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You may have simply used this as an example, Cosmo, but I have never, ever heard of anyone adhering to atheism for the sake of tradition or approval. It simply doesn’t work that way. One comes to atheism through careful and somewhat frustrating reflection and consideration. Some, like me, have lost the closeness of siblings over it. Atheists swim against the tide. We take our positions with the knowledge that there may be very few who agree with us or see things our way, yet we remove the yoke of theological belief anyway. Atheism is not a club and it’s not something that’s practiced. Although I’ve met quite a few atheists in my life I have more than a distant acquaintanceship with none of them. Most of the people I associate with on a daily basis just happen to be Christian or Jewish.
I hold to a narrow definition of atheism that states definitively that there are no gods, or other supernatural entities, except that which humans create in their own minds. People who say they used to be atheists but are now Christians were never atheists, but agnostics; no one would decide to dismiss the processes of logical introspection that are interwoven into an atheist’s world view unless they were never an atheist in the first place. Although I’m cordial with everyone and honestly try to avoid insulting someone because of their religious beliefs, I know that true believers of any mythology are deluded, some to a greater degree than others.
I realized I was an atheist (although I didn’t call myself that) when I was in my early teens. My mother dragged me to church every Sunday. I went through the motions but I didn’t believe. Eventually my mother stopped forcing me to go. It was just as sad for me as it was for her because i wanted to believe as much as she wanted me to, but simply couldn’t. Everything about Christianity had holes large enough for me to crawl through, and I crawled through every one of them.
A number of Christians with whom I’ve discussed religion tend to equate atheism with a religious belief. I guess it’s the only way they can make sense of it. They lump it in with everything else they don’t believe in. On one side there’s Christianity, on the other there’s Buddhism, Shintoism, Judiasm, Islam, Wicca, Satanism, atheism, etc…, but then atheism also has the honor of being placed into a subset of beliefs considered undesireable, eg, Wicca, Satanism, athiesm, etc… Since atheism isn’t a religion or a belief, but an absence of belief, it’s incorrect to lump it in or equate it with any other mythological belief system.
As an admittedly weak analogy, say you’re sitting across the table from a friend who’s drinking coffee out of a white mug. You don’t have any coffee. You’re just sitting there, mugless. You and your friend can discuss your friend’s mug, the shape of it, the color, other characteristics, but you can’t talk about, see, or feel your mug, neither can your friend, because you don’t have one. You can’t equate what you have in front of you with your friend’s mug because you are sans mug. Your friend’s personal experience with his mug is entirely different than yours. In fact, you have no mug experience whatsoever, not just a different mug. Make sense?
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well, what tom said. You can’t be so naive to not realize at least some atheists become that way because their parents were and taught them that, or that they did because of peer pressure. It’s just human nature. It’s isn’t only about logic and reasoning. It’s about emotion as well. Emotion affects the nature of atheist belief as well.
Real atheists can’t become believers? So if they lacked belief in God and then believed that isn’t what happens? Can they at least eat quiche?
I realize lots of people see atheism as some strange form of spiritual belief. I am not one of them. When Sam Harris suggested we not give religion any special status I took that seriously. In doing so I came to think more about the nature of what we believe on a subjective level as well as the objective. In doing so I realized that believers and non believers share a lot of the same traits and motives for what they believe in the subjective arena. Both have a belief system when we subtract the religious label. Both act on things out of faith when we subtract the religious faith specification. If we’re not giving relious beliefs a special protected staus {and I believe we shouldn’t} then perhaps we can stop covering every religious belief with the same blanket, and deal with the more specific details of belief.
Sorry…I vented a bit
FTR believers also have to swim against the tide and more than a few have suffered from it.