4 Answers

  1. The main argument common to various branches of atheism is that they are guided by reason and think independently, making decisions on ideological issues. Whether this argument is true is a separate question, because, of course, there are atheists who are more dogmatic than the average believer, and independent-minded believers.

    Another common argument in favor of atheism is religious wars. I.e., atheism does not lead to religious wars as a religion. There are even funny comics on the Internet on this topic.�

    But this argument, to be honest, is rather weak: two of the largest acts of state terror in the twentieth century, the Stalinist repressions in the USSR and the Maoist repressions in China, were carried out precisely by atheist regimes on purely non-religious grounds.

    That is, the idea that we will eliminate religions and conflicts will immediately disappear, of course, does not stand up to criticism: experience shows that there will always be class, race, national, etc.reasons to hate each other. By the way, Karen Armstrong in the book” Fields of Blood ” just shows well that the so-called religious wars, in fact, often hide completely non-religious reasons.

    More specific arguments for the advantages of atheism were given by individual atheist authors. Feuerbach, for example, believed that the worship of higher powers means that we do not direct these emotions to other people, and instead of loving our neighbor and admiring him, we love God (gods, saints, etc.). And this is only half of the problem: the second half is that instead of striving for perfection as an ideal (i.e., striving to become a perfect person), we alienate this ideal from ourselves and worship it as an external force. For Feuerbach, the atheist is better than the believer because he strives for what the believer only worships.

    Marxists believe that religion is the “opium of the people”, that is, an analgesic that gives us illusory comfort in our social unrest. But religion, therefore, only hides the symptoms, not solves the problem. Moreover, by hiding the symptoms, it slows down the solution of the problem. That is, for example, the poor, instead of fighting for their rights, console themselves with the fact that, they say, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, and, accordingly, they hope for a posthumous reward. In this sense, Atesites are better because they change society in the here and now instead of comforting themselves with religious responses.

    All these arguments in favor of atheism, by the way, have their own truth. That is, it is true that believers are often extremely dogmatic and that religion often ” becomes an excuse for the persecution of some people by others. It is also true that religion can support authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, that it can hinder social change, and that it can provide us with illusory comfort instead of a call to real action. But for rational believers, this is not a reason to reject religion as such, but rather a reason to talk about how religion should change in the modern world in order to be not a brake on progress, but a force that changes society for the better, fulfills an important social mission, etc. Maritena. In Orthodoxy, among the new movements in this direction is of interest, for example, the Christian democratic program of Andrei Zubov.

    Therefore, in a good way, believers should get acquainted with atheistic criticism and take it into account – atheism emphasizes the real shortcomings of religion, even if it often does this in an exaggerated way and ignores similar shortcomings in its own ideology. Of course, if we are talking about normal, rational, reasoned criticism, and not about a primitive like “Gagarin flew into space, did not see God”.

  2. Atheism, theism, polytheism, and deism are equally valid, because a person COULD NOT LIVE IN A PREDICTABLE WORLD. Everything exists in life: absurdity, sanity, superstition, and magical thinking. THERE IS NOTHING SUPERFLUOUS IN the world.

  3. They have quite material reasons for this. The fact is that studies of the level of intelligence of people were conducted, which showed that on average it is inversely proportional to the strength of a person's faith in God. That is, the more stupid a person is, the more they believe.

  4. Incorrect question. It's like stories with yazhmatery – ambiguous. Not all women who have children are infected with ovulism. so it is here. I am an atheist and do not consider myself superior (or inferior) to others. This is everyone's choice-to believe or not to believe, to go to religious institutions or not to go, to pray or not to pray. And if you come across a person who is arrogant, then this should not be related to their beliefs in any way.
    There is another side to the coin. Many atheists who have repeatedly encountered PGM critics are armed with facts that prove that there is no God. And they are agitated whenever they are touched with the question” why don't you believe in God?”, all these facts are presented. Therefore, from the outside, it may seem that they consider themselves “superior” to others. In fact, they are only asking to get behind them.

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