The recommended reads thread was getting a little overran by this discussion. I wanted to continue it after something Repug said, but I thought I should make a new thread to do so.
Regarding the fact that atheists act in the same way as Christians by reading all of the same material and closing their minds off to other possibilities, you said:
Quote:
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[Atheists are doing] the exact same thing that the religious people [they] can't stand are doing.
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I couldn't agree with this point more, and I clarify my thoughts on the following.
Religious people (let's just say Christians for conversation's sake) believe
strongly and unflappably that anyone who lives and dies on this Earth without accepting Jesus Christ as their savior will have eternal fire waiting for them after death. Atheists believe just as strongly that these religious people are wrong.
The thing that bothers me about both of these groups is this;
each side is acting irrationally by believing so devoutly in something they have no way of proving or disproving. Now, between the two sides, I tend to side with the atheists simply because a guy who died 2,000 years ago coming down from heaven like a superhero and taking white Americans to heaven with him while sending most others to eternal fire sounds a lot less believable than those who think this occurance will most decidedly
not happen.
However, more than either of these two sides of the arguments, I find theological coherence with the agnostic belief that, stated simply, contends the best response to most arguments involving God or religion are to simply say "I do not know".
In Recommended Reads I recommended Sam Harris' Letter To A Christian Nation so fervently not because I found the book to be a compelling argument for atheism, but rather as a great source of arguments to demonstrate why a devout belief in Jesus's salvation is ludicrous. No where in the book does Harris deny the existence of a supreme being, which is the definition of atheism, a theological stance that makes only slightly more sense to me as that of those waiting for Jesus to come down from the clouds.