Not So Polite Conversation – the old saw that atheists have bad relationships with their parents

Always fun to see Christian liars like Stephen Bernard come out with armchair psychology and fail as usual.
Here’s what he claims:

“Before I was ever remotely interested in anything religious I noticed something about those I engaged with in the local pubs and clubs that confessed to being atheist. Most of them being atheist or agnostic were either of a wealthy privately educated background or had no father at all.”

No evidence for this, but the typical false claims.

“The former usually had poor relationships with their workaholic fathers who were never around while the latter never knew them. I noticed this even in working class families where the father was either abusive or the sons parents were divorced.”

and yet more baseless claims. I have a great relationship with my dad. Again, it seems that christians are desperate to invent any way they can to cast aspersions on atheists and try to gin up fear to try to dissuade their fellow theists from considering the facts.

“Either way a rupture in the family unit, abusive or absent father is a very common sight to see in atheistic communities. They’re acutely aware of this themselves so when I got a group of them together I asked them how their relationship with their father was going. They all became verbally abusive and refused to answer the question.”

hmm, gee, more lies from a theist voiced and the poor dear is upset that people get disgusted with him. And do tell how a theist got a group of “them” together. I also enjoy knowing that divorce equal or worse in christian families. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/marital-status/divorcedseparated/

https://www.barna.com/research/new-marriage-and-divorce-statistics-released/

and well, we all know how prevalent child abuse is in religious organizations, especially Stephen’s Roman Catholic church. There is also a book that looks quite interesting “Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment” by Janet Heimlich.

Add this plus the common Christain idea of physical punishment for children, and Stephen’s claims seem quite unsupported.

Here is an interesting bit from a NIH paper that shows that the Christian need to keep claiming this nonsense is based on little but weakly supported claims that are contradicted.

“Although religiosity seems to have beneficial effects for adjustment in child maltreatment survivors, prior research has reported that individuals experiencing child maltreatment are less likely to practice religion. Such findings may be explained by the correspondence hypothesis (Granqvist & Dickie, 2005), which proposes that individuals who have experienced secure vs. insecure childhood attachments have established the foundations on which a corresponding relationship with God could be built. According to this view, maltreated individuals, who are more likely to have insecure attachment relationships with their primary attachment figures, are less likely to view God as loving and caring compared to nonmaltreated individuals. In contrast, the compensation hypothesis (Granqvist & Dickie, 2005) predicts that individuals with insecure childhood attachment may be more likely to seek God for compensatory attachment relationships. Consistent with the correspondence hypothesis, empirical studies have reported negative effects of child maltreatment on religiosity demonstrating that survivors of abuse tend to have more negative views on God (e.g., Finkelhor, Hotaling, Lewis, & Smith, 1989; Kennedy & Drebing, 2002). In particular, Bierman (2005) examined the effects of physical and emotional abuse on religiosity among adults and found that abuse perpetrated by fathers during childhood was related to low levels of religiosity. It is plausible that the image of God as a father led survivors of abusive fathers to distance themselves from religion. However, there is also evidence that maltreated and nonmaltreated children did not differ in their view of God as kind and close, although maltreated children perceived their parents as less kind and more wrathful than did nonmaltreated children (Johnson & Eastburg, 1992). Work is needed to understand the unique role of religiosity in child maltreatment survivors.” Religiosity and Interpersonal Problems Explain Individual Differences in Self Esteem among Young Adults with Child Maltreatment ExperiencesJonathan C. Waldron,^a,* Angela Scarpa,^b and Jungmeen Kim-Spoon^c

“They knew the reason for my question. It branded their conscience like a red hot iron. This isn’t a fine rule for every atheist, but usually the majority have had some sort of troubled upbringing in a fractured family.”

yep, we know why you claim such lies, dear, to do no more than try to cast aspersions and gin up fear for becoming an atheist. No iron was there, only Stephen’s delusion.

“What is the correlation between absentee father and atheism? I think a lot of it has to do with the idea of calling God, “Father”. When you’ve had a terrible relationship with your father or never had one around, there’s an anger present there that if someone should even mentions the word “Father” a strong aversion to the concept soon follows.”

funny how there is no “correlation” at all. Stephen has no evidence for his false claims at all.

“It’s the same with children from a divorced family. Any mention of a “Holy Family” referring to Jesus, Mary and Joseph tickles a part of their brain that makes them go wild. I’ve noticed this in Catholic converts to Protestantism by women. If you dig a little deeper you’ll often find such female converts have had a bad relationship with their mother. In Catholicism we refer to Mary as our Mother and Protestantism removes such a requirement from any convert having to do so.”

Here’s a slightly new twist, a claim that us gals have a bad relationship with their mothers. Alas, Stephen simply lies again. Happily, me and spouse also had/have good relationships with our mothers.

“In the end what Atheists crave is the very thing they have a strong aversion for, a loving earthly and heavenly family with God as their father. They don’t know it. . . well. . . maybe some do. . . but they’ll never admit that is what they subconsciously desire because that would wound their pride and force them to come out of hiding and admit God exists.”

ROFL, poor Stephen, trying to convince himself that he’s so special, and that us atheists “really” do want what he thinks he has. We don’t.

He’ll of course try to claim he wasn’t “really” talking about all atheists as a way to dodge his own false claims.