Atheists who hate god

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LoganBryce said:
What makes people like Hawking have this attitude?
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A lot of the blame, in my experience, belongs with we Christians who insist on defining God as a man-like super being; Santa Clause only greater. We leave ourselves open to ridicule and are easily defeated when we begin with the notion that God can be located spatially or that he is a wise old man who sits on a throne, ala the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It’s the literalism which most atheists reject, and rightly so. Every Catholic presenter I’ve ever listened to dismisses this idea of God. It should be no surprise that Hawking did too. Unfortunately, no one offered him the better explanation. Here is Bishop Barron who puts it very well;

 
Lou2U said:
Also, I think it’s similar to Christians trying to prove that Hinduism is false (as an example) and vice versa. The atheist simply takes one step further and attempts to prove there is no god at all.
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That’s because Christianity is incompatible with multiple gods, so it’s different.
 
Someone else added the word hate. The point is it wasn’t enough for him to be atheist he felt the need to evangelize the rest of the world through his discoveries. He never made a “discovery” and left it at that. He always have some public quote on how his discovery disproved god. Also when he says “for people afraid of the dark” he degrades billions of people who have existed since the beginning.
 
Start said:
That’s because Christianity is incompatible with multiple gods, so it’s different.
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That was just an example. Christianity trying to prove any other religion is false shows the attitude the OP talked about.
 
I agree with you and Barron. I’m glad you used him for an example. He helped me with similar ideas I struggled with. But I didn’t wait for information to come to me. I looked for as Hawking should have done.
 
I’ll throw my hat into the ring and I’m pretty close to anti-theism with quite crossing that line. Fundamentally I take my attitude because the Abrahamic god is depicted as violent, callous and cruel. A god that is effectively Orwell’s worst nightmare, happily condemning people for thoughtcrime. If it does exist, and I see no evidence to support the claim, then the only reason for worshipping it is fear.
 
We do fear god but in my opinion the only way to see past claims present is to read the old testament. He was a loving god then, as he is now, and will be.
 
Could you name something specifically he did that was cruel to make your claim valid?
 
Have you ever dug into scripture to understand why God is represented as angry in these circumstances? What may seem like arbitrary anger / violence upon initial reading may become something more nuanced and justified as context is applied.

For example, perhaps you see a single image of a bound man being shot. With only that information in hand, it seems a barbaric act of violence. Then, as you review more, you find another image, showing that the man is being executed by firing squad. That adds some context, but not enough to arrive at any real conclusions. As you study more, you find documentation that the man’s execution was ordered by the government. Alright, more information, but hardly enough to say whether it was justified or not. Then, as you do more research, you discover that the man has spent the last thirty years of his life raping and killing young children. What first seemed an act of barbarism, with an understanding of context, is shown to be an act of justice.

Scripture is similar in nature. There is a great deal of context and information needed to fully understand what is going on.
 
You will find in scripture that in humanity’s relationship with God we are the ones who are cruel to god.
 
Easy, global flood. I’m aware that Catholics take the first 11 chapters of Genesis as allegory but either way it’s a horrific act. Or let’s take the fact that you believe that hell exists and yet God does nothing about it.
 
So punishing thoughtcrime is justified? When is it ever appropriate to do that?
 
LoganBryce said:
The point is it wasn’t enough for him to be atheist he felt the need to evangelize the rest of the world through his discoveries
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Odd a Christian should object to evangelisation. But actually he didn’t. He was no Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens. Because of his academic discipline people were interested in his views on God. He didn’t campaign or evangelise.

And if he had evangelised, which he didn’t, why shouldn’t he? Are we not all entitled to argue for our opinions? Don’t Christians do that?
 
Inquisitor85 said:
Easy, global flood. I’m aware that Catholics take the first 11 chapters of Genesis as allegory but either way it’s a horrific act. Or let’s take the fact that you believe that hell exists and yet God does nothing about it.
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Alright, so let’s add some of that context I was talking about.

What does the Bible tell us the world was like at the point of the flood? Unremittingly evil. The world had completely turned it’s back on God. In Christian theology, God is the source of all that is good, so in this context we can come to understand that the world had turned it’s back on all that was good. So, yeah, God wiped out everyone but Noah, who had remained faithful to Him (and, by extension of the previous context, had continued to do good int he world.)

As for Hell, that is a whole other topic that we could spend our entire lives discussing. Suffice it to say, God does everything He can, short of tampering with free will, to keep people from falling into Hell. He continuously calls out to the soul to lead it away from Hell, right up until that soul is dead. If they did not repent, then they choose to enter into eternal damnation, and suffer the full punishment due for their sins. The only way God could get rid of Hell is to get rid of free will, which would violate His creative act and defeat the entire purpose for our existence.
Inquisitor85 said:
So punishing thoughtcrime is justified? When is it ever appropriate to do that?
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Thought crime is a concept created / used by Orwell to illustrate the dangers of allowing government to be in complete control, even to the point of making it illegal to think a certain way.

This isn’t even remotely analogous to God’s sovereignty:

#1: Governments are imperfect., and therefore may not necessarily be right in all instances. God is perfect, and not subject to the same faults as human government.

#2: God does not punish a person for thinking wrongly, at least not in the sense that Orwell’s big brother did. God will allow a person to think wrongly, He will not force them to do otherwise, nor will He necessarily punish them in life for thinking wrongly. However, when you die, the toll for that wrong thinking comes due. Much like a person who spends their entire childhood eating junk food and refusing to exercise, only to discover in later life that this has been indescribably damaging to them; a soul who commits these “thought crimes” suffers the natural outcome of believing in falsehood. It is not God’s fault that the person did not reject their falsehood in favor of the Truth.
 
Inquisitor85 said:
Easy, global flood. I’m aware that Catholics take the first 11 chapters of Genesis as allegory but either way it’s a horrific act. Or let’s take the fact that you believe that hell exists and yet God does nothing about it.
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Do you have any hostility towards any other gods?
🤔 just wondering. Like the gods of the greeks or Egyptians.
Hinduism?
 
ProdglArchitect said:
God does not punish a person for thinking wrongly
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I felt this needed addressing first and seperatley I’ll reply to the rest of your post in my next post. In Christianity God absolutely does convict people based on thought crime, and he does so in the New Testament and to narrow it down even further He does so in what Christians claim is in own voice in the Gospel of Matthew.

Matt 5:28 RSVCE

But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

And as breaking the ten commandments is a mortal sin, therefore your God does convict people of thoughtcrime.
 
Christians evangelize out of love, we want what is best for our neighbor. Even if God was not real, an atheist evangelizing a Christian would do nothing but take their peace of mind away.
 
Wouldn’t you agree that it’s wrong for a man to willfully and actively in his heart to lust after a married woman?
 
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