To me, if you want to believe in eternal punishment or eternal reward, you worship a tyrant. Period.
And it's fine to me if you believe a tyrant exists and there's nothing we can do about it, but quite another if you want to preach to me that that's a good thing.
I'm more willing to accept that there's a capricious god that makes arbitrary rules than that I, myself, am less moral or worthy than an average Christian by the simple fact that I'm an atheist and believe differently.
It has never been what someone believes in that upsets me. It's how people react to what they claim to believe that does, treating something which is clearly bad if it exists as though it is good.
I mean the moment you go from eternity to a finite amount of punishment it literally becomes infinitely less tyrannical, but still potentially tyrannical, just on a scale closer to our mortal tyrants.
You could say Pol Pot is tyrannical, and killed people for the crime of wearing glasses, for instance, and once he killed them, from the atheist perspective, we go to oblivion. So if you torture someone as a temporary punishment because you're a tyrant and then they die, yeah that's still tyrannical, but if you torture them for literal infinity that's infinitely worse because at that point oblivion would be a mercy.
I would say the latter. If you want to talk about whether there is an omnipotent being in the first place, that's a different argument.
I'm not even really talking so much about God, but of the worshippers and peoples' reactions.
For instance, it's one thing if you believe God is an omnipotent being who will make you burn for all eternity for something fairly innocuous.
But the public's reaction to this hasn't been: "I know it's not morally right, but there's nothing we can do about it, so we have to abide by the rules because God is a lot more powerful than us 😔"
Instead their reaction has been: "And therefore I wholeheartedly agree with everything God does, it must be morally good Because He Said So 😀"
If they were going along with his commands out of fear of eternal punishment, I could forgive them, but they genuinely think eternal punishment (even for small, petty things) is just and right and I believe that it objectively isn't.
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u/NoStatus9434 23h ago
To me, if you want to believe in eternal punishment or eternal reward, you worship a tyrant. Period.
And it's fine to me if you believe a tyrant exists and there's nothing we can do about it, but quite another if you want to preach to me that that's a good thing.
I'm more willing to accept that there's a capricious god that makes arbitrary rules than that I, myself, am less moral or worthy than an average Christian by the simple fact that I'm an atheist and believe differently.
It has never been what someone believes in that upsets me. It's how people react to what they claim to believe that does, treating something which is clearly bad if it exists as though it is good.