Non-believers are people which don’t worship anything.  Usually, the have insufficient natural talent for religious belief.  People inevitably vary in their inborn capacity for religiosity.  Forcing everyone to participate in religious sermons is not going to change this.  Instead, it makes people lacking inborn talent associate the religion in question with compulsion.  The only reason for such a person to believe is using divine intervention as the explanation for things in the physical world.  With the many alternatives existing today this in no longer needed.

Some people are in denial of the existence of such individuals.  They claim others to deny the existence of God in order to sin without bad consciousness.  Why would it not be humanly possible to genuinely be of a different opinion?  I get frustrated every time someone accuses others of lying just because they give a different answer than the person wants to hear.  Imagine a society where everyone has the chance to get to know his or her fellow beings.  In such as society an average 7-year-old understands the difference between deliberate lying and just being wrong.  Denying the existence of other opinions makes one sound as if one had not even reached this level of insight into the minds of others.

Moreover, why are threats of punishment in afterlife supposed to be the only reason to behave?  There are so many better reasons, including adherence to the golden rule, the categorical imperative and consequentialism.  Non-believers are also very aware of what is considered socially acceptable in their society.  If one has the opportunity to learn that religion is optional one does not need any priest to tell this.

People claiming of lack of religion automagically makes one a bad person tends to use circular reasoning.  Someone’s evilness and lack of belief are supposed to prove each other.  To escape this faulty thinking we have to start from the null hypothesis.  In this case, this means treating religiosity and morality as independent variables.  From the 18th century and on it is often possible to tell someone’s degree of religiosity from what he or she wrote or what others wrote he or she said.  In the latter case another person’s writing has to stand up to scrutiny.  If I understand it correctly the claim of Adolf Hitler’s atheism is based on the account of a person we don’t even know if he was there.  Had he really been an atheist he would have told it to Rudolf Heß and/or Albert Speer.  Both survived him by decades and had lots of chances to revel it if true.  Furthermore, we have contemporary diaries of Joseph Goebbels who shot himself the day after Adolf Hitler did.  I don’t think any of these three ever stated him to be a non-believer.  While Adolf Hitler was very good at talking crap it seems more likely that he was religious than not.

There is no statistical correlation between crime rates and degree of religiosity.  I find this completely plausible considering all the evil committed in the name of religion.  However, I think religion is only used as an excuse for what the perpetrators want for other reasons.  These other reasons also apply to non-believers.  The only really bad people I know to have been non-believers either had a position of absolute power (like Napoleone Buonaparte), were fanatic adherents of an ideology (like Ernesto Guevara) or both (Ioseb Jughasshvili might have been the worst).  These factors would make one more or less a bad person regardless of degree of religiosity.

I think the claim of atheists having no moral is just a rationalisation of personal fear.  Apparently, a lot of Americans (and probably some others) mistake a statement of atheism for an exhortation to deny the existence of an afterlife.  This is not the case any more than a statement of faith equals proselytization.  Why would it be necessary for everyone to say they agree on this subject?  I may be a non-believer, but I am fine with others having religious beliefs.  It is one’s views and attitudes towards one’s fellow beings which matters to me.

Uploaded on the 23rd of February 2024.