To start with, I'll remind you I don't believe in predestination but am inclined to be convinced by the arguments of the Orthodox universalists. Just so I'll have said it before you misrepresent what I'm about to say.
The only practical reason that anyone, especially an atheist, would get worked up over Calvin-Augustinian style predestination, in which God creates people who he, from before their creation, knew he would later condemn to eternal suffering, is that those holding that belief would be believed to act differently in the here-and-now to those they figured were among the damned and those who they believe were the ones elected by God to eternal bliss in heaven.
Atheists, such as yourself, would certainly not care about an eternal damnation you don't believe in and you don't care that the consequences of believing in predestination is to believe in a god who is a monster, the most evil of all conceivable entities who created those unfortunate creatures who, through whatever accidental life history or intended plan, would fail to avoid eternal agony. Well, why would you care about that since you don't believe in God or any god?
The idea that you could expect people who held such predestinarian views to act monstrously or indifferently to those they figured were destined for eternal suffering, assumes that their belief in the final destiny of people should determine how you view them in the here-and-now.
Well, if that's true for Calvinists and other predestinarians, why isn't it also true of atheists who, a I pointed out, believe in a far bleaker, far more depressing view of the ultimate destiny of obliteration for all, regardless of their goodness in life? I pointed out that the materialism that is the basis of atheist faith did, in fact, lead many atheist thinkers to discount all aspects of human consciousness, human thought, human life as being either a nonexistent illusion, our very consciousness disdained as primitive, stupid "folk psychology*" And, in a practical demonstration in the here-and-now, the officially atheist regimes have been uniformly blood baths exceeding anything in the age when theocracy was alleged (by some pretty biased and pretty bad historical assertion) to dominate.
Atheism leads to habits of indifference towards other people** and contains no prohibition on treating anyone you want to harm or destroy that is in any sense ultimate. The worst of the preaching of predestinarian Calvinists was at least done with a theoretical prospect of leading to a true repentance which would have to follow sin in order to keep the possibility of salvation open, atheism has no such prospect of salvation. The worst of the actions of the Puritans, those who participated in genocidal campaigns against Indians, who hanged witches, went against Biblical prohibitions on murder and the words of Jesus. Some of those involved came to see what they did as a serious sin that they had to repent of, an atheist might have some regrets for what they did but they'd find no basis for doing that in their scientistic materialism. They'd have to do so through habits of thought, a remainder of the same kind of "folk" thinking that atheists love to deride.
The logical view of this is that the anti-predestinarian view where people can be saved through their own efforts by the grace of God, since, if it were truly believed, it would necessitate the preservation of the lives of even the worst among us so that they would remain open to the possibility of repentance and redemption and so salvation. If predestination is alleged to produce depravity in its believers - and there is no system of belief more bleakly predestinarian than atheist materialism - then those who did not believe in that could be expected to be less depraved than those who do. And if the assumption is that a belief in the ultimate disposition of a person will tend to produce better treatment of those bound for glory, then, surely, the belief most likely to produce good treatment of all is the belief that all are, eventually, destined for salvation.
All I've done here is to look at your claim and its logical consequences. It's a widely held claim among the middle-brow college trained secularists, these days, and not a few of those with higher brows. That doesn't mean it isn't total bull shit. I think it is.
* If you haven't read the Churchlands and the other, currently stylish, eliminativists on that and the total absurdity and irrationality of their "cognitive-philosophy" it is truly ridiculous. We live in an age that has produced academic darkness and delusion far more insane than that of the middle-ages in the name of enlightenment and science.
** Reading the dismissal of the mass murders of Stalin, and Mao by Marxists of most of the 20th century and into today, of even people I used to revere demoting the murders of millions by Mao, Pol Pot to a lesser status than their ideological dogma has led me to believe that atheists do, in fact, have a far greater tendency to devalue human lives because they view them as material objects. I've come to see that so many of those held up as some kind of figures of moral rectitude were far from what they were sold as being.
You can say the same, of course, about many a religious figure but, while the religious figures were at odds with the moral content of religion - that they demonstrated less than decisive and effective belief in what they claimed to - you can't say that the atheists were at odds with a materialist view of people. There is nothing inconsistent with atheism about participating in or overseeing genocide, there is with Christianity, even of the predestinarian kind.
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