I was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic elementary school, but I don’t think I ever really bought it. I liked the stories, but they were just stories for me. I can remember watching the movie The Curse of the Cat People when I was a kid and getting it confused with BVM stories. It wasn’t until years later when I re-watched it and realized it was just a horror movie (although a nice, atmospheric one). My younger sister was a believer and stayed one much longer than I did. She told me fairly recently that she was scared to death that I was going to hell for being an unbeliever. I laughed like crazy. I remember hearing about Pascal’s Wager and getting really angry. Who could believe in a god who could be so easily deceived? It just seemed so dumb. But I didn’t think* I* was especially smart to think the way I did.
Scumpup, you get sarcastic when I respond to your follow up question and I have to ask why, especially when you post the above, my bolding. As others have already noted, you’re essentially cherry picking, willfully discounting any individual’s account that doesn’t fit your theory’s narrative. As to why people like Dawkins, et al , are so vocal, I believe that has been addressed upthread.
I don’t think great intelligence is needed to determine the number of apples in an empty sack.
It’s harder when the people around you are saying, “look at that sack, sure you can carry all those apples?” Or “before we begin, let us each eat an apple from our sacks.” Or worst of all, “You will receive all the apples when you die.”
Let me be as clear as I can. I don’t think that atheism has a unique and universally agreed meaning. I assume you don’t either; why else say:
I wasn’t going to mention this explicitly, but I kind of feel pushed into it: for example, Atheists Who Hate God is more or less a trope, it comes up so often. Try googling it – 3.7 million hits. People other than you or I don’t necessarily share your chosen meaning. That’s why I said:
It’s not about what I think it means, it’s about what other people think it means.
Amongst more rational interpretations, the wiki page on atheism actually has a long section on definitions and types. So there’s a range of views out there, from (what I would call) the absurd all the way through to the philosophical. The wiki section is worth a read. I’m with Sam Harris:
j
I’m not sure I fully understand this. But I do think it’s rather brilliant.
j
I said that because you appear to have a bizarre and wildly uncommon understanding of the term which I most certainly don’t agree with. So as far as you’re concerned the word means something different than it does as far as I’m concerned.
That said, there is some wiggle regarding the actual meaning - mostly about whether it implicitly means hard atheist, such that soft atheism requires explicit delineation.
It is of course also the case that there are people who don’t understand the word at all, like those who think that atheism is a code for satan worship or those who think it means misotheist or those who think that it means faithlike evidence-immune certainty or those who think it’s the name of some kind of religion. But people having the wrong idea about the definition doesn’t change the definition of the word; it just means those people are wrong.
“Women who wear dresses” has 425 million hits. Therefore the definition of “woman” is “person who wears a dress”.
Seriously dude, if you want to use google to define a word, use it to google a dictionary.
Here’s where you rejoin the bulk of atheists who avoid the label “atheist” - it’s not that they’re not atheists, it’s that their theist parents are idiots who will think they’re demon worshipers if they call themselves atheists. It’s people who don’t want to kibosh their chances for elected office by telling the truth about themselves. It’s people who just don’t want to deal the the hordes of people to take pro-religion to the level of bigotry.
For persons such as these the term “agnostic” has long been a convenient refuge. This has happened so much that (unlike atheism), the dictionary definition of ‘agnostic’ has actually changed to include a second definition where it’s not about what you know or believe at all - it’s about what you’re willing to commit to.
I read that section and noted that it neither includes misotheism (atheists who hate god) nor the idea that atheism is a belief system.
We also don’t need the term “bald”; we can just use the term “non-colorfully-haired”.
For myself I’m glad there’s a term for “not a believer in any god”. It means when I want to describe my beliefs regarding theism I can do it in a single word.
How do we measure “intelligence”?
With a Phd? Actually one of the smartest men I’ve known runs a transmission shop. Knows all about transmissions and other auto issues. Very religious man also.
But I dont think he ever went past tech school so the “world” wouldnt see it that way. The world measures intelligence by college degrees.
Now when the Phd’s car breaks down, you know who he has to turn to.
Dont we all know any people without college degrees or being a part of mensa who are very intelligent?
What’s your point?
It’s a PhD. An abbreviated form of Doctor of Philosophy.
