Today at the entrance of campus, just past a group of picketing demonstrators, one wearing a large papier-mâché pigs head, stood a man in a hat with a very large sign that read: “It’s easy to be an atheist when you don’t think about where things came from.” The back side of the sign said that he could convince me that Jesus was my savior in 5 minutes.
The first retort that came to mind was, “It’s easy to be a Christian when you don’t understand anything about science.”
I was a happy, carefree Christian before I learned about the basics of evolution, geology, physics, and cosmology. Even into my later teen years, long after I should have acquired at least a small amount of basic scientific understanding, I remained happily oblivious. I wasn’t curious about how the world worked, because I already knew the answer: God made it all. I wasn’t worried about exploring the claims of evolution, because my teachers, parents, and pastors had already told me everything I need to know about it: Evolution is complete bunk with zero evidence to support it. Christians who dismiss or reject evolution show again and again through their fallacious, twisted arguments that they simply don’t understand the first thing about it.
The second retort was, “Hey, wait a minute! It isn’t easy to be an atheist at all.”
Few American atheists were raised without religion. Most of us embarked on a long and difficult journey of deep and critical philosophical reflection before we made the decision to reject the concept of God. Religious belief is considered a sacred right, and most people go through their entire lives without ever having their faith question or challenged. Atheists, on the other hand, are constantly called upon by the religious to give an account of our position. It is never enough in coversation to just say, “I’m an atheist.” We must give a detailed reason for holding our beliefs. How often do you think the average American Christian is asked “Why?” when they announce they believe in God? Atheists are also consistently found to be the least trusted social group and the least likely to be elected president. We are a group in the vast minority and are routnely considered everything from amoral to evil by those in the religious majority.
Contrary to the popular Christian belief that atheists only reject God because it is easier to pretend that he does not exist than to submit to his will, becoming an atheist takes a great deal of though, introspection, and personal responsibility, not to mention the willingness to exist without an extended communal group and outside of the parameters of conventional society. Plus we have to deal with guys like this one pestering us with signs all the time.
Maybe I should make my own sign…
May 7, 2009 at 6:16 am |
So did you at least take him up on the 5 minute challenge?
I take, I must admit, some small pleasure in taking up such challenges and reducing their arguments to quivering messes of nonsense and idiocy.
May 7, 2009 at 3:49 pm |
No, I didn’t take him up on it. When I saw the sign I was on my way to an oral exam, so I didn’t have five minutes to spare.
May 7, 2009 at 7:38 am |
You should have made a deal. Record his 5 minutes, post it on a blog and invite him to see how many atheists actually become Christians after that. See, cause I’m guessing he’s pretty comfortable that if the atheists weren’t so ‘hard hearted and afraid of hearing the truth’, his spiel would actually work.
May 7, 2009 at 3:54 pm |
I think, in all honesty, his spiel would have just consisted of asking the person if they had broken any of the 10 commandments, then explaining that “the wages of sin is death” and explaining how Christ sacrificed himself to save us from that end. I think most proselytizers like him don’t think that very many people have heard “the good news.” They don’t realize that we’ve heard it all before.
After I told my husband this story he suggested I make a sign that said, “I can convince you of evolution in 10 minutes and prove that you have stopped listening after 5.”
May 7, 2009 at 5:16 pm
and “… stopped thinking in 10 s.”