The Blasphemy Challenge

I got an E-mail from a friend linking to something called ‘The Blasphemy Challenge’. The basic idea is that if you’re really convinced there is no God (i.e. you’re an Atheist) then you would have no trouble condemning your soul to hell. If you load up a short video to YouTube in which you announce your acceptance of eternal damnation then they will send you a free copy of the hit documentary ‘The God Who Wasn’t There’.

It’s a good documentary, for those of you who are interested in it. I managed to watch it at one point when it was making its rounds across the internet. Still, I won’t be sending any such damnation video to YouTube and you won’t hear me damning my soul to hell in person either.

Why?

There are two reasons. The first reason is that if you reach Atheism through logical deduction, you can never be certain that there is no God. You can accept it as the very likely theory, like we accept the Law of Relativity or Darwinian Evolution, but you can’t accept it as absolute truth.

The only people who can accept the non-existence of God as absolute truth are those that have made a leap of faith of their own. They suppose that because they have not felt God, there is no God. I personally actually find this bigger leap of faith than many religious people make.

Following that argument, damning your soul to a possible (though highly improbable) hell for the rest of eternity to get a DVD that costs a few bucks in the store seems like a bad gamble.

The second argument is that this doesn’t help the Atheist ‘cause’. All people will succeed in doing by posting videos of themselves damning their souls to hell is shocking and angering the religious. What we need right now is not fear and anger, what we need is debate and discussion.

If Atheism is actually better than religion, which is something that Atheists believe, then we should behave in better ways than the religious. We shouldn’t provoke disgust, we should provoke discussion. We shouldn’t set out to anger, but rather to enlighten the religious as to why what we believe and how we behave is better than what they believe and how they behave.

I mean, we think that many things that have been done in the name of religion are bad and evil, but there are many religious people who will actually believe that what is going on here is much worse. Let’s demonstrate that what we believe is right by acting right and avoid these types of provocations, as they will just demonise us further (literally, in their eyes).