I was bothered more by his apparent aversion to the non-possessive apostrophe, but I resisted mentioning it because that’s the kind of thing a Ph[COLOR=“Gray”]u[/COLOR]d would say. (I haven’t got one of those.)
When I was at MIT Professor Ed Fredkin, head of Project MAC, never quite got a college degree. I don’t think there is any doubt he was intelligent.
But being really good in one thing does not mean you are generally intelligent, and being highly intelligent does not mean you are good in everything (the Professor from Gilligan’s Island excluded.)
It appears to be a common trope among technicians about how the professor or engineer they are working for is actually dumb because he isn’t good at the practicalities of building things like the techs are. The techs don’t grasp the kind of intelligence needed to come up with new ideas that drive the project the techs are working on.
We’ve had lots of threads about how to define intelligence, so maybe we shouldn’t go there in this one. Doesn’t have anything to do with atheism.
I’m an atheist and I’m dumb as shit.
That doesn’t even make any sense. It’s not possible to hate something that one doesn’t believe exists.
No number of hits on the internet is going to change that.
It’s certainly possible to hate organized religion and to be atheist; and/or to hate being hassled for being atheist and be atheist. It’s also certainly possible that there are 3.7 million people, never mind 3.7 million hits, who can’t understand the difference between hating the way that some religious people behave and hating the god they claim to believe in.
As the religious are so fond of pointing out, many extremely intelligent historical figures were religious. Because historically virtually everyone was religious. Because, in the past, we really didn’t have any better explanation for a lot of things than “god did it”.
What’s critical is not so much intelligence per se. It’s knowledge, or lack of ignorance about the world. But the two are, of course, correlated. Intelligent people tend to absorb more of human knowledge, to be less ignorant. I doubt that (say) Isaac Newton would have had such an array of kooky superstitious beliefs if he had access to the knowledge we have in the 21st century.
The number of atheists has surely greatly increased since the Enlightenment, and since Darwin in particular, not because the human race has become more intelligent, but because we know far more about the universe. We can now explain virtually everything in naturalistic terms. We know where life came from, given a set of simple naturalistic laws. We can easily understand concepts of good and evil in naturalistic terms.
Sure, there are some things like consciousness that we don’t understand well; fundamental physics has struggled to make progress for a few decades; we don’t have satisfying answers to philosophical questions like “why is there something rather than nothing”. But no intelligent person with access to the sum of our modern human understanding of the universe can seriously think that traditional concepts of god like Thor, Zeus or Yahweh are credible answers to any of the remaining mysteries. If “god” still means anything sensible, it’s the hyper-advanced alien civilization that’s running the simulation that we’re living in.
I think the distinction between atheists and theists isn’t intelligence. It is grasping our place in the universe. Believers in God are basically pre-Copernican. Sure they don’t think the Earth is the center of the universe physically, but a lot think it is in terms of meaning. That we are somehow special to the creator of the universe - whether it created it 6,000 years ago of 13 billion years ago, is pre-Copernican.
It made sense when we thought that the Earth was the center of a sphere with stars hanging on the walls. It makes no sense when we are in one small planet circling a star that is one of billions in the galaxy which is one of billions in the universe.
Atheists know we aren’t the center of this universe.
I think you’re giving atheists too much credit. The vast majority of atheists (not counting kids under 3 or 4, who are too young to be anything else) just lack belief in God or gods, and really haven’t given much thought to it. I know I didn’t until I started hanging out here – I didn’t believe in anything, but I had never really been exposed to all of these discussions and arguments before.
I’m not giving us any credit for this, it is more an observation. Any reasonably rational theist is going to agree with our unimportant place in the universe once it is brought to their attention. We can hold two contradictory thoughts in our heads, and that god made the universe for us (not in six days) and we are unimportant are two that lots hold.
Some people are lucky like you and grow up in atheist or apathist households, where lack of belief didn’t require any work. I reasoned myself into atheism, though doing so didn’t cause any waves. But atheists growing up in religious households have to really think about it to come out.
As there are more openly atheist families, I think more will be like you and not start from belief due to parental and social norms. My kids are this way, thanks to me.
I’ve seen people get completely enraged at explicitly fictional characters and organizations before; it’s perfectly possible to hate things you don’t believe in.