Apologetics Fail #26
I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist


"I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist" is a statement I’ve heard frequently from people in real life and read from people on the Internet.

This argument is a consequence of religious believers holding that atheism is a religion. (It is a religion in the same manner that not collecting coins is numismatics.)

Atheism is the response to a single question: I do not believe in your assertions of Kali-ma, because you have not provided sufficient or proper evidence for her existence.

Likewise, I do not believe in your assertions of Odin, Zeus, Vishnu, Amaterasu, Pazuzu, Isis, Ishtar, Astarte, Jesus, Allah, or any other god. No apologist has yet met the minimal burden-of-proof (show evidence of the god asserted).

We do have evidence of the founder of Islam (Mohammed), the Church of the Foursquare Gospel (Aimee Semple), the Lutheran Church (Martin Luther), Mennonite (Anabaptist) Churches (Menno Simons), and the founder of Mormonism (Joseph Smith), but no evidence for any of their claims (God exists in the way I describe him).

Yet the claim is "I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist." All those believers in Jesus or Allah or Kali-ma are atheists about every other faith in the world; the old saw "an atheist just goes one god further" doesn’t seem to connect with believers.

No Christian is worried about the afterlife punishment of Hinduism. No Muslim is concerned about the afterlife punishment of Christianity.

Even within Christianity, no Catholic is concerned about the punishment for not being a Southern Baptist. No Mennonite is concerned about the punishment in Methodism.

But all of them not only think non-belief requires faith, many are flat scared of atheists. That is why atheists in the USA are less-trusted in repeated polling than rapists or paedophiles.

In the New Testament, faith is described in Hebrews 11:1 thusly:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.(KJV)
The position of atheism is "you have not presented sufficient (or any) evidence for your claim, therefore I withhold belief." It takes no faith to reject my claim I have a dragon in my shed. It takes no faith to reject any claim asserted without evidence.

The late Christopher Hitchens (PBUH) put forth an epistemological statement colloquially known as Hitchens’s Razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"

This doesn’t just apply to religion: If I assert without evidence that my specially-treated water can cure dermatitis, you are right to reject my claim without a demonstration this is so. Double-blind testing of my specially-treated water against another sort of water will easily show my claim is true or false without accepting my assertion on faith.

Thus in its most basic sense, "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" is defined as gullibility. No pastor, no cleric, no priest, no imam, no shaman, no one ever anywhere has ever shown a god or goddess. None. Never.

But an awful lot of believers turn over hard-earned money and time to support such people, to try to convince others that their god (or their interpretation of the same god) is the correct one, and yours is wrong. Pretty much all of them agree that atheists are the enemy though—having someone who can be kind and gentle and good without any sort of belief in a supernatural being stands against everything that person has wrapped his or her life around.

That’s the real danger to the believer: Their faith does not matter. People are good or bad despite faith, not because of it. Therefore atheists must be marginalized, suppressed, or killed.

So atheism is cast as "faith." It drags the idea of not believing something without evidence down to the level of gullibility.

Today's atheist inspirational quote:


"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" -- Christopher Hitchens
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