I've decided to quit faffing about and admit that I'm an atheist

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m opening this in MPIMS rather than GD because I don’t believe this is truly witnessing, at least not by any reasonable definition of that term. I’m not trying to persuade anyone to abandon his or her religion; I’m not asserting that Christians are self-deluded, that agnostics are fence-sitters, or that Hindus are silly. I’m just talking about me.

So Mrs. Rhymer and I were at the bookstore the other day, because I’m a nerd and she’s married to one. (She’d be one herself but she’s too cute.) After browsing for quite a while, we found ourselves in the Religion section, where we came across this book by Bart Ehrman. Along with C. S. Lewis’s Miracles, she picked up to read in the cafe over hot cocoa.

I’m reasonably with Ehrman and with theodicy; Mrs. Rhymer is not. So after a few minutes perusal she told me what she’d read and asked whether I thought she should buy it. As I opened my mouth to answer, i realized something: that, despite the fact that I call myself a Christian deist, I am utterly unconvinced by any testimony of God’s existence, and moreover feel there is no persuasive evidence of any God existing, either. I realized that despite the fact that I find Ehrman’s writing dull and repetitive and Lewis’s entertaining and imaginative, I agree with Ehrman’s reasoning and conclusions much more than Lewis’s. I realized that, sometime in the last few years, I’ve completely stopped believing.

Just a head’s up. I’ll post some more if anyone’s interested.

2

I’m with you. The whole non-believing thing just kind of crept up on me and one day I realized that I didn’t really believe in god any more.

I don’t know exactly when it happened but I’m very careful who I tell. People have the strangest reactions.

3

I finally admitted I was an agnostic a couple of years ago after reading JREF for quite a while (and then I stopped reading that because Randi got on my nerves). I’ve decided that whatever part of a person lets them believe, I don’t have. I’ve had people say they ‘hear’ god or have other spiritual experiences; I never have. I tried for years and years to feel the things everyone else did, and it never worked. I have an open challenge to any deity - if they want me, they just have to let me know they exist (I’m not asking for miracles, just the mildly inexplicable and identifying)

There’s nothing in my life I can point to and say ‘god did that,’ it’s all stuff I’ve worked for. But I won’t say there is no god, just that s/he is apparently not interested in me.

4

Well, I wont welcome you to the dark side or anything, because I respect those who hold religious beliefs. My 2 cents is that I’ve NEVER believed in a God. My parents did not expose me to any religion as a child, and once I figured out what it was all about I seriously questioned how, as David Crosby put it on a non-related topic “Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong.”

ETA: Stephen Stills - Sorry

5

I can’t say I have never had the experience of believing I was in contact with hte divine. I was raised in a pentecostal family and believed (because I was never taught there were other possibiities) in the Christian God until I was 12, when I had a very specific and unpleasant anti-Ephiphany. In the late 90s i went the other way, again at a specific and identifiable moment. Now, though, I’ve simply lost that belief. There are too many contrary pieces of evidence, and too few (read: none) pieces of evidence of God’s existence to support a belief for which I no longer have any emotional attachment. It’s all very “Hollow Men.”

6

I think there is a line from Seinfeld’s David Puddy, “Hey, I’m not the one who is going to burn in Hell forever.”

Each of us has go go where our own good sense takes us. You ought to keep your eyes and ears open, but you know where you are now.

7

And that, ladies & germs, is why Paul in Saudi will be allowed to live relatively unmolested once I & my monkey butlers conquer the Earth.

8

(Where is the rabbit with a pancake when you need it?)

I found the actual exchange here:

Elaine: David, I’m going to hell! The worst place in the world! With devils and those caves and the ragged clothing! And the heat! My god, the heat! I mean, what do you think about all that?

Puddy: Gonna be rough.

Elaine: Uh, you should be trying to save me!

Puddy: Don’t boss me! This is why you’re going to hell.

Elaine: I am not going to hell and if you think I’m going to hell, you should care that I’m going to hell even though I am not.

I liked it better the way I remembered it.

9

Wait…can you be a despotic god-king if you’re an atheist? Don’t you have to at least believe in yourself?

10

Ah, yes, those odd little moments when you see. They never quite hit when you expect them to, do they?

My moment of realization went the other way, but we find what we find, don’t we?

I like the way Paul in Saudi puts it, you know where you are now.

11

I was raised in a mildly-practicing Catholic family. I went to Catholic school for 13 years. I was thoroughly indoctrinated. I thought I believed. I tried to believe, I really tried. I spun things around to adapt God to my growing doubts, at 10 I remember thinking that the whole Jesus thing didn’t make any sense, and I figured that maybe Jewish people had it right. Jesus wasn’t the Messiah after all. In the end I was of the mind that maybe there was just “something bigger”.

About 7 years ago I had to face it: I had been deluding myself because I truly wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that bad people would eventually be punished and good people rewarded (my definition of these differed from that of the Catholic church though). I wanted to think that my loved ones will not just turn into dust. But I couldn’t believe. No matter how hard I bent things around my disbelief. No matter the willingness to even entertain other religions as a choice.

So one day I came out to myself. But to this day only about 5 people, including my husband, know that. Some people suspect I have “lapsed” but do not know to what extent. It is better to be a convicted pedophile than an atheist here. And I am only half exaggerating.

12

I find it an odd thing that this sort of realisation or admission matters to people.

My approach has always been: Believe what you like, as long as you leave me alone and don’t make a fool of yourself over it. If you get in my face about it, then I will speak out my side of the story.

13

I never believed that good non-Christians would go to hell. What kind of loving god would do that?

