Perception is not always the truth.
You are talking about “negative atheism, also called weak atheism and soft atheism”
(wiki) I was talking about Positive atheism, *"also called strong atheism and hard atheism, is the form of atheism that asserts that no deities exist; "
*
Two different types of atheism. One is “I *Know *there is no such thing as a Deity” the other is “I *doubt *there is, show me.”
Positive Atheism is a form of belief.
But we don’t get together every Sunday morning to tell each other how much we don’t believe in our purpose built meeting houses. Don’t have any non-religion talismans hanging on our walls or around our necks. I’ve never seen atheists handing out pamphlets, although it’s probably happened - still I’ll bet there are far, far fewer atheist proselytizers than religious. I think this is still a pretty passive “belief system” as it were. I live smack in the middle of the confluence of the Baptist and Catholic bible belt, you can find some sort of church on nearly every street. I’ve never met another person who claimed to be an atheist here. I imagine there are some, it just never comes up like religion does.
Sure. That’s the nature of our beliefs, those with faith, and those who are atheists - that’s how they work. I imagine just about every religion tries to spread the word. And everyone has their choice. And atheists usually don’t hand out pamphlets but I’ve engaged some in some interesting conversations.
Atheism isn’t a religion for the same reason that theism isn’t a religion. But it’s not impossible to have a religion that completely denies anything supernatural. I would personally count Rationalism as a religion. It even has sects.
I think limiting religion to the supernatural limits our understanding of human behavior. Because we still get organizations that work like religions. Heck, I’m not sure we shouldn’t start analyzing political parties the way we analyze religions.
I know that, when it comes to a specific god, no one has shown me any evidence to back up their claim. Thus, I treat their claim with the same amount of concern as I do with any other unsubstantiated claim. Now, if the unsubstantiated claim is the sole thing that is put on the table, then it can be easily ignored and I will have nothing more to say on the subject.
But a not-small percentage of religionists just can’t present their little claim and leave it at that. They have to push, recruit, legislate and do whatever they can to convert. If there is “hard” atheism, I put forth that it is a pushback, a defense against those that cannot take “Don’t want to play your religion game” for an answer.
Don’t be so sure about that.
Atheist mega-churches look for non-believers.
That isn’t from The Onion. It is a real and widespread phenomenon that is getting more popular. Some atheists love churches, just not the religion part although any sufficiently organized congregation with rules, rituals and customs can take on many characteristics of a religion. There are plenty of atheists that attend religious churches as well. I was a church-going agnostic myself for years before I realized I would rather sleep in on Sundays. Unitarian churches are common and they often don’t promote any specific religious beliefs and atheists are welcome.
This hijack of yours is without meaning or purpose.
No one has claimed that all atheists or even a majority of atheists hold specific beliefs.
Nava pointed out that some number of atheists hold wacky beliefs.
She did not claim that all atheists held those beliefs.
She did not even claim that those beliefs were held as the result of the believers’ atheism.
However, when a statement was posted that implied that atheists and agnostics were free of any wacky beliefs, she corrected that claim.
Had she made the false claim that atheism was at the root of authoritarian socialism, you would have a point.
She did not and you do not. She merely pointed out that there are wacky beliefs that are held by some undefined (but fairly large) number of atheists and agnostics.
EVERYONE!, if you wish to wander down the path of whether atheism is a “belief system,” go open a new thread to do it.
[ /Moderating ]
I think some of the confusion when it comes to dinosaurs really is just about simple scientific illiteracy and that is not just limited to the uneducated.
I cringed when I read an article on CNN.com this morning titled “Dinosaur skeleton unearthed in Michigan”. It was a cool story and stayed up most of the day just like that but the title was as blatantly wrong as you can get.
The “dinosaur” is really a Mastodon skeleton from the last Ice Age just a few tens of thousands of years ago. But hey, who cares about the difference between very large mammals that lived after humans were around and reptiles that lived tens of millions of years ago? If the CNN staff can’t recognize such an obvious error before green-light it to the world, what chance does a working-class high school graduate have?
Thankfully, they have corrected the title now presumably because of many complaints but they may have never realized why it was so very wrong on their own.
If a Mastodon is a “dinosaur” then Wholly Mammoths are too and some of those lived after the Great Pyramid was long finished. By that logic, humans and “dinosaurs” did coexist. Just ask CNN.
So, yeah, there are plenty of Christians who know the dinosaurs existed.
My favorite dinosaur fun fact: we think of the “age of the dinosaurs” as being all Jurassic Park animals together and distinct from the age of man. Yet humans and Tyrannosaurus are closer chronological contemporaries than Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus.
