Our language lacks a word that adequately describes the degree to how fucking stupid you sound if you follow this clunky, broken logic. The Christian belief system works on a reward/punishment situation: Where you work towards "heaven" and fear "hell." This leads down the road to martyrdom, the act of sacrificing your life for your beliefs. Some even go as far as to treat this life as an "audition" into the next life.

Atheists, on the other hand, believe that we only have one life and strive to make the best of it while helping everyone around them better themselves. They don't act out of want or fear, but out of a single unadulterated desire to do good in this world.

If you still feel inclined to believe Atheists are immoral, ask yourself who caused the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust; neither were the result of Atheist immorality.

Some Christians like to bring up Stalin at this point-- which leads the discussion down an entirely different path. Stalin was as much of an Atheist as Hitler was a Christian, and both are bad examples.

Nobody's perfect-- and you have no right of making a gross oversimplification about a group of people to whom you can't relate.

This is the "They really believe but because (insert logical fallacy here) they deny there's a God" school of thought. The dipshits who parrot this around like it's the "harsh truth" are usually the ones who have their heads so deeply immersed in their own asses that they can't contemplate having different beliefs.

To be fair, there might be some people who hide behind the "Atheist" label because they fucked up and don't want to admit it-- but the chances of finding one of those are arguably slim.

While this may apply to some Atheists, the majority of the ones I have met are not argumentative so much as they are inquisitive. That is to say, they aren't out to attack you for being religious-- they're curious as to how you view the world and will only say anything "aggressive" when you continue to defend a logical fallacy or an atrocious crime your God supposedly committed (which, in most cases, comes from your religion's scripture).

Saying "Atheists are close-minded" is like saying "Humans are close-minded." It's an empty statement because everyone is close-minded about something. For example, I refuse to accept that anything good can come from child pornography. Several hundred years from now, someone might pull statistics out of their ass that says differently, but I don't care.

That aside, Atheism is the antithesis to being close-minded. The reason they get labeled as such is because they rely on rational thinking, reasoning skills, and sometimes even the scientific method to make decisions that don't run parallel to the decisions you'll find in the Bible. Combine that with overwhelming evidence in favor of science, and suddenly Atheists are the close-minded "bad guys."

I decided to combine these two into one since one overlaps the other. The only reason Atheists are "more likely" to sin is because sin is a Christian term and Atheists have different sets of beliefs than Christians. To a Christian, working on the weekly "Sabbath Day" is a sin punishable by death. According to the Old Testament, slavery is just fine.

Atheists don't have a set "code" to live by... and as such there are no loopholes to exploit. The general philosophy of the average Atheist is, "As long as nobody gets hurt, either physically, emotionally, or economically; it's not completely unjustifiable."

Recently, a high-ranking school official tried to tell me that because she was a Christian, she would not lie. I was tempted to say, "So if you were in Germany in 1942 and the Nazis knocked on your door to ask if you're hiding Jewish people (and you are), would you tell the truth?" If you answered no, and you're a Christian, you just broke one of the ten commandments.

And finally...