Guilty as charged. And that’s probably what led us to being non-believers. That we actually took the time to think about it.
Et voilà…
Ramira, it’s undoubtedly true that many people of faith examine their beliefs and hold to them honestly, but the vast majority of people just believe what they believe because it’s what their parents believed and they’re not intellectually curious.
OK, but now that you’ve done that, can’t you just put religion behind you and move on? Why do you linger?
Most agnostics (and atheists, even) that I’ve known fall into this “perfect agnostic” category, as far as I can tell – something like “I don’t believe in the Christian God any more than I believe in leprechauns” is not an “unprovable” assertion – it’s simply a statement of belief, not of certainty. And while “God doesn’t exist” is “unprovable”, so is “leprechauns don’t exist”. I think “provability/unprovability” is not a very good way to classify or judge belief systems – I think a much better way is “are these beliefs plausible using rational, evidence-based thinking” and “are the actions that flow from these beliefs positive or negative”.
Because it’s an incredibly interesting topic with huge ramifications in human history and human behavior. For me, at least.
Actually, the ‘perfect agnostic’ thinks “There may be a God, there may not. We can never know for sure in this life.” Agnostic literally means “not of knowledge” or more loosely “not knowable, noncommittal”. That is the only position not built on faith. It doesn’t only apply to religion, though, which is why I say that the perfect agnostic is very rare. Every human believes unprovable crap, just about different things.
What unprovoked crap do I believe? I don’t know if God exists. I don’t know if it’s knowable.
Because it’s human nature to ruminant on things that society has declared all-important and sacrosanct, yet strike you as irrational, intellectually stifling, and psychologically harmful.
I live a quiet agnostic life IRL, as probably most non-believers do. The internet is really the only place I can speak my mind on this topic without running the risk of offending a loved-one, a coworker, or anyone else whose backlash might come back to hurt me. Perhaps this is why the opinions voiced online can seem so blunt; non-believers aren’t exactly encouraged to share their thoughts outside anonymous havens.
I’m annoyed by religion more often than not, I admit. Yesterday I was bored so I went digging through the SDMB archives, and found a thread from earlier this year about the gay couple-wedding cake brouhaha. Got a big reminder of how religion is used to justify discrimination, to ridiculous lengths. When you have people staking their positions based on things Jesus said about tax collectors (OMG, kill them with fire!), what can you say to this insanity except call it insanity?
On another board, I see people matter-of-factly psychoanalyzing Oprah Winfrey and Shonda Rhimes’s lifestyle preferences based, on all things, their astrological signs. Posts and posts about who is a Capricorn and who isn’t…as if it makes perfect sense to assume things about someone’s personality based on a birthdate! And this kind of thinking is popping up at work now too, among supposed scientists! It’s just another away of clinging to stereotypes rather than treating people as individuals, but people justify it on the basis of it being quasi-mystical.
While I sympathize with non-radical Muslims being lumped in together with the terrorists on the fringe, a big part of me wishes that Believers as a group (Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc) could see that violent intolerance is an inevitable side effect excessive faith and religion.
The violent intolerance is the inevitable side effect of being human. It is a self-deception to think non-belief will not see such things justified on other avenues.
I used to think this way, but now I think this is a cop out.
The most dangerous people are those who sincerely believe lashing out violently against those who don’t subscribe to their ways will lead to eternal rewards in the afterlife. Anyone programmed to think this way is a threat because 1) they can’t be reasoned with and 2) nothing in the real world can compete with the imagined enticements that await post-death. Family, friends, love…these can easily be dismissed by people convinced that none of these earthly things matter. Because in their minds, the only thing that matters is pleasing the Supreme Being. And the Supreme Being wants them to kill.
In the absence of religion, who would be motivated to think this way? Okay, maybe a few mentally ill folks here and there. But the mentally ill can’t organize themselves and mount a successful campaign of terrorism. The mentally ill also don’t have a doctrine that unites them. So really the only ones who can crusade like this are the devout.
It is true that history is full of examples of men killing each other for causes other than religion. All that means is that religiosity is just one of several risk factors. I don’t think we’d be seeing ISIS be so effective if it wasn’t attracting so many true believers.
Well, religion is pretty damned inescapable. How do I read the paper or listen to the news, and NOT reflect upon religion? Middle east without religion? ISIS without religion? Some stupid county clerk refusing to do her job without religion? “War on Christmas” without religion? My president ending every address with “God Bless these United States” without religion?
