Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – Billboards and Fruits

The deacon over on Alethian Worldview has a nice competition.  Come up with a billboard for letting people know being an atheist is fine.  As he has already noted, some boards are fine, some are nothing special and some are pretty atrocious.

My entry (the crowd image is something I found on the ‘net with no source used many places): 

I have often heard from Christians that they somehow magically know who the TrueChristians^tm are.  We get the whole “fruits of their labor” nonsense thrown at us.  The idea of fruits of one’s labor starts in Genesis where Cain and Able are going along, having no trouble and then God starts playing favorites for no discernable reason (why would an omnipotent being care for plants over meat?). We have the term “fruits of their labor” appear in Psalm 109 where the plaintant is asking God to hurt people (and their children incidentally) for not agreeing with him and in Psalm 128.  And finally, in Matthew 7, we have a lot of the aphorisms purportedly spoken by JC himself.  These are the ones that always give Christians discomfort if pointed out in their entirety, and not the comfortable cherry picked versions that pastors give them. 

In this chapter, we have JC saying that good trees bear good fruit and bad trees bear bad fruit.  In the context of the bible, this would mean that those who believe like him are “good” and those who don’t are “bad” and are to be damned to hell and/or destruction “into the fire”.  Someone who doesn’t believe like Christians, per these verses, can do *nothing* good.  I’ve asked Christians about this point blank, “Does this mean you think non-Christians can’t be decent human beings?”  Of course, considering the evidence, they nearly always insist that of course non-Christians can.  However, many of them caveat it by saying that anyone but them does humane, decent things for only “selfish” reasons, that we don’t do it freely out of some magical “love”.  It’s the only way that they can claim that there is a difference.  However, it seems like doing anything go avoid being destroyed is pretty darn selfish too! I can understand them though. I’d probably look into making sure I bore fruit of any kind if I believed in a being that was so petulant, that it destroyed a fig tree for being a fig tree and not bearing fruit out of season.  If fig trees are metaphorically humans , one wonders how many humans this being destroyed because it wasn’t willing to make the effort to let the humans know it exists aka be in season.

But back on topic… One would think that perhaps by what they professed or where you might find them on a “sabbath” could help Christians (and the rest of us) determine which were the TrueChristians^tm and which weren’t.  When you Google “does one have to go to church to be a Christian?”  There is no consensus and indeed Christians cannot agree when this sabbath is.  When you Google “what does a Christian believe” it gets even worse, with some of the more hilarious rhetoric spewed by believers at each other.  All of this demonstrates that Christians cannot know anyone by their fruits, unless they are only looking for fruits that only agree with them, and that’s not necessarily being what humans think of as good.