-I dont support the same things religious people support. I am against most of the things you see religious people express an interest in like conservative politics, banning gay marriage, prayer in school, censoring the media, ending abortion, etc. I don’t want to believe those things. Mainstream religion to me implies conservative opinions.
-I don’t think its rational to think a personal god who shares our values created a universe of 50000 quintillion stars and only populated one. That is like a single blade of grass thinking the entire earth exists for its benefit.
-Research into god shows god doesn’t really interact with humans. Prayer research is contradictory and shows prayer is unreliable. I don’t want to end up depending on something I can’t depend on.
-I’ve had bad experiences with the subject
-Reading up on evolutionary books on the subject like the god gene I’ve come to believe that the concept of faith exists because it serves and evolutionary purpose, not because it is based on fact.
Priceguy - you can decide to believe something. Just pretend you already believe it and visualize yourself being convinced of it. Over time you’ll start to believe it.
I don’t consider myself an atheist, an apathetic (which I take as a perjorative and vaugely insulting term) or an agnostic. I consider myself to be at war with god.
if this world is the product of the will of a god, then I see that god to be a monster - a seething, vile, heartless, vicious, pitiless beast who refuses to be accountable for his arbitrary and petulant actions. Who refuses to punish the iniquitous, as it threatens and allows even the good and inncoent to suffer and die incompehnsibly horrible deaths. All with no attempt to account for why it does these things. Who refuses to put to right and punish those who commit outrages in its name.
So I defy god. I refuse to acknowledge it has any moral authority over me, nor has any right to judge me on my sins which are far less grievous than its’. this god creature is a monster - perhaps a monster of the imagination of men, but nonetheless a monster. So it’s not that I do not believe, it’s that I don’t fear, worship, respect or accept.
Another reason is that I support science because science works. I feel that one of the reasons humanity became so scientifically minded is because research into natural laws 300 years ago proved that there is no being interacting with us as the laws of physics, math, chemistry, etc. remain constant. Its harder to believe in the parting of the red sea when you understand that the laws of physics don’t change, etc. I’d rather rely on science than God, and I worry that God will get in the way of science. I feel humanity is better off when we realize the world is built unfairly and amorally and we use science to fix it rather than the idea that God invented the world and can be relied upon to change things for the better.
I know I am anti-religion, but I try not to be. But to me, how a religious society deals with threats reminds me of the black plague. The plague hit and people begged god for help and got none. People were trying desperately to figure out how to please god by flagellating themselves and persecuting the jews (the same way modern religious figures blame earthquakes, terrorism, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc on groups like gays, apathetic muslims, support for the US, etc). Nowadays we deal with diseases with global research instead. On some level I feel the 2 ways of looking at the world are vastly different. A muslim looks at an earthquake in Pakistan and sees punishment for supporting the US and secularization. An athiest sees geology at work and tries to figure out how to fix it.
My point is not that everything Newton believed is sensible – I’m just offering a counterexample to the claim that any intelligent person wouldn’t believe in God. (Which I think is pretty strongly implied in panache45’s statement above.) Yeah, in the case of alchemy one could probably say that any intelligent person alive today wouldn’t believe it – but this is clearly not true of theism, which to this day has many obviously intelligent adherents (in addition to some not-so-intelligent ones).
If you want to say you don’t think belief in God is well-justified, fine, but acting like everyone who believes in God must be a moron is bigoted and offensive. (This isn’t directed at you, GorillaMan, but at the attitude that panache45’s comment suggestd, along with similar comments I’ve seen posted elsewhere on the SDMB.)
For what it’s worth, I’m not religious, at least not as most people would define the term (although I do find theology to be an interesting subject). I have some vague metaphysical beliefs, but nothing as detailed as the claims of the major religions. To answer the OP: I don’t belong to any major religion because I have no particular reason to believe any of them, and because in many cases I find some of their beliefs contradictory.
Well, it wasn’t intended to be insulting or pejorative, so I apologize. I characterize myself as apathetic (in the religious sense), because I don’t really care if any particular religion is true or not.
Anyway, I hope I’m not miscontruing panache45’s comment, but saying “what’s kept me from believing is the fact that I have a brain” seems pretty much equivalent to saying “Religious believers are brainless idiots”. Atheists who act like all theists are idiots piss me off just as much as theists who act like only an idiot wouldn’t believe.
That’s how some people mean it, but for a lot of us, it means something more like “I’ve put a lot of thought into this and examined it critically, and in my understanding of the world I’m living in, gods and religions just don’t make sense.” It’s glib and I know how it comes across, but there’s no denying that that plays a role. I have to admit that I’m proud that I came to my own conclusions about how the world works instead of accepting someone else’s orthodoxy. It’s not that people are stupid for doing so, it’s that I know it isn’t right for me.
As opposed to a religion thread where seven-eighths (or whatever) of the world’s population gets tossed into a lake of fire?
God (or whatever/whoever) is so far removed from my life experience that all the apocryphal stories of the bible seem like so much incredible bullshit. You might as well ask me to kiss Hank’s ass.
When I’m approached by somebody asking me to believe, and they throw the bible in my face as “evidence”, I tell them they’ll need to do a LOT better than that.
This is actually pretty close to what made me an atheist, I think (I was very young at the time, so I’m not sure I’m not post-rationalizing). But I was aware that:
a) Almost everyone believes that all religions other than the one they hold are wrong, immoral, and usually “obviously silly,”
b) But the one they hold is obviously correct. (i.e. they believe that given free choice of all religions and without initial bias, this is the one they’d pick because it represents “reality.”)
Paired with
c) The “obviously correct” religion is almost always the one their parents/community believed in, and is different from place to place.
