There are a lot of things that atheists, including myself,
say all the time that we really need to stop saying.
Special thanks to Vic Wang who inspired this list. You should check out his expanded list below.
"I lost my faith".
That sounds like is a bad thing.
You know, you say you lose something when something bad happens.
You say you lose your job,
you say you lost your keys.
The only time I can think of, when someone says, "I lost something"
and you intended as a good thing,
is when you say, "I lost my
virginity" or "I lost my weight" if you were trying exercise or something, but that's about it.
If you say "I lost something",
we think, "Oh, that's too bad".
So, if you lose your faith,
I guess I'm supposed to feel bad for you.
But no, atheists say it all the time as a badge of honor, like "I lost my faith".
Well, don't say that anymore.
Instead of saying, "I lost my faith", say you defeated faith.
Say you grew out of faith,
say, "I gave up my faith", like you gave up smoking or something.
That gets across the same point,
but this time there's more of a positive spin on it.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
When someone suggests that faith healing works,
or that Jesus came back to life, we may say something like that,
"That's a pretty amazing claim, you better have some amazing evidence for it".
But the truth is--
The problem with faith healing,
or anything like that, is not that there's some evidence
and just not an overwhelming amount of it,
it's that there's no evidence at all.
So, when someone makes an extraordinary claim,
we don't need extraordinary evidence.
We don't even need
a good amount of evidence, we need the bare minimum,
just a little bit of evidence
to understand why you believe this stuff. If you want to say prayer works,
just give me a tiny iota of evidence and maybe
I'll hear what you have to say and I'll take it seriously.
So, this idea that whoever makes an extraordinary claim
has to meet some really difficult
burden of proof to convince us to believe that stuff;
no, they don't need to do that.
The problem with them is not that they can't go this height,
the problem is they can't even go this low.
Like they just need to meet that bare minimum.
So, let's stop holding them to
unreachable standards.
We just want to ask them for the bare minimum.
So, extraordinary claims,
they don't require extraordinary evidence;
they just require a tiny-teeny little bit of evidence.
"Everyone is born an atheist".
Oh, I hear this all the time about babies,
like every baby is born an atheist,
and as if that counts for something, as if
we ought to include them in our ranks
because everyone is born an atheist.
Look, it's true, technically is true that babies are not born believing in God
or being a Christian, or being a Muslim, or whatever.
That is accurate.
But to say that they're atheists and
as if to say they're on the same category as those of us who have thought about religion,
and rejected religion,
I think that's an insult to me,
because I've actually put thought into this and that's why I'm an atheist.
That kid didn't even try.
That kid was just born. Why give him credit for all this stuff?
It's kind of like saying that babies are politically independent.
It's like, "Yeah, I guess he is, but what is that even mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
You should only give someone a label about this stuff,
if they've had a chance to think about it,
and then they've come to accept that label.
And then it's fine, but let's not call babies atheists
as if that has any meaning or if that should count for a point on our side.
"We can be good without God"
If you think about this, this is a really silly thing for us to say.
Because, first of all, is a straw man argument to begin with.
No one, including a lot of conservative Christians, no one's ever saying,
"Oh, yeah, all atheists are bad immoral awful people".
No, even the most conservative Christians out there would say.
"Oh yeah, atheists can be really nice people. I know a lot of nice atheists".
"I have a best friend who is an atheist."
They all seem to have a friend who is an atheist. I don't know how that happens.
But they all say, "Yeah, you can be good without God".
"No one is arguing that."
But, when Christians hear that, it's kind of the equivalent of
"I can drive without a seat belt on and I won't get into an accident".
And they're thinking,
"Well, yeah, you could. You're probably going to be safe."
"But you might not. Wouldn't it be better if you just wore the seat belt?"
And when we say we can be good without God,
they're probably thinking,
"Well, yeah, you can be good without God, but
why would you want to be?"
Or "Why not believe in God? Because it'll make you even better".
That's the thought that's going through their head.
And obviously that's not what we're intending to say.
The truth is the facts speak for themselves.
