Atheists And Death

Ray Comfort was feeling particularly lazy today, and so instead of making up a new branches of science or claiming he looks like Einstein, he just wrote a title and said “bugger it” to the actual article. The title is a quote, so it’s not even his own work. I think that’s a little too lazy.

Anyway, to make Ray look more of an idiot, I’ll write an article for him. The quote was from Plato, and simply said:

No one ever dies an atheist

This is an obvious attempt to provoke the old “there are no atheists in foxholes” argument, something that has been thoroughly debunked by the number of atheists in the military. Such a preposterous quote as the one above can be debunked quite easily though.

Seeing as the last thoughts going though a dying person’s head are their own, and nobody else can even imagine what they are thinking, this argument is already pretty weak. Even if an atheist says “I believe in God” at the end of his/her life, that doesn’t mean they truly believe it. Since the person is completely dead after their “last thought”, there is no way for them to verify their final belief, so not only is Plato’s argument weak, it is both scientifically and factually invalid.

Perhaps the most humorous thing about this argument is that it is easily reversible, and because of the above properties, nobody can argue against me when I claim:

No one ever dies a theist

Go on, prove that every single person who has ever died has not converted to atheism at the last possible chance. What’s that? You can’t? Don’t use pathetic arguments then.

Here endeth the lesson.

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Categories: atheism, belief, religion Tags: , , ,

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  1. July 11th, 2008 at 00:21 | #1

    This is an obvious attempt to provoke the old “there are no atheists in foxholes” argument, something that has been thoroughly debunked by the number of atheists in the military.

    Not to mention that Einstein died a non-believer in a personal God … a non-believer in an afterlife.

    Ray Comfort is a joke.

  2. July 11th, 2008 at 00:25 | #2

    It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
    – Albert Einstein, 1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press

    I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
    — Albert Einstein, 1954

    Again, Comfort is an idiot.

  3. July 11th, 2008 at 06:37 | #3

    Well my great grandfather’s dying words were – “There is nothing”.

  4. Lamprey
    July 11th, 2008 at 14:02 | #4

    Even if it could be proved that every dying person is hoping for an afterlife, that still wouldn’t make them theists. Say they believe in the supernatural. That doesn’t mean the supernatural has to be divine. Maybe souls survive after death because space mermaids like to preserve them.

  5. August 27th, 2008 at 19:05 | #5

    Hooray for cryonics!

    I’m just hoping it becomes reversible in the next 50 or so years.

    • December 31st, 2008 at 08:49 | #6

      Not to dig up old skeletons, but I guess cyberbrain technology a la Ghost in the Shell would be cool too.

  1. July 24th, 2008 at 23:25 | #1

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