As the product of a few million years of evolution, we humans (atheists included) find ourselves the most highly socialised mammal on the planet. We are hard and soft wired to look out for each other and our offspring.Our inborn biological imperative encourages us to be co-operative, to self sacrifice and to look toward the future. We atheists understand and feel this without the need to invoke Santa or God. I suggest Robert could learn more about humanity from biology than from a narrow minded ideology based on fantasy and mythology.

AJ good luck with that line of reasoning.

I've yet to see a theist on OLO engage with point you make about the choice of a god to follow being less than absolute. The strategy seems to be just ignore mention of that issue and carry on promoting the idea that they work with a set of absolutes.

On the broader topic Christian's I've known sometimes cared for the environment, the idea that god is going to destroy it all anyway so it's well down on priorities seems to be a more common viewpoint.

R0bert

Strange essay indeed especially considering that some of the most strident voices opposing the environmental movement altogether and more specifically idea of human caused climate change and global warming are right-wing Christians, some/many of which are closely associated with the IPA which is one of the sponsors of this website forum. So too with the right-wing "catholic" publishing outfit Connor Court which also has direct links with the IPA.

I have just checked out Robert's website which pretends to "answer" the big questions.
One wonders which century Robert "lives" in - perhaps the 18th or 19th or even the 14th (prior to the European Renaissance)
It is as though none of the explosion in radical iconoclastic scholarship, philosophy, and hermeneutics of the 20th and now the 21st ever happened.
It is as though the internet does not exist. Because every aspect of every known religious and Spiritual tradition is now freely available with an internet connection. And every philosophical proposition ever made about the nature of Truth & Reality in all times and places too.

And yet somehow in the face of all of that, everything has to turn out to be reduced to the dim-witted form of one-dimensional Christian-ism with its infantile/childish mommy-daddy good-luck parental deity that Robert promotes.

"I cannot see how atheists can rationally hold the tension between maximisation of opportunity in the present and simultaneously sacrifice for the future." An argument on the lines of "I cannot see/understand..." is an argument on personal inability and thus no argument at all.
But who needs arguments? I'm convinced: atheists are going to burn in hell, so let's burn them on earth now.

Mr. Martin should have stuck to Christianity. His critique of the negative aspects of Christianity is cogent and accurate as far as it went, although there's a lot more to criticize there.

His statements about the portions of Christianity that should be emphasized is accurate too.

His comments about atheism are irrelevant noise, both inaccurate and insulting to an extraordinarily varied group of people whose only commonality is a lack of belief in one more god than Mr. Roberts.