And I do believe we have life after death, in a philosophical sense - we influence people, and they influence people because we did, and so on. And that’s enough heaven and hell to satisfy me.

14

Bing-fucking-go.

15

Welcome to our world. You no doubt went through considerable questioning and maybe even some spiritual anguish before that epiphanal (is that a word?) moment in the bookstore cafe. There will be more. But you are about to experience a freedom and purity of character you never thought possible. Who knows, you may even someday return to church, having reconciled the metaphor of religion to real-world living. That could end up being the best of both worlds – the communion with your fellow humans and the liberty of free thought.

16

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII wiiiiiiiiiiill!!!

Now, here’s your Darwin fish for your car, and oh! can’t forget your altar for infant sacrifices, now can we? Ah, and to commune with Satan–sorry, we’re out of iPhones, so for the moment this Ouija board (hey, it’s got GPS) will have to do.

Please report to the nearest UN headquarters for your NWO name, rank, and serial number.

There’s a Bible burning next week. See you there!

All hail the dark void!

17

I grew up with out television. We couldn’t recieve it where I grew up. I did however grow up with a room full of books.

We had english translations of all the worlds major religions, and several “versions” of the bible. We also had works by Feynman, Heinlein and encyclopedias dating back to the 1930’s. We had the great works of literature, and subscriptions to National Geopgraphic, Harvard Lampoon and Scientific American, and Even National Lampoon. Voltaire, Aristotle and e.e. cummings were all at my fingertips as soon as I learned to read. And more.

By the time I was 15, I knew that faith/religion was a sociocultural construct that had little to do with “cut and dried” reality. i was pretty convinced that there was no life after death, no soul, no god.

And I was comfortable with it.

The other thing I learned is that “some” people need to believe otherwise. They need to “have a reason to exist” out side of their own fact of existance. They need to have an external , socially mediated set of moral rules, as they have never been educated in raw ethics. They need to believe that their time here on earth is some small subset of a greater , eternal “pie in the sky when you die as long as you agrees with the god guy”, like some ultimate judgemental parent.

I think of those people as handicapped. Just as a polio victim may not be able to walk, I thinkl of them as handicapped by a set of socially / culturally/familially ingrained beliefs, which limit their ability to love, understand (outside of dogma), or simply live comfortably. They are crippled, and I pity them.

I also learned that these crippled people were the majority in society, and I had to create adaptive social skills to be able to deal with them. So… I will let them have separate schools, so that they may infect their children with their cancerous meme. I will fight to my last day to let them force their sick , limiting, guilt based sickness upon a public school. (as example).

I have sat on library boards, school boards and acted as a public representative consultant on tax reform for religious institutions.

I have had my child threatened, my front windows smashed and was once beaten quite badly - but NOT for my point of view… buit simply because the things I say were so un arguable that the only result was violence (the last resort of the unreasonable)… they had no rational rebuttal for my point of veiw.

Now here’s the irony… I identify religioulsly as a Sufi…

not an athiest at all

FML

18

Good luck with it. I’ve always been an atheist to some extent (i’ve never really had any epiphanies, at least), so my advice may not be worth much. I don’t know that i’d be as positive as Sunrazor; committed atheism is what you make of it and what it makes of you. I think the most important thing to remember isn’t just the epiphany, but that we can have epiphanies; that we can change our minds, sometimes even before we realise we have. We should never accept that what we have is the final state of being.

Also I shall probably attempt to indoctrinate you into utilitarianism at some point. Just so you know, O Grand Overlord. :wink:

19

Atheism Against the Law?
Scientific proof that atheism requires a belief in miracles.

Wow google ad, I had no idea miracles were within the realm of science!

Anyway, I would consider myself either atheist or agnostic, but the whole atheism epiphany is a foreign concept to me. I was raised in a completely agnostic household, no church or synagogue services or anything. I never even had a Santa Claus epiphany, I just remember one year when Christmas came around I just somehow already knew that he wasn’t real.

I never really sat back and thought about whether I believed in God. I grew up hearing about him from various media, but it was always in a sort of vague, metaphorical sense, much like Santa, so it never seemed real to me. It’s like in old cartoons and movies where the characters don’t believe in Santa (or anything fantastical) but are proven wrong by the end. It was a silly fantasy that worked in movieland, but wasn’t reality.

I don’t mean to denigrate anyone’s beliefs, but that’s just my point of view on the issue.

20

Skald the Rhymer writes:

> I’m reasonably with Ehrman and with theodicy; Mrs. Rhymer is not. So after a
> few minutes perusal she told me what she’d read and asked whether I thought
> she should buy it. As I opened my mouth to answer, i realized something: that,
> despite the fact that I call myself a Christian deist, I am utterly unconvinced by
> any testimony of God’s existence, and moreover feel there is no persuasive
> evidence of any God existing, either. I realized that despite the fact that I find
> Ehrman’s writing dull and repetitive and Lewis’s entertaining and imaginative, I
> agree with Ehrman’s reasoning and conclusions much more than Lewis’s. I
> realized that, sometime in the last few years, I’ve completely stopped believing.

To be precise, Ehrman says that he has no firm belief about God anymore. He says that if God exists he doesn’t have much to do with the Judeo-Christian tradition, since it doesn’t answer any important questions for him. He says that he isn’t interested in trying to convert anyone to anything, and he doesn’t think anyone is much convinced by any of his arguments. He hasn’t even managed to persuade his wife by his arguments, since she remains a devout Episcopalian. He says that the only people who try to convert him to anything these days are atheists who don’t understand why he remains an agnostic.

I’m just reporting on his beliefs, not agreeing or disagreeing with them.