DEAR CHRISTIAN ...

I can appreciate that your belief and your faith brings you comfort and joy. That's wonderful for you. I don't want to destroy those warm and fuzzy feelings, but I DO need you to understand this:

>>>  I support your right to believe whatever you want even if those beliefs seem utterly foolish to anyone else.

BUT Your belief and faith does not make you a better person than those who don't share your beliefs or your faith. The days when religious belief confers any respectability are coming to an end, and in the opinion of a growing number of people, it's way past time they did.

You probably don't appreciate being told your beliefs are utterly foolish. Oddly enough nor does anyone else, including those of us who don't have any religious beliefs at all.

Telling someone who doesn't have any religious beliefs they're going to burn in hell for all eternity only strengthens their view of you as someone with utterly foolish beliefs.

>>>  Atheists are, on the whole, happy, moral people who are good citizens, care about justice and equality and would prefer to carry on living that way without being told how bad or misguided they are. I don't respect your views but at least I don't tell you they'll cause you to writhe in agony in the flames of hell for all eternity. Please extend the same courtesy to me.

>>>  Your holy book might be a source of inspiration and 'truth' to you but to me it's a self-contradictory, error-ridden account of a people following a mythical 'war god' whose supposed actions, if repeated by a modern day human in a civilised country, would see him thrown in jail (preferably never to be allowed out) or, in some states of the USA, executed. 

If you haven't read the whole of the Old Testament, you should. So many Christians haven't and they're shocked when they finally do. 

The existence of the New Testament doesn't make any difference. In fact it makes your beliefs look worse because your god was either a very nasty entity in the OT and changed his ways in the NT (although no-one seems to be able to explain why a  perfect being would need to do that) or he's still just as nasty as he was in the OT and you're deluded about him being good, kind and loving.

But if you insist on your holy book being a divinely-inspired, faultless instruction for life, let me remind you of The Gospel of Luke chapter 18 verse 22: 

"Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him,
Yet lackest thou one thing:
sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor,
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven:
and come, follow me." 

If you have not followed that instruction (to the letter, rather than just popping a few coins in the collection plate on Sunday -- because Jesus apparently wasn't leaving any wriggle room here) and you claim you 'follow' Jesus, you're a hypocrite.

Show me where Jesus told you which of his instructions you had to follow and which you could safely ignore and still be counted as one of his 'followers'.

And before you're tempted to lie in order to tell me you have followed this very clear instruction from your 'Lord', let me remind you that you believe that your god is watching you and recording everything you do and say and that by lying you'll be breaking one of the ten commandments. 

 

>>>  Many Christians claim that atheists cannot be moral and good because they don't believe in your god. If you're one of them, you're actually saying that you are only deterred from being an evil person because you believe that god will burn you alive for all eternity for being bad or reward you with heaven for being good. You're saying that you'd be exactly like you assume atheists would be without god -- a rapist, paedophile, thief, murderer -- unless you had specific instructions from god and he watched you every moment of your life, keeping a record. 

That's infantile thinking. By all means apply it to your self but don't apply it to me. I'm an adult who can control their behaviour without punishment or reward. 

Christians make up 75% of the USA's prison population and 91% of the death-row inmates in Sing-Sing who have been executed for murder were Christians. So much for belief in god making you good!

>>>  Religion has always dragged its feet when it comes to knowledge. I have challenged Christians to give me chapter and verse when they say the bible contains science and no-one has yet provided a single example. 

The scientific community is largely atheist. 

Religion seems determined to fight scientific knowledge every step of the way. Let's not forget that religion wanted to kill the man who said that the earth stool still while the sun revolved around it! 

Christians insist that all the rules and instructions in the Old Testament became redundant in the New Testament. But why didn't god think to make sure someone put a note in the NT about washing your hands after shitting. In fact even the disciples didn't seem to know this was a good idea:

 

Mark 7:1-5 : Now when the Pharisees gathered to him ...
they saw that some of his disciples ate
with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed ...
And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him,
“Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders,
but eat with defiled hands?”

Just a quick note to us all from Paul in one of his never-ending letters would have done the trick. I suppose we must assume your god didn't care about the countless number of newborns who'd die soon after birth because their parents didn't know how to stop contaminating them with their germs.

I'll concede that water is important to your New Testament god, but only for walking on, turning into wine, washing feet or dunking people ... but not for hygiene.

>>>  You are not entitled to be a bully by insisting that everyone else on this planet live their lives according to your set of moral standards derived from a book that contains many errors and deals with the doings of a mythical being. Atheists tend to get rather angry when you want your myth-based morals enshrined in the laws by which all must live. 

For example, many Christians want to ban gay marriage, prevent abortions (even under circumstances where a raped woman's life is endangered by the pregnancy), control women's right to contraception and so on. Notice that the things Christians want to control are almost always about sex and reproduction. Please get over the idea that you have any right to control what people do with their own bodies.

Let me propose a few scenarios to you. Note that I am not proposing these laws nor is anyone else I know of! I'm merely trying to make a point here. Consider whether you would be happy to have your rights limited by others whose views you disagree with and whether you'd be happy if all or any of the following laws were imposed on you by them:

1. A law that meant when you bought an airline ticket its cost would depend on how much you weigh: the more you weigh, the more you pay. Thin people shouldn't have to subsidise fat people who eat more than they need and can't discipline their eating habits.

2. A law making it a crime to eat meat because raising and killing animals for meat is cruel?

3. A law that limited couples to one child. Afte the birth of this child both parents would be compulsorily sterilised because the world is already over-populated.

4. A law that limited the amount of fossil-fuel-produced electricity you could use per day because carbon emissions are causing our climate to collapse.

5. A law that allowed you to use your car only on certain days because the oil crisis means we must limit oil consumption.

Now you might argue that you don't believe some of the 'facts' stated above (oil crisis, killing animals for food is cruel, climate change, fat people are greedy and overeat) and you might resist these laws being enacted. But that's the position that militant Christians put others in; other people who neither share nor approve of any religious beliefs and who don't wish to have their lives controlled or dominated by them.

>>>  Some Christians complain about 'militant atheists'. In the last two thousand years being an atheist could get a person tortured, drowned, pulled apart on the rack or burned alive and all at the hands of the disciples of an apparently loving god. Thank goodness those days are over, but they are not forgotten. While Christians insist on bullying behaviour by insisting that their standards be imposed on unwilling 'others', that bullying will be vigorously resisted.

 

If you're one of these 'militant proselytising Christians' who complains about militant atheists, it seems to me you have two options: give up your bullying and bigotry or get used to the loudly voiced resistance of those of us who don't appreciate being controlled or preached at.

And if you can't or won't back off you're just going to have to grow a thicker skin!