Sauce for the Gander

One look around the atheist/theist blogosphere, and one thing becomes very clear: Atheists are seen as a great threat to moral values, a threat to society as a whole, and generally thought of as a bunch of big meanies whose sole purpose is to run around trying to persecute Christians.

I will now try to put a few things in perspective:

Okay, imagine a scenario where, at the end of every conversation I had with a Christian, I said something like......

"Well, you can deny the truth and believe there is a God all you want, but when it's all said and done, guess what....your body will attempt to inhale one last time, you'll gasp for oxygen, and that'll be it! Yes, and after that last breath, you can be sure that gases and fluids will start to accumulate in your lungs and other organs, and from there, it won't be long before post-mortem hypostasis sets in! That's right, your skin will turn blueish-purple and your once beautiful eyes will become discolored and cloudy! From there, you will pay a visit to the mortician, be cut open, have your organs removed and crammed back into your lifeless, blood stained carcass! Mark my words, Nature will have her way, you'll see! But don't worry, you won't even know that you died or had ever even lived! In a few generations, you'll be completely forgotten!!!! You'll be worm-food, and don't say I didn't warn you!"

Now, think about that. If I and all atheists made such remarks when the realization set in that we aren't going to change theist's minds with our arguments, no matter how sound those arguments may be, we would be seen as some pretty ugly, mean people(never mind for a minute that many of us are already seen that way).

And yet, most of you knew where this was going when it started, and you'd be right if you thought I was making a parallel reference to when Christians threaten atheists with their "Hell" doctrine. Sauce for the gander, anyone? And yes, I realize that many of today's liberal Christians don't believe in a literal "Hell"(thank goodness!), so, I'm mainly addressing the moderates and fundamentalists who do believe there's a literal place called "Hell", and in my experience, their defense would undoubtedly be something along the lines of..."Well, the truth hurts!", or "God is Just!", or "God can't tolerate sin!", and the like.

Well, news flash---atheists could just as easily use the same empty tactics and say.."The truth hurts!".

And if evidence matters at all, there's actually mounds of evidence that Christians and everyone else will suffer the fate that I described above, when in contrast, there's not one iota of evidence that we survive our physical deaths and go to a literal place called "Hell" or "Heaven", the former of which, of course, is a place where non-Christians will allegedly be kept alive and perpetually tormented with fire.

But yet, despite that whatever objective evidence we have that leans to side of human beings expiring in the same, natural way as every other living organism, we atheists still don't feel the need to pull this sort of scare tactic out. Why is that? Simple---because we don't need to. Our arguments stand on their own merits; we don't need to run around trying to frighten theists into seeing things our way.

That's pretty telling, if you ask me.