Mammoths are more closely related to elephants than mastodons are, despite their outward appearance.
True. People are really bad at understanding timescales longer than living memory. It is hopeless when it comes to things hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago or much, much longer. It just all goes into the mental “a very long time ago” bucket and tends to get mixed together.
Not only are humans closer in time to T-Rex than they are to Stegosaurus, so are chickens and they ARE dinosaurs. That doesn’t mean that chickens are just sort of related or descended from them, they very literally are dinosaurs scientifically speaking and much more closely related to T-Rex than T-Rex is to some of the much older dinosaurs like the Stegosaurus.
If Christians didn’t believe in dinosaurs, they would have some real explaining to do when they bring a basket of fried chicken to the church picnic.
-I am the librarian for an Evangelical Lutheran parish. We, as I understand it, are some manner of “Yeah, but God was involved,” really long-term and guided form of I don’t know what the fuck. It comes down to tossing books with Adam riding dinos and rolling my eyes because these people are my friends.
FTR: There should be a long discussion of how various sorts believe things completely contrary to tose of others in the population, snd why we manage to function.
There is no one answer to the OP’s question. Just as there is every variety of Christian, there is every variety of Christian belief when if comes to whether or not dinosaurs existed, when they existed and how they came to their end. I have gone to churches that took the “Flintstones” model seriously(there were cavemen that lived with dinosaurs, then God wiped them all out together and started over with the Garden of Eden), one that believed that dinosaur bones were planted by Satan, one that believed that they were planted by God(along with all evidence of an ancient world), and one that believed that dinosaurs existed between the time of The Garden and The Flood. I find the Roman Catholic Church not too bad science-wise, and the Episcopal Church(Catholic Lite :D) a bit better.
The Christian message is to “love your brother as you love yourself”. The existence of dinosaurs doesn’t really come up in such a doctrine.
As a Christian I can honestly say I have no idea why Genesis is written the way it is. Whatever meaning there is mysterious and hidden. My day-to-day struggle is living my life by what is clear and obvious. “Blessed are the peacemakers” is far better than starting a fight over whether Tyrannosaurus was a Jurassic critter or whether it was from the Cretaceous.
I’m just real slow on the idea God created a mess of rocks to look like ancient reptile bones in order to what … drive man away from the Face of God, set stumbling blocks before our feet, confuse and contradict His teachings? I believe the Path to God is straight, narrow and obvious; and that it goes forward, never backwards.
“Be here now” – Alan Watts … the past and future are just imagination, irrelevant to the good we should be doing right now. It’s just a personnel fascination of mine learning about the science involved concerning these theories of dinosaurs, especially how these theories have change over my lifetime. When I was a lad, dinosaurs were these cold-blood vicious killers who ate each other to death. Today we have Kentucky Fried Dinosaur, I love it !!!
Amen, brother (sister?).
As for Genesis, it may help ro remember that the story of Genesis, and the entirety of the Torah, was handed down from generation to generation for thousands of years before it was put to writing. It is a story.
The Golden Rule - what you say. True.
Well a different point of view is this. The OP’s question was…
Do Christians believe in Dinosaurs? The definitive answer is Yes. Some (is it most? dunno) of us do. But if the OP question instead was…
Do all Christians believe in Dinosaurs? Clearly the answer is No.
I’m 55 and attended a Catholic elementary school and a Catholic high school. Even then, schools always taught that the universe to evolve. We were taught about the Big Bang theory, and no one ever suggested it was incompatible with God.
In 5th grade science class, we re-enacted the Scopes trial, and we all were on Darrow’s side. Evolution was taken as self-evidently true, and anyone who wrote differently on a test would have flunked.
We were taught that dinosaurs were extinct more than 100 million years before humans existed.
Of course, there are Southern fundamentalists who would argue that we Catholics aren’t really Christians.
That’s why I went with my answer. With almost every “Do Christians…?” type of question, you can find a group that self-identifies as Christian that does whatever you want to fill in that blank with.
I think non-believers struggle with this and may say that we believers change our story as more scientific evidence is revealed, to conveniently “fit” the biblical narrative to new facts. The Genesis creation timeline used to be taken literally, many years ago, but now we take it as a non-literal story. I get that, I can understand that.
But as with everything from evolution to the Big Bang and Expansion Theory to plate tectonics and particle physics and gravitation and such, and also with faith and the bible story as more evidence of archaeology and science and such are revealed, what we know (or in faith believe) becomes richer with the new information. That, or is judged to be heretical and the information sources condemned if not persecuted and killed.
The more we know, yes we know more, but yet also there is more we realize that we don’t know.