"Most humans are not capable of this -- take away their purpose of life and the hope of at least some form of life after death, and they would be basket cases."

Then they should learn how to give purpose to their own lives and worry about the grim reaper - do what you predisposed towards doing in life and try to smile as death comes knocking at your door. It works for me, and I see no reason why it won't work for anyone else...

As has been already pointed out, many atheists have come to this position having argued their way out of the religion which was sanctioned by the adults and authorities of their environment. We didn't become more intelligent, we just dared to apply it in areas where others were reluctant or too terrified to try.

The paradox is that most religious people believe that it is a sin to apply intelligence in this fashion, but not a sin for their deity or deities to create a person with the genetic tendency to do it. The "gods" do, however, seem to consistently view education in critical thinking as either evil or a mixed blessing.

Most humans are not capable of this -- take away their purpose of life and the hope of at least some form of life after death, and they would be basket cases.

Do you have any advice on how to get them to realize that is THEIR problem and not mine?

EKM

A lot of people think that atheists really deep down do believe in God. No, I do not. Why can't these people grasp the concept?

Greta Christina wrote a rather interesting post once, in which she discussed this phenomenon as part of a much wider and very common pattern of thought. Here it is.

It seems that people have a strong tendency to assume that what they consider normative is normative, even a moral imperative. It's happened to me, and I've seen non-religious examples of it all over the place.

On June 1, 2006, 5:05 pm, Eziekel said

my family, who says i'm really not an atheist at all, and i just think i am, and am making a hasty decision that's "irrational."

Where do these ideas come from?

Sometimes theists get mad when we ask them if they believe in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, but I think these are valid questions. A lot of people think that atheists really deep down do believe in God. No, I do not. Why can't these people grasp the concept?

They have devoted so much of their lives to their support structure, and their identity is so intimately bound up with it, that meeting a person who needs none of those things is naturally threatening to them, because it suggests that all their effort was unnecessary, even wasted. And from there, it is only a small step to the conclusion that atheists must think them deficient in intelligence not to have seen the better way, if there is one. In my experience, even people who care nothing for dogma and doctrine, who disagree with their church leadership on virtually every issue, often react with anger or incredulity to the suggestion that they leave their religion, because they have been brought up in it and participated in it for so long that it has become part of how they see themselves.

I think this is the sunk cost fallacy in action. When the atheist says "I don't need religion", in effect he's also saying "you don't need religion, either", which amounts to telling the theist "you've wasted your life". And who wants to hear -- or even be led to -- such a conclusion? No wonder they react violently.

The ones I'd have a problem with, I don't socialize with anyway. Being an atheist doesn't really "define" me; that's the other things, which are largely covered already. My explicitly atheist friends are mostly online, and far from me. While there are local atheist groups in this city, I'd have to travel to talk to them and I'd rather spend most evenings with my family. In fact, to go spend time with atheists, I'd have to spend less time doing other things, and I like almost everything I do now. So I'd have to be reasonably confident that I'd like it better. I don't see it happening.

If the point is to have a social structure to make us less threatening to theists, I say "why?" - it's not my job to make theists comfortable. I don't need a church structure, or even an analogue of one. They might find it confronting, but it's a reality they need to get used to. In fact I think it's counterproductive to fit in with their social expectations, because it reinforces the false belief that some quasi-"religious" organization is necessary, even for the nonreligious. It isn't.

The cognitive dissonance of seeing atheists happily go about our lives without is confronting. It should be. It's showing them their assumptions are wrong. They should worry that maybe they've wasted their lives on a false belief.

It is not my job to make people comfortable in their false beliefs by being all nonthreatening. I see a better purpose in allowing them to confront the reality.

Regarding Islamic holy law, or "Sharia," it exists in many countries as a dynamic code of laws that has been modified through centuries of debate and interpretation, much the same as various forms of civil law. You're taking a worst-case scenario, namely a radical fringe organization such the Taliban, and asserting that this is the norm regarding Islam.

the Iroquois and many other native tribes across the world historically have tortured, murdered and even consumed their organs in order to gain their courage, strength and knowledge. Their religious beliefs included these acts.

