In this article, in the Sydney Morning Herald some Australian bishop and arch-bishop (which I believe moves like a bishop plus a knight) lambasted atheists just in time for good friday where their tradition claims that only one lamb need be slaughtered. Rather than simply typing snide comments about it, I decided that I should take them seriously in the claims they are making about the lack of belief which 16% of the world seem to hold. Or not hold since it is a lack of belief. The dear bishop Fisher suggests that this godlessness gives direct rise to mass murdering dictatorships. While the arch-bishop Pell seems to only be claiming that atheists are uncharitable.
''Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating,''
Then the following are given as examples
''Nazism, Stalinism, Pol-Pottery, mass murder and broken relationships: all promoted by state-imposed atheism or culture-insinuated secularism.''
We'll handle this one in parts, starting first with the idea of anything ending in ism. by which I mean any handle that can be given to a set of beliefs, which once embraced allow you to stop thinking. In Nazism for instance, you don't need to decide when you meet someone if they are a good person if you find out that they are a Jew. At that point you don't have to know anything about them. You can safely stop thinking about them and just hate them. Oh and try to kill them, did I mention the stop thinking part. A belief is the famous philosophical lever of infinite length, and faith is the immovable place to stand. Faith I am defining here, as accepting on no evidence. When you combine these you get a filter for your thoughts, a mind moved to do anything. What would be the point of doing something you know to be pointless. Such as wasting resources on "inferior races" as the Nazis would put it.
''we find no community services sponsored by the atheists''.
Really random Australian Bishop? You might want to do some fact checking rather than just taking it on faith. Maybe you should apply that to your entire life. Also "the atheists" makes people who lack a belief in gods to be some kind of cohesive bloc. We're not. I have met plenty of people that don't believe in gods that I don't really have much else in common. True we are likely to be better educated, and have a more rational world view. But, that only goes for atheists that are actually asupernaturalists. There are plenty of people who believe in ghosts and psychics and other claptrap. I also know a few that are avid conspiracy theorists, and weave elaborate plots that seem casually irrational to me. In this group you have, political conservatives, liberals, anarchists, fascists, racists, and any other derogatory term you could chose from that isn't faithful. Atheism is not some moral high or low ground, it is simply not accepting one very specific proposition. That is the idea that gods exist. You simply cannot make many claims past that. It really isn't a useful term in point of fact. Most people don't go around identifying as the type of person who doesn't rape children, but if asked most everyone would in fact say yes that does describe me. An arapist, and some would wonder why you only mentioned children and wonder if you were merely an arapist in regards to children, but not adults or indeed horses. This form of discussion is not useful. I can imagine there is someone reading this, that has already become offended that I compared religious belief to rape. (rape of reason not withstanding) The term just isn't helpful. I do not believe as you believe and see no need to. Feel free to try to convince me otherwise, but spurious arguments about the necessity of faith fall far short. Try that in any other aspect of life and see what I mean. Getting back to the definition by lack, I thought it would be useful to list other things I don't do, or think and see how that works out. My hobbies include, not flying kites, not sailing, not drowning kittens. You can see how this doesn't really serve a purpose. And will you have to worry about everyone that doesn't list not murdering as a hobby? Or is it more likely to make you think that they have to spend a lot of time thinking about how to not slip up and murder someone. Just like some religious people seem to think that atheists have a lot of faith to not believe in whichever god they happen to support. But how much of your time to you spend not collecting stamps? All of it in one sense, but in another sense none of it. If you aren't a stamp collector, then you spend all of your time not collecting stamps. However you don't actively spend anytime in the pursuit of not collecting stamps. Think of the difference between not eating and fasting.
Some of you might object to me having not addressed the community service issue in that response. But a quick google search was enough to dispel that idea, and I thought that you gentle reader would have that power. But it you insist Here is one.
Now maybe the problem was the atheist community (like the non fishing hobyists) just isn't active in Australia... Well the best I could do in a three minuet search was to find a list of humanitarian organizations linked to by the Atheist Foundation of Australia. The majority of the remaining links were about this Easter bashing. Now, I am still of mixed opinion on the idea of atheist groups, that is groups explicitly dedicated to atheism as a thing. While you do find groups dedicated to other non things, a group such as this requires the existence of whatever they are against. A better use of time and resources might be put into a group dedicated to rational discourse and evidence based practices, part of which could include the questioning of religious faith as a valid mode of belief.
There is plenty more that could be said on this topic and on the attitudes expressed in these articles, but for now I think I have said what I felt that I needed to.
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