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If you had lived his exact life odds are good you would have made his exact choices too. Dehumanizing that just keeps us from learning from his mistakes, because you inherently assume anyone "good" would never make them.
That's where you are wrong
You seem to assume, like I believe too many people down there assume, that people are just a "blank table" that fill themselves as their lives and experiences goes on. In other words, every babies would be "identical", and only their environment would change them as they grow up. But this is wrong: We are born as different people and have different genetics making our body and our brain. A huge part of how we act on everyday live is written in our genes, and only a smaller part is actually determined by previous lived experience. Thus, even if anyone else was born instead of Steve Jobs, that person would have made different "decisions". (and the worst of that, is that all we decide is a combination of our genes and lived experience, so none comes really from "our will", yeah that's a crazy debate I had to read entire books about it in high school).
All that to say, that yes it is correct to blame him, because he was responsible of what he did, in my point of view. I believe this philosophy is absolutely compatible with both a believer and atheist point of view.
I have absolutely no problem with other people being atheist, as long as you do it consistently. It's the toughest "religion", since you believe that there is nothing after death, so death means that you're actually disappearing. For believers, death is a jump in the unknown, so it is an entirely different thing. No matter what you believe it is absolutely 100% certain you and everyone else will someday experience death, so you'd better be prepared for it.
I also believe maybe some people find death horrifying because they're not accounted to it. Back then people were born in poor families of 10 kids and someone from the family would die of illness almost every year. After having grown up in such an environment you don't fear death because you are familiar with it. Today, people are more "protected", and that's mostly a good thing. The side effect is that some people seem to be too much afraid of death.
What I despite is those "capitaliso-atheist" people who aren't atheist because of their own conviction that there is no god, but because they're too busy watching TV, window shopping, watching soccer and other dumb thing that they forgot to even ask themselves if god exists. They won't go to church but won't hesitate to spend lots of money to celebrate Christmas - no the birth of Jesus of course but this horror of feat of capitalism and consumption it has turned into. Arguing about that in a foreign language is hard for me but I hope you see the picture and what I mean. A good atheist should not celebrate Christmas, a good Christian should celebrate is by going to the church and celebrate the birth of Jesus. Anything else is pure crap (the same happens to Easter by the way).
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I don't want to enter into a thick debate either, but you're damn right my point of view is atheist. You can believe whatever you want but humanity has collectively spent the last 2000 years enforcing religion on everyone, usually under penalty of death
I belive you are referring to the colonisations, and those started in the 15th century, so that's been much less years than what you say. And yeah those guys were miserables and as much un-Christian as they could get.
What bugs me is always with how much convictions some atheists are enforcing their absence of religion on everyone
, and yes some of them did it with "death penaly", Hitler, Stalin, Mao, does they remember you something? Yes I know there were not representative of all atheists, but so were the Spanish colons who sentenced indigenous to death not representative of Christians.
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If you believe in heaven then why not go slaughter everyone that's currently unhappy?
Err... You known that in Christianity murder is a capital sin, right? In most other religions too, including Islam.
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Belief that there is anything that comes after death is too often treated as a free license to send people there prematurely. Belief in a higher power is too often an excuse to absolve oneself of all responsibility.
I couldn't agree more. My particular variant of Christianity faith (Protestantism) insists on individual responsibility, but many other religions do not.
And guess what? I am a
terrible Christian: I almost never read the bible, I go to Church like 3 times a year, and pray like only once every 2 months outside of that. We're supposed to do this stuff everyday. It would be easier for me to give up and call myself an atheist and be done with that. But for some reason I can't revolve for it, and don't want to.