When we say we can be good without God, what we mean to say is
in areas where God doesn't exist,
the divorce rates are lower, the teen pregnancy rates are lower,
people tend to be more educated.
Let the facts speak for themselves.
"We can be good because we don't believe in God",
or something like that would get more to the heart of that point.
But when we're saying we can be good without God,
a lot of Christians are like, "Well, no one was arguing otherwise".
"I trust science, not some 2000-year-old book".
There are two problems with saying something like this.
The first is it suggests that something big happened 2000 years ago.
And whether you want to say, "Oh, Jesus was born approximately 2000 years ago",
or "He died and then came back to life. He was resurrected 2000 years ago",
I don't think a lot of atheists are suggesting that those things happened.
But by saying, you know, "I don't trust a 2000-year-old book",
you're suggesting that happened 2000 years ago.
And here's the other problem,
The Bible wasn't actually written 2000 years ago, it was written
over the span of several hundred years.
So, by saying it was written 2000 years ago,
we're actually granting legitimacy to a book
that we intend to debunk and demystify.
It completely goes against to what we want to say about the Bible.
"You can't reason someone out of something they were never reasoned into in the first place".
You hear this sort of statement a lot whenever
you're trying to explain why you shouldn't argue with someone like Ken Ham.
You can't argue him out of creationism.
It's all he's ever known. He just believes it.
You can't stop someone from just believing something.
Or maybe you're arguing against someone who thinks homosexuality
is wrong or immoral.
It's like if that's a belief they hold,
no logical argument you make is going to convince them to drop their belief.
And it makes it sound like the whole effort is futile in the first place.
But that's the problem right there.
How many of you watching this video right now
became an atheist
because someone said something to you
that convinced you to drop your beliefs?
Or maybe you read something in a book,
like the "God Delusion", that you were just reading and you're thinking,
"I've been wrong this whole time".
And you dropped your belief.
All the time we are convinced to drop beliefs we've held for a long time
because someone convinced us to think otherwise.
So, I don't think those debates, those conversations, are futile.
They're maybe good reasons for having those conversations, and it's certainly
not something we should stop doing.
So, when someone says,
"Don't argue with them because you can't reason them out of something they were never reasoned into,
it's kind of effectively putting a stop sign on the whole conversation.
It just says, "Don't do it. Why bother? Nothing is going to help".
The truth is it helps and it doesn't-- We all have evidence of it helping all the time.
"I don't believe in God".
Have you ever heard someone say, "I don't believe in the death penalty?"
And the response is like, "Well, that's great,
but the death penalty still exists, whether you like it or not".
I think what you mean to say is,
"I don't think we should use the death penalty", or something like that.
That's what a lot of religious people
hear when you say, "I don't believe in God".
It's like when religious people say, "I don't believe in evolution".
It's like,
"Who cares? You don't have to believe in it. Evolution is happening, evolution is real,
whether you believe in it or not". The evidence is there.
So we always tell people, we always correct people and say,
"You accept evolution because that's the way it is".
Well, when we say, "I don't believe in God", there's a lot of religious people who are thinking,
"Who cares that you don't believe in God? God exists. So,
whether you choose to believe in him or not is kind of beside the point".
Furthermore, saying that I don't believe God exists,
it kind of suggests
that God does exist but we're choosing to delude ourselves.
And that's so far from what we're intending when we say that.
So, I think we just need to be more specific.
What we need to say is, "I don't believe in the existence
of any god or gods".
I know that's a little more of a mouthful.
That gets the point across
in a lot more of straightforward way
and there's a lot less room for ambiguity.
"Religion doesn't make any sense".
You know what doesn't make sense? Quantum mechanics. And you know why? Because,
I can tell you, I haven't done the research and even if I were to open up a text book on quantum mechanics,
it would just look like gibberish to me.
You know, when religious people say to us like,
"I don't believe in evolution. I don't understand evolution".
"Evolution doesn't make any sense".
My first thought when I hear something like that is
"Oh, that's because you don't get it".
Maybe if you actually understood it, maybe if you read
a popular science book, you might actually know what you're talking about.
