It is freeing to recognize that I have never sinned and it pissed Christians off when I say this. To clarify, in Christianity sin is not simply “the bad things we do” it is specifically an offense against god. God does not exists so i have never sinned against him.
I’ve been an atheist for for 16 years but it was only recently that I realized this distinction. It short-circuits the guilt based evangelism. It forces the christian to first demonstrate that god exists before they can convince me I have sinned and need to be saved from that sin. And to say the least, they are ill equipped to demonstrate the existence of god.
If you ever broke the law like even rolling through a stop sign, or bigger crimes like theft or murder, would you still consider yourself not a sinner?
The thrust of the argument is that sin is a thing assigned by God. If there is no god, there is no sin; there are only moral and immoral acts
I submit that there are also criminal acts (and non criminal,) that are not necessarily moral or immoral. for example, feeding hungry people might be a crime… but it’s far from immoral.
and I suspect that most christians would, at least agree as far as that goes.
No I don’t, at all. I follow a few moral rules, like “Don’t be an asshole”. I actively don’t try to hurt other people. But there is no superior being that makes me do it, whose will I bend to.
By the way, this was my road to atheism: As a teenager, brought up with a few christian viewpoints (nothing like in the US) I one day thought
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if I only am behaving “well” because I will be judged one day, I’m still not a good person.
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if I want to be a morally good person I need to be that person out of my own free inner will
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if I am, I need no judge, therefore god is irrelevant
Then I stayed with atheistic agnosticism (god is improbable but possible) for another 30 years or so.
Calling myself an atheist now, as I do not BELIEVE gods exist (*) , but the nonexistence of something can not be scientifically proven.
*= Of course gods “exist”. Gods are an idea, thought up by many human minds, as a shared idea they really are potent things. GOD IS A MEME. Therefore gods are everything and as powerful as religious people believe.
God commanded us to do things like stone women that spoke, gouge our eyes out if we lusted, kill slaves that didn’t obey, and on and on.
So how exactly do we reconcile that god commands us to stone women to death that speak or have slaves and kill them for misbehaving and our laws that sorta say don’t kill people. Hmm?
I hope you haven’t been sinning against those commands. Gods gonna be big mad if you haven’t murdered infidels lately.