My Mother, a proud atheist, has a lot to say about theism in general;
On Jesus : Jesus is made up, a story character, like Robin Hood, King Arthur and Ali Baba.
On Christian morality : If god is a loving god then why did he let six million Jews die in the Holocaust? The adults might have sinned, but what crime did tiny babies and toddlers commit? What did he achieve by the massacres in Darfur and Bosnia?
On Christmas : I think we’ll all go round to god’s this Christmas. So long as we can get water we won’t be short of wine and the food will be provided so long as you don’t mind loaves and fishes.
On god’s right hand : I’m waiting for Cliff (Richard) to turn up in heaven, and god will say to Jesus, ‘You’ll have to shift from my right hand cause Cliff’s here’.
On the Christian doctrine of free will : Say I’m walking down the street someone jumps out on me and mugs me? Does the mugger’s free will, his right to mug me, matter more than mine not to be mugged, because he’s stronger than I am? Does might make right in god’s eyes?
When challenged about if there is no god how can you tell the difference between right and wrong : Because if a group of people murdered one another and mugged one another and raped children freely, that society would not survive. That’s where laws come from, what’s good for society, and the people who invented god and the bible wrote them in their book.
When told she would go to hell for her ideas : Look, heaven’s all right if you don’t mind doing what you’re told and standing to attention and serving the almighty dictator forever. Hell is the place for rebels and freethinkers, those who have their own ideas on life. I’d much rather by free to live how I wanted than live in an endless dictatorship.
On Satan, god and Armageddon : Of course the Bible would say god wins, it’s propaganda for god, isn’t it? The battle hasn’t been fought yet. How you do you that the devil won’t win?
On spiritualism : All right then, you say that we live on after death. If my Mum or someone comes back and tells me, then I’ll believe.
On Creationism : If we aren’t descended from ape like animals how come we’ve got a coccyx (tail) at the bottom of our backbone?
On religion in general : I’ve studied and examined in every religion and they’re all baloney.
My Mother is not an educated woman. She is a Mother, a housewife, now a widow, and she never studied theology or philosophy or anything, but just using her common sense she has answered many of the age-old arguments for theism and the reality of god. It was thanks to her influence in the background that I came through my Christian period and was hauled back into sanity and reality.
