There aren’t any good atheist superheroes, for one thing. (I’m somewhat joking, but it’s true.)
Penn Jillette!
Captain America’s famous quip aside, how the heck is a superhero supposed to react when he gets introduced to Thor?
It does raise questions about theology in the MC universe. Jack Kirby is the ultimate power canonically, which is fine.
I’m going to clarify my earlier statement.
The best thing about being an ateist is freedom. You make your own choices, you don’t have to follow the dictates of a God or religion, you are free to find your own path to morality and proper living.
This comes woth a huge downside though: The lack of absolution. Most religions have an absolution mechanism: No matter what kind of shithead you’ve been in the past, you can seek and receive forgiveness. Or you can pray to God for forgiveness, then happily go on with your moral failings erased.
As an atheist, I kmow that I must own every bad thing, every callous comment, every moral weakness. No one is going to absolve me of my guilt. I have to live with whatever I’ve done and accept that it’s all on me. No demon tempted me, no evil spirits infested my mind at that time, and no deity can erase what I did.
When I am on my deathbed, the story of my life to be looked back on will be the accumulation of everything I did, and I can only hope that the good outweighs the bad such that I can believe the world was better off having me in it. There’s no ‘better place’ I’m going to, and no do-overs or second chances. I have to carry the knowledge of every hurt I caused with me until the day I die.
On the good side, accepting your own moral agency is a good motivator to do moral things.
Atheists can too, indeed it’s a critical life skill: we learn to forgive ourselves.
Yeah, but that’s a lot harder unless you are delusional. And the only way to do it is to work to be a better person.
Religious people can do shitty things their entire lives, but they can feel as moral as anyone else because they’ve been forgiven for their sins. If I am thoughtless to someone and hurt them, I carry the weight of that forever, and all I can do is try to not do it again. I can say, “I am not that person anymore”, but if it’s not true I will know.
I actually have to become a better person to absolve myself of what I did earlier in life. As I said in the first post, doing the hard work to become a better person is not as easy as seeking absolution from a deity. But it’s the only honest way to go.
He’s a human-looking alien who’s very strong and can fly. In the context of a superhero universe, that’s not that impressive. The Hulk is stronger, and he’s not a god. Dr. Strange can fly, and he’s not a god. Why should Thor be regarded any differently, just because he impressed a bunch of iron age Scandinavians?
Oh, he also has lightning powers maybe. But so does a guy who gets his ass kicked on a weekly basis by broke teenager dressed like a bug.
I’m 90% atheist, 10% cyberist. God could be a Martian.
Scratch that, not a Martian, but a super-advanced alien species who created the simulation we are all living in (like Nick Bostrom says). No meat-bag bodies needed, like The Matrix, just AI, with consciousness. Some smart people think this may be true (some even say the odds are in favor of it). Who am I to disagree?
And I have seen a glitch in the Matrix. Once, I saw a double image of the same thing! I dropped the bottle of whiskey I was chugging, and said whoa, I’m a convert!
I’d rather not deal with a Judeo-Christian God, but I wouldn’t mind having alien computer scientists as my overlords. They’d probably be running the simulation to learn stuff, not to be praised, and act like a dick about it.
And, what’s the main reason most humans want to believe in God? That’s right—we want an afterlife. Well, the alien simulators can give us that, too. In fact, that’s likely the goal of the simulation! They give us a sense of God, and a feeling of morality which we must follow to reach heaven, or ignore, and end up in Hell. It makes sense that they would continue the simulation to cyber-heaven, and cyber-hell, to see how we behave when we get our reward, or punishment.
I was always scared of heaven when I was a kid because I didn’t want my dead granny to watch me masturbate (so I never did 
). But I don’t mind if aliens watch me. Heck, super-advanced aliens probably don’t have genitals as we know them, anyway.
I can’t wait to see my cyber-family, and cyber-pets in cyber-heaven someday. 
On the other hand, I’d certainly believe him if he said he was Thor. Hard to disprove.
But, when the theist gets absolution from God, it seems to mean to them that they don’t need absolution from the person they hurt. We atheists can get absolution, but it requires apologizing and asking forgiveness from a real person, not a fake deity.
And a lot they ask absolution for are things that are not even bad. Only their god tells them it is.
