What Was I Thinking!?

A favorite question asked to atheists by religious people is, "What will you say to god once the act of standing before him proves you're wrong?"

Well picture this...

As you pass through the pearly gates, you can't help but notice they're adorned with large swastikas.

"Strange," you think, and then surmise, "They must not be symbols of hate as they are in the place from which I came."

You sit down and wait for the entity that will judge your earthly actions. As you mentally list your good deeds with a confident smirk, he begins walking toward you from a great distance. "It can't be," you mumble. "Uh-oh; that mustache is unmistakable." You don't even have to wait for the thick German accent to know you're doomed. "Do I stand and salute? Oh no, if he's omniscient he's aware of the fact that my best friend throughout college was Seraphim Bernbaum!"

If the above scenario actually happens, will you express regret over your failure to champion Nazi programs? Will you say, "Why didn't I embrace the formation of a master race!? The Third Reich wasn't evil like my disgraceful pro-Semitic teachers portrayed it. After all, if you want to make a world of perfectly sculpted, blue-eyed beauties, you've got to break a few inferior races."?

No matter the consequences, you wouldn't wish to turn back the clock so you could disrupt history class by booing footage of Allied soldiers liberating Nazi Concentration Camps.

I'm not comparing anybody to Hitler; I'm simply saying that, by rejecting the deity whose actions you strongly admonish, you'd be standing up for your fellow human beings, which is exactly what I'm doing as an atheist.

If it is revealed that a creator, responsible for me and the planet on which I lived, considers homosexuality a sin most wretched, I'm not going to all of sudden hang my head in shame for failing to even attempt converting my gay friends. No matter how much heat I feel, I will never say, "Since you, my creator, favor the stoning of gays, then such brutality must be just. I only wish an earthly person would have convinced me of this and then placed in my hand a few rocks that were light enough to get some muscle behind yet heavy enough to do significant damage to the face of a sodomizer."

If you eventually discover Sharia law is god's real preference, will you kick yourself for allowing your earthly wife to remain scarless after that Super Bowl party during which she without a doubt proved who wears the pants in your relationship by intensely glaring you into dropping what would have been your twelfth beer into the cooler and slowly walking away?

When you base your decisions on right and wrong, and bestow admiration on individuals whose actions you consider noble, future judgment is of no concern.

If I am wrong and find myself awaiting a meeting with my maker, I would be concerned, however, had I spent a lifetime judging the sinless, an act I felt in my heart was wrong, yet performed simply because I was convinced great reward would follow.

In Christian circles, atheists are considered immoral despite the fact that one of our biggest desires is making sure not a single life is negatively impacted by religion. Without fear of consequence and without regret, I would pridefully tell anyone, or anything, my earthly goal was championing human dignity.