A Christian Interviews Two Atheists on Ask an Atheist Day

What are some areas of common ground where Christians and atheists could work together? 

Neil: Social justice, fighting poverty, hunger, war, and income inequality, encouraging scientific and medical innovation, and caring for the planet. I would very much love to see Christians and atheists collude on moral matters in order to find those places of common ground around which we can form alliances. I am convinced that economic injustices and environmental neglect will ultimately prove to be life-threatening for the human race, and it would go a long way if people from opposite ideological poles could figure out those things about which we agree so we can get some things done about those issues.

JT: Well, there’s obviously no general answer.  Some Christians we can work together on anything, the beliefs of other Christians pretty much keep us from working together on anything.  I’ve run posts about how Christian charity organizations, desperate for volunteers, rejected help from swaths of atheists.  They literally made themselves less efficient at alleviating suffering because they valued snubbing atheists that much.

But in general, charity.  For the most part we all care about assuaging suffering.  Let’s just not imagine that handing a bible to a starving child, that spending some money on bibles to distribute that could’ve been spent on food to distribute achieves that goal.  😉

Is there anything you see fellow atheists do and wish they didn’t?

Neil: Atheists can be insensitive toward people of faith, particularly if they’ve never been in that camp themselves.  Even the ones who used to be devout can forget after a while what it’s like to think like a person who believes in supernatural things. I suspect we could learn to keep our interaction more respectful and more empathetic. It takes work, though, and not everyone feels it’s necessary. Some just so dislike religions of all kinds that they feel emboldened to fight every version of it as bluntly and indiscriminately as possible, but I feel like when they do this they sometimes miss the mark. People want to be understood first, and if they feel their faith has been misrepresented, they won’t listen or learn from you. I’d love to see more atheists taking the time to understand how believers think before they try to change anybody’s minds about these things.

JT: Oh, definitely.  While I think atheism is a reasonable conclusion it’s clear that it in no way guarantees that a person will have reached it through reasonable means or that they’ll be a good person.  Right now there’s a portion of the atheism movement that tends to respond to disagreements not by listening to the other side charitably or assuming the best of people who share most of their goals, but by doing their best to brand them a racist, misogynist, rape-apologist, etc.  I hate that.

And while, to be perfectly frank, I think religious beliefs of all stripes are irrational and without evidence, I loathe the people who treat religious people as if they’re all stupid or as if religion is some kind of disorder.  My wife has a degree in neuroscience, so we both know that ain’t true.

Is there a question you wish I had asked you and didn’t? Please ask and answer it!

Neil: What’s the worst, most despicable and thoughtless misrepresentation of atheists you’ve ever seen in your life?

Easy. God’s Not Dead. Pretty much everything you learn about atheists in that movie is wrong. Just so you know.

JT: Why do you fight against religion?

I get this question all the time and the answer is simple: beliefs are the gatekeepers of actions.  Take the parent who prays for their sick child rather than taking it to the doctor for fear of testing god’s beneficence.  Every couple months you can read about a child dying of a treatable condition for exactly that reason.  If the word “bad” is to have any meaningful definition, parents who neglect their child unto death are bad.  But there’s something to acknowledge there: those parents loved their children as much as you or I would/do love ours.  They wanted their child to get well.

The problem wasn’t malice or lack of love; the problem was that they had a bad idea about how the universe worked and once that idea had taken hold all the good intentions in the world were insufficient to stop them.  What this tells me is that everybody who has good intentions, like most atheists and most Christians do, has a moral obligation to do their very best to map out reality clearly so that their good intentions are then borne out.  I think religion, by teaching people that it’s ok to believe things on faith that would never fly by reasonable examination (people simply do not rise from the dead or walk on water) undercuts this value.

Does it do it for everybody?  No.  But it does it for enough.  And besides, if we care about what’s true, which I think we’re morally obligated to do, then that is explicitly what should matter.

JT: Thank you to Rebecca for giving me this opportunity.  If you have more questions, leave them in the comments.  If I get enough I’ll do a post answering them.  Take care of yourselves.

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