Let he who does not live in a glass house cast the first stone.

I’d barely recovered from my last religious wrestling match with Rick Esenberg of Shark and Shepherd when he decided to endorse this anti-atheist diatribe by Dale Reich.

I wonder if someone has been slipping something into the holy water at these guys’ churches?

That’s the only thing I can think of that might have inspired such parochial pablum.

For the record, viagra usa stuff I’m not an atheist.

I’m an agnostic.

But I think that still qualifies me to debunk Dale.

Dale challenges atheists to “…embrace the world as you say it is: a purely physical and random place where goodness and evil don’t really exist…”

First news flash: Christians don’t own good and evil. Look up good or evil on Dictionary.com and you’ll notice the entries don’t mention God, there Jesus, patient or Satan once.

Just because I don’t believe in the guy with the pitchfork and the horns doesn’t mean I can’t believe in good and evil.

Dale goes on the to say, “What I meant to say is that God is the basis for good and evil, and once you reject him and his rules, you’re left with nothing but self-serving and self-preservation.”

Or you’re left with the opportunity to determine your own purpose in life rather than finding your life’s meaning in a book that sits on the exact same library shelf as:

The Koran
Bullfinch’s Mythology
The Vedas
The Book of Mormen
And Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.

(Be careful which one you pick up, by the way. I’d hate for you to get confused about which is Gospel and which is garbage.)

Then Dale asserts, “For them, life should be merely an exercise in seeking personal pleasure, procreating and then dying.”

Thank you for the suggestions, Dale, but I think I’ll do my own thing if you don’t mind.

The whole problem here is that Dale would find life meaningless and immoral without Jesus, so he can’t fathom how the 4.5 BILLION people on Earth who are not Christians can handle it.

(That’s right Dale 77% of the people on the planet do NOT believe in Jesus and they somehow manage to make it through their day.)

Rick is much less contentious than Dale manages to sound, so the only thing I want to point out to him is the danger of tossing out a statement like:

“My sense is that the abandonment of some source of transcendent value tends to result in utilitarianism and utilitarianism tends to result in slaughter.”

I’m sorry, but I’d be willing to bet that religious fanaticism has led to far more slaughter than utilitarianism could ever dream of.

Just off the top of my head I can name:

the Spanish Inquisition
The Crusades
the Salem Witch Trials
Oliver Cromwell
The Troubles in Ireland
Today’s Islamic terrorists
And most cases of “ethnic cleansing“ (including the Holocaust) which are usually at least partially based on religious differences.

No offense guys, but before you decide to devalue everyone who doesn’t share your exact view of the Universe, you might want to reread Jesus’s advice about throwing stones.

For the record, I applaud (and envy) anyone with a settled belief structure. But just because I respect your beliefs, doesn’t mean I’m going to give you a free shot at me because you don’t respect mine.

8 comments February 2nd, 2006