And then this will all make sense to you.
So, when an atheist says something like, "Religion doesn't make any sense"
or "This religious belief doesn't make any sense",
that's what a lot of religious people are hearing.
That's what they're thinking. They're thinking, "Well,
you just don't understand God. You don't understand theology
like we understand theology".
So, when we want to say things like creationism
or predestination or
eternal damnation, doesn't make any sense,
a lot of religious people are sitting there thinking, "Well, you just haven't studied it like I have. You don't understand it like I do".
And that's ridiculous because
I say these religious concepts don't make any sense, not because I don't understand it,
but because I understand it really, really well.
That's why I'm rejecting it.
So, instead of saying, you know, "This religious belief doesn't make any sense",
we should say, "This religious belief is illogical,
is incoherent. It's contradictory to other religious beliefs".
Because those are the points we're really trying to make there.
A lot of times atheists say this to Christians,
"You can't just pick and choose what you want to believe".
I have said this so many times.
I've written this so many times. And I really need to stop.
Because what it suggests is that being like a cafeteria Christian,
where you're only picking certain things from the buffet line, that's a bad idea.
But it's not. It's actually, "That's a great thing, I'm glad Christian are doing that".
I'm glad they're saying, "You know what?
Genesis 1 ad 2, all that stuff about the creation of the universe, young Earth creationism;
I tossed that aside".
All those laws that say, you know, if you
work on the Sabbath, you should be stoned to death. Or if you're gay, you should be stoned to death.
No, Jesus overrode all those laws.
I'm glad they're doing that, I'm glad they ignore chunks of the Bible.
Because I don't want to live in a world where all the real Christians, all the true Christians,
are obeying every word of the Bible.
And in fact,
just about every religious person,
no matter their holy book,
they all pick and choose the parts of it that they want to follow.
We can argue that they're being logically inconsistent,
but that's fine, that's a better option
than if they were logically consistent.
If you ask Christians, "What do you need to believe
in order to be a real Christian?"
They're not going to say,
"You have to accept the Bible as 100% fact".
I don't know any Christian that says that.
What they all say is you have to believe
in the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, that he died for your sins.
They'll say something along those lines.
And if you accept that,
however you deal with the rest of the Bible, they don't care;
they ignore you about it, but that's not the bulk of it,
it's all about Jesus. So,
we shouldn't say you're picking and choosing because
we should be happy that they're choosing to do that because
it would be a really crazy world if they accepted everything wholeheartedly.
There's a reason we shouldn't be elevating this form of fundamentalism
to this point where we're saying, "You're only a real Christian if you accept
everything the Bible says".
That makes it sound like,
Ken Ham at the Creation Museum is doing it right.
But other Christians like, I don't know, Joel Osteen and
president Obama and every progressive Christian out there,
they're all doing it wrong.
And that makes us look crazy. That makes us look like,
I don't know, Fred Phelps and the "God hates fags" people.
Yeah, they are the real Christians, but all the rest of you are all,
I don't know what you are, but
you're all the bad Christians.
It makes us look bad when we say something like that.
We should be rooting for that side. We shouldn't be rooting for the
creationist, you know, "God hates fags" people.
Furthermore, we're not really giving Christians an out here, because think about this:
if we say you have to a 100% accept everything the Bible says, like Ken Ham,
they can do that, but then we're going to call them crazy.
Like they're the crazy creationists and they're the ones out there who
are just stuck to their book and nothing else.
And then, if they pick and choose what to believe,
we call them cafeteria Christians. We call them people who are just picking and choosing what to believe.
And then we mock them or we criticize them.
And if they dismiss just
about everything the Bible says and they just stick to, you know what,
accept Jesus as divinity, but the rest of it I couldn't care less about,
then we're the firsts to say, "You're not real Christians".
So, basically, there's nothing a Christian can do
that would suffice for us to like them, or for us to not criticize them.
We're not giving them an out when we criticize them for being
Christians who pick and choose what to believe.
My name is Hemant Mehta and I write at FriendlyAtheist.com
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