So my question is: Why do some non-religious people challenge the beliefs of those who are religious?
What do you gain from it?
What is there to gain from 'taking' someone's faith from them?
Is that not immoral to you?
I'm genuinley curious.
I'd imagine the motivations are largely similar to your motivations for challenging their beliefs; for their benefit, ultimately. I think most people would agree that we want our beliefs to be true- and given that all atheism is is the belief that theism is false, we think that helping people see theism as it is, false and incoherent, benefits them. Also-
(Also, I'd rather not have the fact that it's because religious people killed others who weren't of the same faith, Wars that were caused by religion because
Most religion teaches you not to kill, So if you go against that, Then you'd kill for greed, lust, politics etc regardless of your faith.)
You may not like it, but the history of religion is, in part, a history of violence, oppression, and manipulation. Moreover, the teachings of many religions are
pernicious- take Catholicism for example, in which one is taught all about sin and hell, and is basically taught to feel guilt and fear over things that likely aren't true, and one has little control over anyways. And, in general, religion (and Christianity in particular) is fundamentally preoccupied with another realm, another reality- it is "otherworldly". And this preoccupation with some other life implicitly devalues this one. In other words, religion is damaging.
When one combines the evils of religion with the fact that what few benefits religion
does offer can be had elsewhere- art, literature, social activities, etc.- religion just looks entirely
dispensable. Once again, atheism would lead to an
improvement of people's lives in these respects (and dispensing with religion entirely would be a huge step for mankind); this is what most atheists believe, and is largely the reason why we challenge the beliefs of others. That, and the fact that we
all benefit from critical discussion-
"That one would go through fire for one's teaching-
what does that prove! It is truly more when one's teaching comes from one's
own burning"
-
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
