Wrong about what? How can not being convinced to believe in something, be considered right or wrong? It is what it is. It’s not like we are making a purposeful decision to “not believe.” We just have not been convinced (due to the lack of convincing evidence) to cross the threshold to belief. Atheism is just a label applied to those who are without a belief in god. It refers to a state of being, just like being without hair is a state of being. Is being bald right or wrong?
I could care less about being an “atheist.” Like, I said, it is just a label to reflect my current state of non-belief (in gods). I am always open to any evidence which could lead me to a belief in god.
The closest I’ve been to death was spending about 40 seconds underwater while falling off a raft on the Zambezi on a class 5 rapid. I twice tried the roll into a ball and you will surface move. Didn’t help. I didn’t think about any gods. I just thought, “So, this is what dying is like”.
Somehow, without the help of any god, I finally popped to the surface and was rescued by a human in a kayak.
I’ve never had a crisis of non-faith. It wouldn’t make much sense, would it? Like, on Christmas, I’d suddenly doubt that Santa Claus wasn’t real, and think, well, maybe he’s real after all? And then talk myself out of believing in Santa Claus?
It turns out that my non-faith is a great comfort to me in times of sorrow. When some toddler gets maimed in a car accident, when my friend got cancer and died, when bad things happen to good people, I’d go crazy if I thought there was some entity who wanted it to happen. The fact that it’s just random crap happening to some sort-of-clever primates and doesn’t amount to a hill of beans makes it explicable. Martin got cancer because of some random DNA transcription error in one of his cells, not because he offended the gods, or because Jesus decided it was for the greater good.
Thing is, if we’re just primates with slightly larger brains who evolved on a ball of rock orbiting a random star, then our world makes sense. If God exists, what the fuck is the purpose of all this? What’s the meaning of human suffering? Why bother? So suffering or a crisis or hearing a bump in the dark doesn’t inspire anything like a re-appraisal of my belief in the supernatural. Atheism isn’t a mirror-image opposite of theism. It’s a different sort of belief.
No crisis of nonfaith here. The closest to it would be that I am, in general, less convinced of the “when you die, you stop existing” view that many (most?) atheists hold.
I don’t deny that is possible or likely, but I also think there’s a possibilty that some sort of consciousness / identity persists in some form. I don’t believe there’s anything supernatural at play, just that it’s possible the idea of “experience” doesn’t stop at death – just becomes something different.
No, personally my nonbelief in the Christian God causes no crisis whatsoever… that belief would just limit me and hold me back to an exclusive and irrelevant, and frankly feeble, outdated mythology/theology. My experience of the “mystic and universal power of the universe” is so much greater and unlike “the Christian Experience” and frankly out of bounds and nondelineable to these subjunct religions/ prejudices of the spirit that I feel sorry for Christians in their limited and puny faith in the “Christian God”.
Nope, I’m a son of Yahweh, and every other “religious configuration”, “spirituality”, “myxticism” and “God” that has ever come before and will come to pass. Just like you and every man and women that has been or ever will be.
Why, exactly? What’s wrong with his religious statement of faith? How is it egotistical? He claims his faith is larger or greater or truer than Christianity. So?
What if someone were to say, “God is infinite,” and someone else responded, “Get over yourself.” Would that be a logical response?
Theophane, keep the snippy remarks to yourself. You’re welcome to argue points, not to drop in snotty personal insults. Please heed this advice, which has been dispensed to you previously, I believe.
Do you have any idea how many snippy remarks and snotty insults have been directed at me on the Dope? Is there are moderator or admin on SDMB who will enforce the rules even-handedly? Seriously, I’d like to talk with someone about that.
This thread, which somewhat ran off into the ditch, is a perfect illustration of why people who don’t believe in God don’t like those who do, ramming God down their throats. It’s one of the main things that puts me off religion. I have a friend who is ultra-religious and, quite frankly, it’s scary. I would never try to get a Christian or Muslim to stop believing in God (that would be disrespectful) so why do religious people feel the need to rescue atheists from themselves?
As for whether all the evil in the world is because of humans behaving badly all by themselves or because God is asleep at the switch-- supposedly, a whopping 95% of humans believe in God or some deity. Does that mean that the near constant barbarity going on in the world is only perpetrated by a mere 5% of the population, that 5% being “evil atheists”? Ridiculous.
You only have to delve into the history books or turn on tonight’s news to see all the barbarism committed in the name of God/Allah.
I object to the assumption by believers that atheists or agnostics are inherently bad people. If I suddenly had a change in “faith” and decided that God really does exist, I wouldn’t be a better person, just a busier one, running off to church and what not.
I saw a documentary years ago that helped me understand why I am absolutely incapable of believing in God. My brain just doesn’t work that way. The primitive part of our brains that told us to be fearful when we were early hominids, lights up like a Christmas tree on a PET scan when religious people are asked to focus on their faith. And the same part of their brain lit up when they were asked to contemplate their own deaths.
The premise of the documentary was that a belief in God evolved from our primitive fear of death. After all, isn’t that one of the main points of being religious and believing in God-- to soothe our fears of dying by convincing us that we are all going to heaven if we believe in God?
That was not a non-apology apology. It has to be an apology first. After you figure that out, then go read any of the (imagined) insults and see to whom the (faked) offense can be attributed.