Not to single you out, but it seems to me that this whole thread is full of overgeneralizations about religion and religious people, and this is just one example. Jesus’s teaching (Matthew 5:23-24), which at least some Christians purport to try to follow, seems to contradict the kind of thing you’re talking about:
The thread title asks for the worst thing about being an atheist, yet so many of the replies are along the lines of “Being an atheist is superior because it means I don’t have to believe/do this” (“this” being something that some religious people believe/do but that is hardly an inherent part of theism).
To follow up on @Thudlow_Boink’s post, this is oversimplifying quite a lot.
Forgiveness/absolution is the last part of a process that also involves: confession, remorse, atonement, repentance.
Confession - acknowledge that you have done wrong
Remorse - truly feel the weight of the harm you have done others and suffer for it
Atonement - an outward act of penance to balance the scales
Repentance - a commitment to live a better life
It’s not just a case of saying “oops, my bad, soz big guy lol” and getting the slate wiped clean. The underlying idea is that you have to do exactly the same hard work of recognising your flaws, making restitution where possible and trying to be a better person. Then you can be absolved, not before.
Does every believer put in that work before being told they’re forgiven? No. But does every atheist put in the work before forgiving themselves? Also no.
As you say, the big difference is that the atheist can work through this process themselves, while typically religion would have a holy person act as an intermediary between the wrong-doer and the deity. I would tend to agree that it is better not to have this intermediary and to rely on one’s own moral oversight and judgement, but in fairness there are obvious downsides to that as well.
As I get older and friends and family start to die, I really feel it would be nice to think that I will see them again in an afterlife.
On the same vein, it’s getting harder to live with the fact that some day in the next 2, at most 3 decades I’ll surely cease to exist, sometimes I feel it’s like when I’m going to start some project at work but it’s Friday afternoon… there’s no time for it.
I hear ya!
I used to procrastinate a lot and save the best for last (delay gratification). But now I don’t, because I might kick the bucket any day. This means I binge-watch my favorite shows without delay. It would piss me off to miss the finale of Band of Brothers or Breaking Bad simply because I died.
…Unless, of course, there’s a TV in the afterlife. Maybe God or our alien AI universe creator has Netflix on their device.
My guess is that religious people make their own choices too, and rarely “follow the dictates of a God or religion.” Or, if they do, they do it because they wish to, and ignore the parts they find distasteful or inconvenient. The only religious person I know personally is my mother in law. Yet, even she goes to church each Sunday more because she wants to than because she’s supposed to.
I said didn’t need to, not that all Christians are so obnoxious they wouldn’t apologize. It’s not clear that apologizing itself will help you get into heaven.
Your passage mentions people having something against you. That seems different from you offending them. Anyhow, I wonder how many follow even this advice.
You had me until this. Why do we need an intermediary between us and a deity not harmed, instead of between us and the person we harmed? I thought confession, for a formal example, is between the sinner and the priest and God.
Clearly no group has a monopoly on doing this right, but at least atheists can’t fool themselves into thinking their wrongdoing has been made good somehow.
That’s the Catholic version. In most Protestant religions, you just have to accept Jesus into your life, and all is forgiven. You can even do it on your deathbed and get to heaven. For that matter, can’t a sinner be given last rites in the Catholic church and still be absolved, without doing the other stuff?
Also, many religions teach that bad actions are due to temptation driven by Satan. By accepting God, you absolve yourself of everything you did before, and can blame Satan for your prior misdeeds.
I kmow that when I look back on my life from my deathbed, I will have to own everything I did, good and bad. There’s no do-over, no different world to go to where my wrongs are forgotten, no eternal bliss. Just the knowledge that I got one shot at existence, and what I did with it is what it is, and soon there will be no more existence and all that will be left of me are the memories of what I did in the minds of the people still alive, and the reverberations of my actions on the world.
If you didn’t lead a very successful life, or were weak and made a lot of mistakes or hurt people, old age can be pretty bleak for an Atheist. Ther’s no heaven to look forward to, no reuniting with loved ones. Just pain and regret before the music stops.
This is a good incentive to be a better person.
Jeez, I get my jollies from being a better person right away. I’m not sure the spectre of death-bed regrets is that much different from fear of hell.
(My everyday language is larded with “God damn it to hell” and “Jesus H. fucking Christ” and the like. As an atheist, that sort of tickles me. I wonder why.)