It made me start to wonder if the community was creating the belief and not the other way around. From there atheism is an easy step; all religions are pretty darn silly when explained to an unbeliever - the trick is to see the ridiculousness in the one you’re surrounded by, and not just all the others.
Thats actually a well respected theory. Daniel Dennett, among others, has written on it. It is around 40-50% from what I’ve read, which is about what most psychological traits seem to be.
Dennett seems to feel it is a 2 way relationship between men & religion, like the bacteria in your gut that digest food for you. You benefit and so do they. Religion is like a mental virus and has the same relationship. And that is why the concept of spirituality & religion has survived and become common. The religion gives you
-Unity (people have something to unify them which is good for group cohesion)
-Strength to face adversity. Religion gives one the ability to see the long term and the strength to deal with the threats in the real world. People can and do call on god during hard times.
-the placebo effect. Religion can strengthen the placebo effect (God will heal me, etc), which is useful for things like medicine.
-control over your environment. Control is tied into immune response and responsiveness to the world. Religion paints the world into black/white situation. Everything complex is due to ‘angering god’ or ‘pleasing god’. Complex geological, epidiological and meterological phenomena like HIV or hurricanes aren’t due to complex viruses or wind patterns (for 99% of human history, humans didn’t know these things existed and they had no way of finding out like we do), they are due to making God angry. That sense of false understanding of the world gives people a sense of control If I just stop doing X,Y,Z, then the diseases and hurricanes will stop. And that false understanding of the world and how it works is one of the reasons I don’t want to be religious.
-a free police force. If you closely examine what god wants and believes it is almost exactly what that particular society believes. For example the western Christian god opposes homosexuality, animal sacrafices, the murder of innocent american children and is ok with killing Iraqi terrorists and getting rich. At the same time american culture is opposed to homosexuality, animal sacrafices, the murder of innocent american children and ok with killing iraqi terrorists and getting rich. Nevermind that the iraqi terrorists are more religious and have a stronger relationship with God than we do or that the bible constantly calls for animal sacrafices or that Jesus condemns wealth. This also ties into the last point I made, because when something bad happens people take that as an implication that they need to tighten the reins of the social police. They need to get more intolerant towards things that threaten group survival and group identity. So people persecute (or want to persecute) jews, gays, pro-US politicans, left wing pundits or whomever that culture finds distatesful. Bad events are fuel to tighten social control.
In exchange for these benefits the religion gets to keep surviving (its members have a survival advantage), and that is what evolution is at the end of the day, a competition to survive. He feels that the only religions alive now (there are only a handful now of the thousands that have existed) are the most competent and finding new believers and keeping the old ones from leaving. Think of all the fundamentalist christians here in the US. They want to convert others out of fear that they’ll end up in hell, christian missionaries are all over the world spreading the gospel. On the other side of the world muslims want to forcibly convert everyone to Islam. Catholicism prohibits birth control among its members for example. That is a damn good religion as far as memes go, as prohibiting birth control means there will be more kids. You have to wonder if there is any connection between the opposition to abortion and sex ed among religious people and the desire of the religion to propagate itself. That could just be a coincidence though. But perhaps the ‘sanctity of life’ the religious right is always talking about is just the equivalent of a virus trying to coax cells into making more cells so it has more cells to infect.
But as I recall it, mine was more along the lines of "How can we - and God - possibly say all those Chinese and Indians are wrong?
“And if God sends a perfectly moral Hindu to hell - or doesn’t let him into heaven, then he really sounds like a dick.”
Really makes you wonder if this was SO obvious to us in grade school, what is so different about us that we are so much in the minority.
I’ve seen a bumper sticker I need to get: “MILITANT AGNOSTIC - I don’t know and you don’t either.”
Interesting post, Wesley. I’ve also come across, somewhere, a comparison of the spread of religion to the spread of a virus, which depends for transmission on the proximity and quantity of receptors susceptible to it, their degree of susceptibility, and its strength among its hosts. That analogy can apply to any new idea, not just religion, with the exception that a religion that cannot be transferred to enough recipients quickly enough, like a viral plague, will die out.
I was raised Catholic, in fact I went Catholic school for primary school, and was an altar boy until I was in high school.
Oddly enough, I don’t ever remember a time when I believed in God. From my earliest memories I pretended to believe in god, because that’s what was expected of me, and what the hell, go along to get along. It’s kind of like when kids pretend to believe in Santa Claus, to avoid disappointing their parents. I did that too.
To this day, I have trouble believing that there are people who believe in god. Deep down, I always assume they’re pretending, like I was. I realize that’s wrong, that there are people who sincerely believe, but I’m just not capable of empathizing with that belief. It’s probably a character flaw.
I can’t say that I ever believed. I just went to church occassionally and said prayers and all that stuff, but I never recall doing it for reasons other than a vague obligation to conform. When I began to learn to think, I did not become an apostate; I gave up the obligation to conform.
Dennett feels that due to the pressures of natural selection only the fittest religions still exist, only the ones that are best at converting people, maintaining them, and preventing people from leaving are left. All the ones that didn’t eventually died out. When the catholics conquered South America they forced their religion on the people. Hundreds of years later and most south americans are still catholic.
Throughout history and even today many religions have a strong compusion among their members to convert new people, penalize those who leave (not too long ago it was news that people wanted to kill a muslim who converted to christianity in Afghanistan. Christianity until recently tortured those who didn’t believe or convert), maintain publicity, be fruitful and spread the gospel will do better than those that do not.
TimeWinder - I didn’t see your post earlier but that was an extremely clear statement.
I’m utterly apathetic. My belief or lack thereof won’t change whether there is a god or not, and my behavior wouldn’t change even if I was presented with irrefutable proof of god, so I don’t see the point in wasting any more time on the question than I already have.