Bacterial Life

If the presence of bacterial life is as is reported, then many people kill thousands of bacteria every day through actions that at the human scale are very trite or non-threatening, like cooking frozen food or taking specific medicines.  This regular "genocide" of microbes is something that many people likely become so used to that they do not even think about it or that they do not think about with moral horror.  At the thought of a deity--which is often assumed to, if it exists, be loving and happen to want what various individual people want--not even causing human suffering, but simply not ending it, many people also react with anger, frustration, dismissal, or even moral condemnation, as if their preferences would in any way impact the nature of morality one way or another.

The kind of person who believes that a multitude of types of bacteria exist without any firsthand empirical evidence, much less logical proof (and most of one's sensory perceptions could be total illusions of consciousness anyway, so it is not as if seeing something proves it is there), and yet is fine with killing them by the thousands with no proof that they do not have the same general capacity for experience that humans do is a hypocrite if they would complain about a real or imagined deity who would casually kill or ignore humans.  After all, the differences between a human and a bacterium would be miniscule compared to the differences between God and a human.  There are some qualities all three share, like being logically possible and incapable of not being governed by the metaphysical laws of logic, but the differences would be vast.

If someone is truly opposed to the idea of a deity treating humans like this--something that is already invalid if they are motivated by subjectively appeasing their personal moral feelings instead of a true concern for morality at the expense of gratifying emotions--but still thought it was fine for humans to almost thoughtlessly slaughter lesser beings, there is definite hypocrisy present if they would attack even the idea of an apathetic deity while they scarcely try to alleviate the potential pain of subhuman creatures.  Most people, however, theists and atheists alike, are not interested in any serious exploration of concepts and truth, as much as they might sometimes pretend otherwise.  This is how such ideological hypocrisy flourishes.

The point is not that humans casually killing bacteria is wrong, as this does not logically follow from any provable fact and has no evidence in its favor (though even the existence of bacteria and other people cannot be proven, just supported with evidences that could be illusory).  The point is that people tend to think little or not at all about killing life forms that by all appearances are a lesser class of being, though whether any other organism is conscious or what the contents of its consciousness are cannot be known.  At the same time, they might criticize the concept of theism out of the mistaken idea that theism necessarily entails God treating humans like this, when this is not even what all forms of theism would involve.