urges and then demand that we resist them?

And how else could you describe a deity that would allow such horrid institutions as organized churches to act as his corporeal PR team without smiting the ever loving shit out of them? How else could you classify a god that demands that his loyal flock spend much of their time being invasive assholes about virtually everything anyone enjoys?

So either (a) there is no god or (b) there is a god and he’s a childish asshole who wouldn’t be worth mild praise, let alone worship. Either way, religion is equally full of shit.