Phanes

I am - as you can probably tell - a newcomer to these boards, so forgive me if I'm rehashing an old argument (as if no one else does that ).


Anyway, let's get on with the bickering. If you're an atheist like me who hangs around fundamentalists, I'm sure you've heard the spiel about what happens to those who reject God or his Word. Now the fundamentalist would have us believe that your average atheist is an idiot, a dunce. Who would give up a shot at eternal paradise for the sake of his own pride? Surely the Good Book speaks rightly when it says "the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God" (or something like that).


Now I'm going to do something crazy here; I'm going to agree with the Bible. Quite frankly, I think anyone who throws away a shot at eternal happiness and bliss has some problems upstairs. But here's the key point that I want to make: no rational person knowingly gives up life in heaven*.

Many monotheists would have us believe that the atheist does just that. This is quite clearly not the case. The theist has left out a very important point - atheists don't reject heaven, they reject God**.

Proposed idea: Atheists reject eternal life.
Actuality: Atheists reject God. (Theist addendum: God does not grant eternal life to those who reject him.)

This is where I see some difficulty with the idea of divine reward and punishment. Atheists should, I think, want eternal happiness as much as anyone else. So why do they reject God? Well, for a number of reasons of course, but it should be fairly obvious that atheists do not believe their decision to reject God has any bearing on their fate after death.


Why does this matter? I believe it means that God, if he exists as the (fundamentalist) Christian religion proposes, does not judge atheists fairly in any sense of the word. The atheist does not know the consequences of his actions (again, assuming this God exists). He is punished for something he did not know was "wrong." How can you hold him permanently accountable for this?

Now I know many of you are coming up with examples even as you read this. Do we excuse a Nazi who claims he didn't know killing Jewish people was wrong? What about a KKK member who says the same of blacks?

There I two things I have to say about these types of examples. First, I suspect that many of you, particularly of theist persuasion, think that Nazis and KKK members really do (or did) know they're doing something wrong. God has to have given us some sort of intrinsic moral compass, perhaps for this very reason.

Second, we are not talking about a moral issue here. We're not talking about the atheist hurting someone else. We are talking about the atheist making a decision that only affects himself. There may well be moral decisions that don't affect other people, but I do not think this is one of them.

This is an analogy that expresses the way I see the situation: Bob the Almighty has put you in a room with two doors. You can only pick one (and you must pick), and once you've gone through the door, you're stuck with that choice (I assume we only die once). If you pick door A, Bob sends you to a spa where you can spend the rest of your days with scantilty clad members of the opposite sex. Not too bad. If you pick door B though, Bob throws you into a pit of flesh-eating maggots, who will devour your skin millimeter by millimeter (by all means a better fate than eternity in a lake of fire). Not too good. Now let's say someone, we'll call him Smith, is put into this room by Bob. Remember, Smith has to pick one of these doors (maybe Bob just throws him in with the maggots if he doesn't pick). Now Smith has heard about this Bob figure before, but he hasn't seen anything to suggest the guy is more than a myth. So Smith thinks about things for a while, and - deciding it doesn't matter either way, since Bob is probably a phony - he hazards a chance at B. (Of course in reality, atheists have plenty of reason to suspect that they are correct; they aren't making random guesses.) Unfortunately for Smith, he's picked incorrectly, and it's off to the maggot pit.

Now the question is whether there's something wrong with this set-up, and in particular with Bob, who's in charge. Remember that Smith, like our average atheist, does not know his choice will affect the outcome. Of course in real life there are also the unfortunate people who think their choice does matter, but pick the wrong religion. For the moment, I only want to focus on Smith though. Do we explain to him, "Hey, you chose door B of your own free will. It's your fault you're not in a jacuzzi right now"? I don't think so. I don't think anyone will argue that Smith got what he deserved. Further, it seems clear to me that Bob is not acting fairly or morally.

The only way I see for a theist to explain this problem is to claim that Smith really does know what's involved, and which door is correct. And indeed, there are people who say that sort of thing. But this is, in my opinion, an intellectually bankrupt position. One would have to argue that every person in existence "really does know" that God exists (including which particular God). I don't know how plausible that is. At the very least, it would make several billion people on the planet either insincere or self-deluding, no matter which religion you pick.


In summary, for those of you who didn't feel inclined to read the whole post:

Do atheists knowingly condemn themselves to hell?

If no, then a hellfire God is an unjust one, because he punishes people unfairly.
If yes, then you've got a lot of work to go in showing people really do believe in god X and afterlife possibilities Y and Z.


* I take it for granted that heaven is a place of the greatest happiness for everyone there, not necessarily a lot of boring harp playing.

** When I say "reject" with reference to God, I simply mean "deny the existence of" or "don't believe in" or something else along those lines. I didn't wish to get into a technical argument about what the word "atheist" means. I don't mean to say atheists actually believe in God.