What if there is no god?

“What if you’re wrong?"

As an atheist in the college community I frequently get into conversations and debates on the existence of a supernatural deity. While Christians have many foolish dead-end questions to ask whenever a debate arises, one question is always sure to make it out on the playing field, “What if you’re wrong?” You see, Christians ask this question expecting us to envision ourselves burning for an eternity in the, ever so scary, fantasy world they call hell. A place filled with demons and “unquenchable” fire in which all who subside there experience an eternal misery like no other. While these scare tactics have succeeded in making millions of nimble minded people pursue a “personal” relationship with the lord, they don’t move my fellow atheists or me an inch.

You see we’ve moved on past your fairy-tale fantasies. If I’m wrong, I go to hell and I burn, sure, fine, I accept that. I would be most concerned about seeing God first in order to ask him some very important questions:

[DELETED]

List goes on and on(I probably have somewhere around a thousand questions I would ask God if there were one, but I’ll save that for another article)….

I'm getting off topic...

That’s not really what this article is about. Although there’s not a doubt in my mind that when I die I will be DEAD. I won’t be in Hell; I won’t be in some sleazy purgatory trying to talk my way into Heaven. I’ll be DEAD. Six-feet under the ground, getting incinerated, cast off to see, donated to science, I really won’t care because I’ll be DEAD. What this article is about is me wanting to turn the tables a bit and ask “What if your wrong?”

--Religion and money—

“Satan hasn’t a single salaried helper; the opposition employ a million”

-Mark Twain-

One very big waste would be all the money that has been spent, and that will be spent, in the name of the Holy Spirit. The Vatican is estimated to be worth over 760 billion dollars. That alone could do a hell of a lot of good towards ending world poverty. But lets talk about churches in the United States.

There are estimated over 300,000 churches in the United States, from small congregations of 75 or less to Mega-Churches with hundreds and even thousands of members. I think it’s safe to say that with numbers like that American churches have become somewhat commercialized over the past few decades. And behind every commercial organization there is good money being made. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some churches that do spend the majority of their money to help others, but there are also churches that don’t do that. And with around 3.5 million people experiencing homelessness in America every year, I’m not sure that all this money being made is going anywhere near the “right place.”

Hence, “what if your wrong?” well if your wrong then there is an incredible amount of money being wasted in the name of your lord, while around 200 children have starved to death since you started reading this article. Which ultimately leads to not a waste of money, but a waste of life. There are an uncountable number of children and adults alike that maybe, just maybe, in another lifetime could have been saved had all this money been redirected in a better fashion. Oh and let’s not forget, many of them weren’t worshiping what you would consider “the right” God, so I’m not sure their eternal afterlife is going to be too pleasant either.

--Religion and violence—

"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

Religion and violence, to most followers of the good book these two words don’t belong in the same sentence. To an atheist, or anyone who has actually delved into the parts of this “so called” good book that are overlooked during your local Sunday sermon, these two words go hand in hand. God has been killing people since the beginning of time. When it comes to the God of the Old Testament I believe that Richard Dawkins said it best when he stated,

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

But, considering there is no God, a lot of what is said in the Old Testament, either never happened or was extremely misinterpreted (Noah’s Ark), So let’s talk about some of the violence that has occurred in a more recent time frame during the process of carrying out “God’s will”.

Let’s talk once more about September 11^th, 2001. The day thousands of Americans lost their lives because a group of Muslim extremists disagreed with our freedoms. They believed they were doing God’s will, and because of that there are an uncountable number of people whose lives will never be the same since that day. And these people weren’t fighting; they had no hostility towards Muslims or Ala. They were just living their lives like they had done every day before that. Thousands of innocent people killed because of religious tension.

We definitely can’t leave out the fact that Christianity was also Hitler’s biggest influence during World War II. This is a proven fact. He believed that by ridding the world of Jews, he was carrying out the will of the almighty creator. Nazi soldiers even had the German phrase “Gott Mit Uns” inscribed on their belt buckles meaning “God with us”. Hitler was no doubt one of the most (if not the most) fanatical and radical believers in God to date. And he left the bodies of over 6 million people in his wake. He was definitely more of an Old Testament reader.

That’s only two situations; listing them all would take an eternity. Let’s not forget Jim Jones or what happened in Waco, Texas, I think you get my point. Now while Jim and Adolph were definitely, in every sense of the word, wrong; “What if you’re wrong”? If you’re wrong then you have spent your life blindly following a God that not only doesn’t exist, but that has been the source for the majority of the world’s violence.

--So... what if you're wrong?--

Considering all the lying, greediness, violence, and sometimes sodomy that has been coming out of the religious community for… well, pretty much forever, it’s pretty hard to imagine that you’re right. But hey, at least you have helped in supporting the terrors of religion to rein supreme long after you are gone.

Six feet under….Like everyone else.