I also am curious why I appear to differ from the majority of my species in this pretty significant issue. What does that say about me - or them? Why are so many people willing to accept beliefs that seem so unproven and unnecessary?
If religious folk would keep their religion to themselves, and not demand their irrational beliefs to be reflected in public policy - on a local/national/or worldwide scale, it would be a lot easier for nonbelevers to pay less attention.
One final thing - above folk said things like “atheism cannot be proven”, equating it with religious belief. Sure, I cannot prove that god does not exist. While I do strongly believe that to be the case, I acknowledge that. Which is why I generally do not describe myself as an atheist. I have little interest in defining myself by one of many things I reject. If asked, I would describe myself as a capital-H Humanist, with a love and respect for humans, and a rejection of ALL supernatural.
I think it IS a valid position to say there is no demonstrable, reproducible evidence for the supernatural underpinnings of any religion. Sure evolution and gravity could be disproven tomorrow, but the evidence supporting them is pretty consistent and overwhelming.
In contrast, religion is just the preference of some particular myth. That’s fine. Believe whatever fantasy you want. But a whole lot of religious people seem to believe that their particular chosen fantasy ought to dictate actions or expenditures by other folk. That I just don’t understand.
I think there’s a lot of legitimate truth to this. Orthodox religions — the ones that contain “stuff that you’re suppose to believe or you’re officially wrong” —appeal to our desire for certainty and order in the world. It’s a dangerously false promise. The one thing religion cannot give people is a legitimate claim on certainty.
The most important attitude that needs to be inculcated in people in order for them to play nicely with the other kids is the attitude that “hey, I’m human, and no matter how strongly I feel about something, I need to keep in mind that I might be wrong”. Also expressed as “get the beam out of your own eye before you go pointing out the mote in someone else’s” not to mention “judge not, lest ye be judged” and so on.
People who are absolutely certain that they are right have no compunction against being coercive, violent, punitive, and otherwise hateful to those that they are certain are doing wrong things, living in violation of god’s edicts and principles. If they remained aware of their perpetual uncertainty that would most likely give others leeway to perceive things differently, to acknowledge that even if they think These People or Those Folks are full of bullshit and their activities bad and evil and destructuve to the principles of human society and safety, perhaps that isn’t actually so, perhaps they themselves are wrong or misguided or seeing things from a very limited viewpoint or something.
Unprovable, not unprovoked. :smack:
We can’t know that God in general does not exist. (Special classes of Gods have self-contradictory characteristics so we can know they don’t exist.) But we can know that some God exists if that God decides to show himself in some obvious way. Or we could know it as well as we know almost anything we claim to know.
Strong atheists believe that no Gods exist. It’s a provisional belief, but I think quite a justified one.
It is a puzzle. No one has ever managed to answer these questions to my satisfaction. It’s tribalism I guess. People want to be part of a club, no matter how screwy the bylaws.
That’s a very strange claim. Some religious people can be uncertain, true, but if you buy that the writers of a holy book or the founders of a religion have communicated with God directly, you also buy certainty. Science is an incremental search for more correct theories about the world, but a true religion claims to have looked at the answers in back of the book.
In fact I’d say that the reason the fundamentalists freak out about science is that science, if they accept it, robs them of this certainty, the certainty that God said it and I believe it. And they clearly reject the science before the reject the certainty.
Yes, it’s a strange claim. The key word was “legitimate”.
I identify as theistic myself but if my own theology has an anchor-point or a cornerstone, it’s the inviolability of human fallibility. Religions that attempt to discard that are not legitimate. Certainty is not an option.
I define the God I worship as being the Creator of the Universe. If you also worship a God you define as being the Creator of the Universe, then you and I worship the same God. If you tell me that the Creator was the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn, well then, those are just other names for God.
Now, we might (and probably do) have differing notions about all the rest of Es attributes, but hey, we’re both fallible. Perhaps, for all I know, when I go to Heaven I’ll be brought before the Creator in all His noodly glory and say “Wow, you’re much more raguferous than I expected”.
Fine, but why do you believe the universe was “created”? Or if it was, that the creator still exists?
I’m not suggesting that I have any good explanation of what existed when, where it came from, what existed before… But nor do I think that the universe has any need to conduct itself in a manner that is comprehensible to an evolved monkey brain at this point in time.
Maybe we will never know. But just because we are incapable of knowing something impresses me as little justification for making up some fairy tale, and then relying upon that fairy tale to direct how you think and act about things that we ARE capable of understanding and have good reason to believe actually exist.