Atheists believe that life is meaningless
On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is
meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal
happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is
precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our
relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever
to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well …
meaningless.
Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human
history
People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler,
Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem
with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of
religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes
are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are
indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag
and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings
reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and
nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever
suffered because its people became too reasonable.
