Being An Atheist Doesn’t Mean You Are Immoral

A comment on a recent Newsvine thread stated:

A Columbine shooter’s diary, released along with loads of other documents by the Denver Post, shows that he was an atheist who believed all the evolutionary teaching he’d been fed in school. He wondered why he should suppress his natural instincts and be nice. Surely natural instincts like eating, breeding, and fighting are good since they were instrumental in evolving us to our present state. He viewed most people as being worthless, and would have selectively killed most U.S. citizens if he could. If we are created by God, and He loved us enough to send His Son to die for our sins, then we are all very special indeed.

If there is no God and we are purely the result of random chance, then we are no more significant than bacteria on a mote of dust.

The Columbine shooters held the latter view and took it to a logical conclusion for their circumstances.

I hear this line all the time, and find it very interesting. To be fair, I describe myself as fanatically agnostic, rather than atheistic, but in fully embracing the fact that I do not know, and in fact cannot know whether or not there is a god, I must face squarely the possibility that there is not. When you couple this with the fact that in all my nearly 31 years on this earth, I have never yet seen any indisputable evidence of a god, I find that I often proceed on the assumption that there is not. And yet, somehow, I don’t find myself tempted to go out and hurt others. How could this be?

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Dear Democratic Party,

I know we haven’t spoken in a while. I would like to say it’s my fault, that I overreacted to your sleeping around, your unwillingness to defend our relationship to others, your weak justifications of your actions. But those were your choices, and I chose to distance myself from you as you seemed so hell-bent on your own destruction that I couldn’t bear to stick around and see your undoing. Quite honestly, I don’t know if I can ever trust you enough to commit myself to you, but I am willing to try to be friends.

As a friend, I want to offer up a little perspective on the situation in which you currently find yourself. I know it’s unsolicited advice, and I know unsolicited advice is rarely appreciated, but we have known each other a long time and I truly have your best interests at heart. I hear you’ve moved up in the world, lately, that some of the people who used to belittle and berate you have come over and started thinking you look pretty good next to the alternatives. That’s great; I have always wanted to see you succeed. But I also hear that you are getting, perhaps, a little over confident about the whole thing, walking around talking about how you are in like Flynn come November. I want to warn you to be careful there. The American people are fickle, and you don’t want to be eating your words a couple of months from now.

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