I’m an atheist and someone had asked me this question in a theological debate and I was unaware on how to answer it. So the person asked me “and if God doesn’t exist then why is there such a push for him to be spread around the world” so I would like to know how my fellow intellectually superior atheists would answer this question.
Posted: July 11th 2010
bitbutter www
Your interlocutor was making a mistake sometimes called the bandwagon fallacy, a version of argumentum ad populum. The implication is that a high rate of Christian evangelism is a good reason to suppose that God exists.
In fact, large numbers of people have been passionately wrong about all kinds of things in the past. For instance, once many people believed that witches existed, and should be burned. I think that Christian missionaries are mistaken in a similar way.
Posted: July 13th 2010
SmartLX www
This person’s implication is that God himself somehow drives the human urge to spread the Word. This is unlikely since the majority of religious people are driven to spread the Word of the wrong god, even if one particular god is real.
Intrinsic to any religion is an instruction, supposedly directly from the object(s) of worship, to bring others into the faith – friends and strangers by proselytisation, children by early indoctrination and active opponents of the faith by confrontation (or eradication).
In other words, the urge to spread God doesn’t come naturally, it’s drilled into believers from day one. That’s how religions survive from generation to generation, and why the instruction is intrinsic.
Posted: July 12th 2010
logicel
Religion has become a catchy global tune.
Memes, like catchy jingles and songs/melodies, compete for space in our brains. When someone sings a catchy tune, is it an active focus to spread it? It is more like a passive and unwilling contagion.
However, the singer and the producers behind said catchy tune are not passive, they are aggressively focusing on getting that tune out there so it can compete with all the others for space in our brains. Religious leaders with vested interest in the religion game exercise the same approach.
Fear is used in both games, the pushers of popular songs use the fear that people have that they will not be in the in-group, that fashion will leave them behind, while the pushers of religion go full throttle—you will roast in hell if you don’t swallow their codswallop.
Intellectually superior? We are just more obsessive than most other atheists! lol.
Posted: July 12th 2010