Not at all. That’s a “Fuck you Jehova!” if ever there was one.
If you believe what you appear to, I would call you an atheist.
“God” cannot be an infinitely malleable concept, otherwise it’s simply meaningless. When I say I’m an atheist, I mean that nothing exists that remotely resembles the way “god” has variously been defined in religions or elsewhere. And that is something we can know, because the hackneyed saying that you “cannot prove a negative” is quite wrong. Equally wrong (or at least misapplied) is the aphorism “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
I can easily prove that there is no elephant in my living room, unless you want to adopt some functionally useless infinitely-malleable definition of “elephant” that includes microscopic elephants or invisible elephants.
The theism hypothesis is a “god” that resembles any commonly-used existing definition of god. This hypothesis strongly predicts that we should expect to see evidence, yet we see none. The absence of evidence is therefore strong evidence that the hypothesis is false. Hence atheism, not agnosticism, is the rational position.
To make this more concrete, I do believe that there’s a significant probability that this universe is a simulation, set up by aliens with powers so unimaginably far beyond ours that they might seem god-like. But they would surely not remotely resemble anything we currently imagine to mean “god”, so I don’t think that is a sensible reason not to call myself an atheist.
Believe it or not, I was a staunch evangelical Christian in my youth. I was even Pentecostal for a while. I became disillusioned with the church due to its anti - gay stance and then had a string of really bad experiences that fundamentally altered my system of meanings. Then, in college, I discovered Nietzche. And I believe it was The Gay Science where he made the famous God is dead speech (though he’s not actually talking about the literal God so much as the idea of God, but anyway…)
“Where has God gone?” he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling?
That quote so perfectly described how I felt at 18 years old, facing life for the first time without God. At the time it was a crisis. But I’m fine now.
As long as you treat the planet and your fellow creatures well, I got no quarrel with you. I identify as a theist, a Christian even. My idea of God probably doesn’t set that well with Atheists or conservative Christians, but we believe what we believe (or don’t).
Congratulations! Your anti-rapture helmet will be delivered by black helicopter any day now.
I’ve been an atheist for over 50 years and it is very liberating. I can’t imagine how any god believer handles things like tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. The world not caring about us is much easier to take.
I don’t think that anyone yelling “fuck you, Sauron” at their TV has a relationship with Sauron. And if you escaped from the JWs, the concept of Sauron never caused anyone as much pain as the concept of Jehovah probably caused you.
Welcome to reality.
As I tell people who ask, “On the basis of certain knowledge, I am agnostic; on the basis of belief I am an atheist.” If they did deeper, I admit to being a Jewish atheist. So are my wife and kids.
My morals come from within, not from a belief in some eternal punishment. Some of the things done in the name of religion are utterly evil. To mention two of them: the Crusades and the Inquisition.
Oooh, story time! If it’s not too personal.
How long have you been out of JW? What caused you to leave? How are friends and family treating you?
Welcome to a better life! Fuck Jehovah, fuck Elohim, fuck Yahweh, fuck God, fuck Allah, hasa diga Eebowai. Sure, they’re fictional, but they’re clearly evil characters who deserve no respect. Fuck Sauron and Voldemort while we’re at it.
The way Sr. Weasel has put it is, “I could never believe in a god that wasn’t at least as compassionate as myself.”
I just had a giggle at a mental image of Jehovah getting a little miffed. “Fuck Me? I decide who fucks me! Just ask Mary.”
This.
Welcome to the freedom that comes from kicking an addiction to a dangerous mind-altering substance.
I was born into the faith, or the Truth as they call it. I started falling away, again as they call it, in my early twenties. I am now in my late fifties.
There was no one cause. There were things that I found annoying, the misogyny for one, but I never doubted my belief because of it. I just thought, well, if I have to be in subjection to my husband, I’ll just never get married. Simple. It helped that I have a naturally low libido, and I never wanted children.
The strict behavior standards were no problem. I agreed with most of the requirements. Still do for a lot of them. Some of my views have changed. Take homosexuality, for example. I used to believe it was wrong. Now I don’t. I don’t think people who live together unmarried, or have non-marital sex are indecent. I don’t participate myself, but I don’t condemn those who do.
The thing that made me doubt, really, was evolution. To put it as simply as I can, I don’t buy the talking snake theory. Why for example, would god create animals, male and female, and not do the same for humans from the first? He had to think about that one? He had to observe how lonely Adam was, and deduce, “It is not good for man to continue alone.”? I mean, how stupid is god anyway?
