DangerousTalk

One of the ways religious believers try to sidestep criticism of their ridiculous beliefs is to claim that anyone who has any criticism must “hate God.” The conversation usually goes down like this, “You must hate God and therefore your argument is invalid.” There is actually a logical fallacy for that.

When religious believers claim that atheists “must hate God” they are actually using a derivative of the ad hominem fallacy. It is an attempt to ignore the actual criticism and passive/aggressively name call.

There are a few ways to deal with this type of thing. The first is to deny that you hate something that you don’t even believer exists. But this gets us nowhere because religious believers often think that atheists secretly do believe in their deity and that we are just pretending not to so that we can live our sinful lives tricking people into giving us their hard earned money so that we can use it to build huge tax exempt buildings to ourselves and so that we can more easily rape kids… oh wait… never mind. Besides, the study is in and atheists actually do hate God… well sort of.

Personally, I like to follow Louis C.K.’s lead. Because we all know that comedians are awesome. In an early Comedy Central Presents, Louis C.K. talked about being stuck in traffic and having the guy behind him screaming at him to move forward despite the cars in front of him. It was a great routine. The guy got out of his car and started to bang on C.K.’s window. C.K. knew he had to argue with him, but he didn’t have to have his argument. So he rolled down the window and demanded that the guy give him back his grandmother’s sweater.

So when a religious believer tells me that I must hate God, I tell them that they must hate Voldemort. Why would anyone rebel against “he who must not be named?” Then I get into the argument that being all-powerful doesn’t make one just (even when those all-powerful beings are completely imaginary).

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Filed under: Ad Hominem, argument, Religion