Like all atheists who make their email addresses publicly available on the internet, I receive a variety of unsolicited emails from believers and non-believers. Most of them are polite, like the one I received last night from a small business owner in South Carolina:
"I just bumped into some info about you on the internet…….no big deal…you are a smart guy….
But there is one God….and Jesus was His son…..and He left the Holy Ghost to live within us…..
And I bet one day….maybe your last day…..you will change your mind and believe that too……I am going to pray for that….
Maybe we will meet in heaven and talk about stuff….i hope so……"
Here is my response:"[Name removed], nice to hear from you. I'm always willing to change my mind if provided with satisfactory evidence. The question is whether you are. If you sincerely believe that we'll meet in heaven, I trust that you also believe that we both could also meet in the eternal fat fryer of hell. If you believe that your God would torture beings He created forever, please give some thought as to why you hold that belief.I pose this question so you will understand that what I object to is not the suggestion that there is some kind of supernatural being (or beings) that exists outside of time and space. After all, how could anyone ever disprove that? What I object to is those who profess religious certainty about metaphysical truths which are, by definition, beyond human comprehension. If you think that the above makes me an agnostic rather than an atheist, then so be it. However, I am most certainly an atheist when it comes to your God (i.e. the one described in the Bible) just like you are (I assume) an atheist towards Zeus.
Best regards, TAM.
P.S. If there is a heaven, I hope annihilationism is true because I would consider an eternity of anything to be hell."
At this point, an enlightened theist (such as Randal Rauser, author of "The Swedish Atheist, the Scuba Diver and Other Apologetic Rabbit Trails") might chime in and insist that atheists should also give some thought as to why they hold the beliefs that they do. I wholeheartedly agree.
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The underlying attitude for everyone should be - if you are wrong, would you want to know. In my experience, most but not all Christians and religious people fall into the I don't want to know category, and some but not most non believers don't want to know. OR, perhaps it just seems that way to me because discussions about this usually occur with religious people rather than non.
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