I know. That’s what I was saying.
Also, first you have the congregation rooting for you. Secondly, you start wanting to include the church in your will. It really is about the next generation.
Look, you won’t believe me, but you guys have walked a difficult path. I know, because I thought about walking away from God many times and I didn’t.
I don’t regret my decision, however, because I found God to be rewarding.
I’m not asking you to follow God, I’m asking you to create an entity of your own choice and help other young atheists along.
Along to what?
They already don’t believe in a god so we win! Yay atheism!
So, to help other atheits along - especially young atheists - we should make up a entity/god to help - kinda like Christian’s did?
We know. This is incredibly obvious, and I don’t know why you think you have to explain.
Yes, we know: churches and religions take money from their followers so the churches can perpetuate their wealth and power and their outdated laws forever. What a lovely gift for the next generation.
Please stop telling me what I’ve done. It’s incredibly presumptuous. It would be very presumptuous if you hadn’t had all this trouble understanding what atheism is and what atheists think. If you want to know if it’s difficult, ask.
We know, and we wouldn’t listen if you did.
I’m happy to talk to young atheists. I don’t see the need to set up a formal churchy structure because part of becoming an atheist - assuming you’re not raised in an atheist family, as some people are - is deciding on your own what you think on some of the big issues that religions address. Of course everybody goes through that process to some extent whether they are a believer or not, and nobody goes through it in a vacuum. But for atheists, I think that process of deciding for yourself is more important. I don’t have a vested interest in making sure other people in the future think what I think. I’m not going to get rewarded in heaven for it and I haven’t sunk a bunch of money into my beliefs with tithing. I am not a joiner and I really don’t want to belong to a big community of atheist believers who work to indoctrinate young people. The concept basically gives me the creeps, and since it’s not what I wanted when I was younger, I expect most future atheists won’t want it either.
I’ve been reading this thread for some time and haven’t bothered responding, but I have to put my two cents in.
WHY oh WHY do you think there is any need for an “entity” to help atheists along? You remind me of people that think I must have an empty space inside me because they think they have Jesus inside them and since clearly I don’t I must have some horrible gap in my existence. There is no entity that helps atheists along, and there is no need for such an entity. Mutual encouragement comes in many variations; religious and non-religious. There is no one form of it, so it is ludicrous to talk about atheists creating some particular method of mutual encouragement.
I’ve got one, thanks (theist, remember?). So do a lot of the other posters in the thread. We don’t object to the notion of community - just to your poor reasoning and bizarre ideas on the nature of atheism and word definitions.
As repeated ad infinitum, there are already groups of atheists that serve this purpose - just not a general one. Likewise, there’s no such general monotheistic group, much less Protestant or Christian or what have you.
But you are calling for a general “all atheists” organization. What you fail to realize, and continue to fail to realize, is that a general atheists organization makes as much damned sense as an “all monotheists” organization.
You are not only still conflating any/all religious faith and belief structures with a certain narrow brand of American Protestantism, which is itself a narrow slice of the general Christian experience, you are also still conflating atheism with religion.
And you still need to ask why we know you don’t get it?
Let’s look at the legacy portion of the question then. Some people say that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are atheists. There’s also people that say they are agnostic. It really doesn’t make that much difference.
Anyway, both of them have given substantial sums to charities. I’m sure they could have given these sums to large atheist organizations, but there weren’t any that they trusted.
Can you name a theist organization that is raking in the donations?
They did. Lots of their money went to charities that are not ostensibly religious (and no, agnostic is not the same as atheistic).
Try again.
You’re still thinking of “atheism” as some sort of organized body.
“Atheism” is no more an organized body than “monotheism”.
Individual charities can be religious (of various stripes). Individual charities can also be agnostic (of various stripes). Those individuals give large sums to charities that don’t have ostensibly religious messages, which is consistent with their beliefs.
And you’re still not getting it.
The Red Cross (or Red Crescent in some countries) and the Salvation Army tend to do ok. Places of worship, including churches and those awful televangelists, certainly rake in donations.
That said, many of the big name charities don’t espouse a particular or any religion.
Every church I have been a member of (Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, U-U - the wife and I shopped around a lot to find somewhere we were both comfortable) has had a small corps of members who were the ones who actually organized and did things. The other 97% of the congregation might show up for the Pot Luck with a bag of chips.
So, no, unless you are one of the movers-and-shakers, membership in a church does not impel any more action in an individual than non-membership does. People who like to be involved involve themselves, most everyone else just kinda drifts along in their wake.
Good grief, now you are conflating church and charity.
There are plenty of secular charities. Personally, I choose to donate time and money to Doctors Without Borders, Shelter Box, the local food bank, and others sponsored by Rotary, but there are many to choose from.
I assume they donated because of the beneficial activities of those charities, not the religious affiliations of those charities. If that is the case, why does it matter if the charities are purely atheist?
That said, I’ve never really thought of the United Way or Red Cross as religious (don’t know whether Gates and Buffett donated to them; just pointing them out as large charities).
It’s a [del]relatively[/del] vanishingly small part of all atheists’ world view. You should try to wrap your brain around that last sentence. It’s key. Unless I’m actually discussing religion and/or atheism, as in this thread, the concept of the existence/non-existence of god, and even the very concept of god, never even crosses my mind. Most atheists are the same. “God”, as a concept, just doesn’t really matter to us… at all. We spend no time at all even thinking about it, except when we are engaged in an “Internet Circle-Jerk”, like this thread. Or maybe it would be better described as a “Cluster-Fuck”.
I never walked away from God, or even thought about it. I just looked around me one day, and saw there wasn’t actually anyone there, and never had been, and I had not, in fact, been relying on that non-existent “anyone”. It wasn’t difficult, at all. Some atheists were more bothered by their loss of faith, probably because they had more faith than me, to begin with. Many of us just realized we never really had any faith, in the first place, to lose. You can’t lose what you never had.
And there you go again, equating atheism with religion. That sentence is just utterly nonsensical, and can only be uttered by someone who utterly fails to grok the term “atheist”, and what it actually means and implies.
In other words, what ^Antibob^, there^, just said, better than I did.
My point was that those organizations are not theist organizations. In the case or Red Cross/Red Crescent I don’t believe that they put forth much of a theistic package from what my, limited, experience shows. Places of worship are not expounding theism so much as expounding their world view, which happens to include a theistic base.
I would not consider any of the above to be groups that expound on the benefits of theism in general. Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps there is a priest out there who is just happy that his talking to you happened to convince you in the realities of Odin instead of Jesus but I doubt it.
I think Cyros is asking if Gates and Buffet are giving any money to some overtly theistic organizations. Their major areas of focus are health, economic development, and education, so I expect there’s not too much connection to religious charities. They’re also involved in some issues that some religious groups are opposed to, like climate change, getting women into business, and dealing with HIV and AIDS. pchaos, try to comprehend the idea that not everything atheists do has to be related to atheism. People have been explaining this over and over for several pages. While some religious people argue that your religion should be reflected in everything you do, it doesn’t work that way for atheists because atheism isn’t a religion and atheists don’t want it to be one.
Consider the meaning of the name International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement - it combines a Christian symbol and an Islamic symbol. I think those reflect the roots of the charity but I don’t think it does anything actually religious at this ponit.
Am I to take it that you think Atheists cannot be trusted, but somehow theists can?
As a rule, its only theists that like to wear their charitable stuff on the sleeve like a badge - most atheists do it not to impress others, but simply because its the right thing to do.
That’s pretty much the theist assumption about us. Just look at everything pchaos has assumed in this thread.
Agreed - just calling him out on it.