Okay, it was more than that. All the scientists in the world supposedly got together and conspired to purposely misinterpret the fossil record in order to deny the Bible. That’s what you have to believe to accept the Garden of Eden story. The idea behind science is to observe reality, and draw conclusions based on evidence. Fundamentalism observes reality, and twists it to fit into a pre-conceived notion that must always be unquestionably aligned with what the Bible says. “Because even the smartest people are not smarter than God,” the Witnesses say in their videos. The Bible is the word of god, and cannot be wrong about anything. Talk about making the facts fit the views.
My dinner is getting cold, so I will continue this later.
Regardless of all the semantic gymnastics behind your conclusion (none of which was news to me), calling me an atheist doesn’t make me one. “I don’t know” means “I don’t know.”
I’m back. That gyro was mighty tasty, and I have leftovers to take to work tomorrow.
Where was I? Oh yes, how did my family and friends react? Well, it was such a slow process that some of them still cling to the hope that I will return to the fold. It’s not like I was disfellowshipped or anything, so they still seek me out and talk to me. In fact, I was never baptized. Maybe the doubts I had held me back from doing that. I just never felt confident enough to take that step, although I did believe in the Truth.
Well, most of it. The whole paranoia about the United Nations always sounded stupid to me. The United Nations was supposed to play a big part in the Great Tribulation of the Last Days. The United Nations was the Great Dragon that would devour the World Empire of False Religion, or the Whore of Babylon as they saw it. Has the United Nations ever been that effective in anything? Peacekeepers in their wussy little baby blue helmets couldn’t prevent the Hutus from killing half a million Tutsis, and they’re going to destroy all world religion? Puh-lease.
The blood transfusion taboo is nuts too. It’s a dietary taboo you idiots.
So here I am. I vote, and I stand for the anthem, and I’ve bought myself a birthday gift or two. If the need arises, I will accept a blood transfusion. That’s what’s changed for me since falling away.
And the process continues.
I’m Christian, and the kind of atheists who go beyond “Oh, I just don’t believe in any religion or that there is a god” - the kind I’ve seen referred to as “big A atheists” - usually came out of some kind of religious fanaticism, usually either the Jehovah’s Witnesses or fundamentalism. Someone on another site just said a few days ago that in (most likely) her experience, the really vocal atheists were raised in nondenominational megachurches, which doesn’t surprise me either.
I also know of several such people who embraced paganism.
Well, technically I was raised a Lutheran and got into the JWs during a rough time in my teen years–plus, the guy I later married was in it along with the rest of his family. What ended up happening is that I studied so much comparative religion that it became super obvious to me that god-tropism is something baked way into the human psyche and it has nothing to do with any actual deities existing–something for which there is zero evidence, let alone proof. So yes, I became a wiccan, because I can look around me and see that the world works together as one great system in concert with a greater system of the universe and that makes perfect sense to me. I have a strong notion that once we get far enough into quantum mechanics it will show us the systems of magic. If it doesn’t though, that’s fine too. I’m just a tiny waveform in the energy of the universe that pleases itself to consider itself a discrete being for this time and space moment and the universe is big enough to allow me my arrogance and that works for me.
So what happened to the husband? Still a JW (doubt it)? Still a husband (50/50 chance)?
Nope, not buying that AT.all. Religion =/= morality
Oh, and good for you Two Many Cats!
I didn’t say religion was required for morality. I said “it can be useful”. Just because some people use religion for harmful purposes doesn’t mean everyone does. And just because someone rejects religion doesn’t mean that the religion was a waste. It provided them some guiding principals that helped them become a good person. Maybe it also had some coocoo bananas stuff as well, but that doesn’t mean it was all bad. My comment was made in that context of someone rejecting their religion. I wanted to point out that they should realize that there were some good parts rather than just thinking it was a total waste.
We married very young and I had two kids by age eighteen. Then he was diagnosed as bipolar, did not want to medicate and we went through a few cycles of that until I determined I could either be a mom to the kids or his wife/caretaker but not both so we divorced. Shortly after that I left the religion for good and was subsequently disfellowshipped. We both remarried and coparented and the religious difference was always a problem but the kids grew up okay and eventually he was also disfellowshipped for apostasy, which is pretty cool–definitely more fancy than your usual garden variety smoking or sex crimes. We’re still friends to this day, we have a lot of history together.
Good for you Two Many Cats! I hope you enjoy your new perspective.