Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist

TodayChristian.net seems to think they have a set of questions that “Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…”  They’d better be very interesting to warrant that mess of capital letters and using the word “atheist” like someone who doesn’t know English very well.  Let’s see what these stumpers apparently are.
1.       How Did You Become an Atheist?
2.       What happens when we die?
3.       What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!
4.       Without God, where do you get your morality from?
5.       If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?
6.       If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?
7.       Where did the universe come from?
8.       What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?
9.       What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?
10.   If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?
Sigh.  Here we go.

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Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist
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Investigating (Straw) Atheism

There’s nothing quite like a set of loaded questions from a believer to illuminate what being an atheist really means.  For all the increased and increasing visibility that celebrity nonbelievers like Daniel Radcliffe and Jodi Foster are getting us, and for all that atheist thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have rendered an exemplary case for non-belief as a philosophical position, we continue to suffer from a litany of stereotypes.  (Often, our most visible proponents do little to disprove them…)

And no set of questions is likely to be more loaded than the set that BornAgain_Believer (sigh) posted on MyNews24, reproduced here:
 
1.       Where do you come from?
2.       What is your purpose on earth?
3.       Does life have a meaning?
4.       What is just and fair for you?
5.       God forbids, if your child is murdered and the person is never caught and brought to justice, how would you handle it, seeing that life has no meaning and we are just here on earht [sic] to live and die. Where would you get justice from?
6.       An intelligent, thinking child brought up by atheist parents becomes a Christian how do you respond? Oh and becomes preacher and starts a new church, would you say your child has a problem?
7.       What about all the injustice in the world that goes by unreported, where must everyone else get justice from?
8.       How do you answer your own child that is searching for meaning and purpose in life?
9.       Why does research, discovery, diplomacy, art, music, sacrifice, compassion, feelings of love, or affectionate and caring relationships mean anything if it all ultimately comes to naught anyway?
10.   Is death the end of life?
I’d like to give this questioner the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re asking purely from a position of ignorance.  But when it comes to the privileged and often oppressive end of an unequal societal dynamic, that’s not a warranted assumption.  This fellow’s username says it all.  The Digital Cuttlefish and Nate Hevenstone (if you’re not reading him yet, start) have already taken this on, so I’ll add my two cents.
Investigating (Straw) Atheism

Clever Questions to Ask an Atheist, provided the Atheist is Very, Very Drunk

A LOT of Internet real estate is devoted to Christian zealots of various flavors claiming to have some sort of checkmate-level rebuttal to the steady increase of nonbelievers in the developed world.  One example in particular caught my attention.  I’m not sure where this list originated (I found it here), but its “cleverness” is, shall we say, overestimated.

The questions:

Dear Christians,
Here are some clever questions I have thought up for you to ask an atheist.  If you are on an atheist online chat, you can copy and paste these questions to ask them, or you can confront an atheist in public and ask the questions.  Just watch how they can never answer these questions:
Can you explain what happens when we die?
If we came from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys living today?
Is it okay to commit murders, rape, homosexuality, going to stripbars, looking at pornography, and other forms of rebellion if you think there is no God to guide you?
How can you explain the way a banana fits in the palm of the hand?
If Fox News is a dishonest channel, then why are the reporters such as Bill O’Reilly true Christians?
Did you know that there are biblical records of dinosaurs that were witnessed by men?
How did pond scum turn into us?
How did the eye form?
How did the Grand Canyon form?
If you call yourself an atheist in regards to God, then do you call yourself an atheist in regards to Santa and Bigfoot?
How did everything come from nothing?
If evolution is true, how come we never see frogs turn into birds?
Have you heard of the shroud of Turin?
Your’s [sic] in Christ,
Where to begin?  Most of these questions are veterans of the religious apologist circuit, frequently utilized in dishonest ways by prominent anti-atheist agitators like Ray Comfort.  While none of them is particularly clever, some of them require surprisingly interesting answers.
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Clever Questions to Ask an Atheist, provided the Atheist is Very, Very Drunk