Frederick Noronha: Marshall, for a change I'm not in agreement with you. Charity is just one of the criteria on which someone's "goodness" could be judged. If the criteria were changed to, say, fighting for justice, and giving up one's lives for that, then the non-believers might come out leagues ahead.
Response: Frederick, when I see posts and articles extolling the virtues of atheism over religion, as a student, I am eager to find information / answers to validate the same. And unfortunately, the answers I find simply do not hold good. I have asked in the past to name prominent atheists who have worked among lepers like Fr Damien or Dr Ruth Pfau or Graham Staines or looked after society rejects like the mentally and physically challenged, the old and the infirm, HIV and AIDS patients, destitutes and generally touching human lives. Till date I cannot find a single name. Roland did name Edhi of Pakistan. But reading about him, I find that he does not belong to that grouping. He was a religious man though not an overtly practising one.On the contrary, I find that persons who subscribed to atheism committed the greatest crimes in the last couple of centuries. Normally when atheism is discussed it is people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Hawking, Daniel Dannett and others who are revered and quoted. Not people like Che Guevara or Charu Muzumdar or Kanu Sanyal who did enormous work for the deprived or the downtrodden at great cost and sacrifice. The atheists often quoted are armchair intellectuals with no contribution to humanity. No human being is completely bad. Everyone has good and bad in him. But there has to be some motivation for a person to keep on doing good for very often it is a thankless job. Regards, Marshall