There are many anthropologists and cultural historians that would disagree with such an assertion. Native American religion, particularly those of the eastern North American woodlands, was not so much a "religion" as it was a cosmological and social worldview. If anything, the idea of the manitou, or other-than-human being, was simply a facet of sensory perception. The anthropologist Paul Radin wrote extensively on this regarding the Winnebagos:

It was soon quite clear that the Winnebago did not base their test of the existence of a spirit on the presence or absence of corporeality; in other words, upon such sense perceptions as sight and hearing...He claims that what is thought of, what is felt, and what is spoken, in fact, anything that is brought before his consciousness, is a sufficient indication of its existence and it is the question of the existence and reality of these spirits in which he is interested. The question of their corporeality is of comparative unimportance and most of the questions connected with the personal or impersonal nature of the spirits do not exist (The Winnebago Tribe, Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 37, p. 283).

Such views were usually analogous amongst North American tribes. If you couple this with the fact that many Native American creation stories put humans on the lowest rung of nature, it seems illogical to assert that Iroquois torture was undertaken for the same reasons as something such as Jihad. For these tribes, there was no distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and the assertion that these acts were committed "in the name of religion" is false.

You were probably thinking more of pre-Columbian, post-Toltec Native American societies, such as the Aztecs or the Maya, who practiced human sacrifice. However, this was a form of polytheism that was radically different from the spiritual beliefs of the Iroquois.

As they invaded, there is much documentation that millions of natives were slain due to their physical opposition to the explorers invading their land and due to most of the natives' total opposition to acceptance to a new god.

"Total opposition?" You should regard the various mission accounts of Spanish Jesuits that denote records of successful conversions. The missions at Sinaloa and Sonora, or the religious community at Julí (modern-day Peru) are prime examples of how the efforts at proselytizing the natives - not killing them - were a success (once again, see Cushner). Even still, read any of James Axtell's work on New France and the "flying missions," as baptism rates amongst the Huron increased exponentially following the 1660s.

From a purely practical standpoint, what purpose would it serve Spanish Conquistadors to spend all that money to go to the New World and slay every "infidel" who refused to convert to Christianity? The Spanish were greatly outnumbered and they would have been quickly driven from the continent if they adhered strictly to a "convert-or-die" policy, especially since other European nations were befriending the Natives. Yours is a simplified history that leads to a false assertion. There is "much documentation" about how native tribes assimilated their own religious beliefs with those of Christianity (which is why that area of the world has Catholic traditions unique in regard to the rest of the Church), so your claim that these killings occurred due to the "total opposition" of the Natives to Christianity is false.

It was in the Spanish Empire's interest to convert the Natives, not kill them, for purely economic reasons, as this would help secure their colonial holdings and provide them with valuable trading partners and potential conscripts for their army. At the end of the day, the Spanish Crown didn't give a damn about the Church; it cared about its own power. The same is true of French Jesuits and the fur trade amongst the Huron and the Montagnais.

Uprisings amongst natives occurred more because of Spanish intrusion on Indian subsistence economy rather than religious conviction, and Spanish retaliation was never because of religious conviction, either.

As far as Russell is concerned, I am not aware that he ever said that religion is the most destructive force on the Earth. Rather he said something to the tune of "religion is used as an excuse to commit great atrocities," but he never credited religion as the sole reason behind it. If anything, he cited a lack of evidence for belief as the sole factor in illogical action. Moreover, he said something like "Christianity is detrimental to progress," by which he specifically meant scientific progress.

I'm not sure why you took my post as a personal attack, but I addressed the content of your post specifically. If history has proven anything, it's that nothing kills more humans than humans. Replace religion with any number of political or philosophical ideologies (fascism, communism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, etc. - which contrary to what Russell thinks are not religions) and the result would be the same. What I am arguing against is your claim that makes a scapegoat of religion for a host of complex historical problems (à la Sam Harris). It's funny that you should think in this way, as this is doing exactly what you didn't want this site to do, namely to perpetuate the conflict between theists and atheists.

Blaming religion for all the world's problems and using circumstantial historical evidence to back it up not only ignores the other side of the argument, but is akin to intellectual bankruptcy.

the Iroquois and many other native tribes across the world historically have tortured, murdered and even consumed their organs in order to gain their courage, strength and knowledge. Their religious beliefs included these acts.

Regarding the Spanish explorers, they derived their funding and support from the monarchy which indeed was the church or had the total support of the church. As they invaded, there is much documentation that millions of natives were slain due to their physical opposition to the explorers invading their land and due to most of the natives' total opposition to acceptance to a new god.

Regarding Russell, you made my point. He was a theist into his twenties. I said that most of his adult life, he maintained his opposition and criticism of all things religious. He lived to be 98.

As you said, "History has proven that the bad outweight the good in the case of religion."