If your response to the question “do you believe in a god?” is anything other than a definite “yes”, then you are an atheist.
You may not like the word, or shy away from using it but, there isn’t a better word to neatly describe your state of belief. Of course it is also just a starting point for discussing the complexities of what you do actually believe or what you know.
And “I don’t know” speaks to knowledge not belief, that’s where gnosticism/agnosticism comes in to play. One can be an agnostic or gnostic as well as being either a theist or an atheist.
You are free to use the terms in a non-standard way if you like but for general discussions on this subject it helps if we agree on the definitions we use and the way I’ve explained it above, I find, is the most clearly understood definition.
I guess I was lucky, being born and raised in a secular environment. My mom was Jewish, but barely practicing. She lit a menorah and told us kids what it was about. My dad liked to listen to Kathryn Kuhlman type tv preachers, but it was pure entertainment.
My friends liked visiting our house around xmas. We were the only home with a xmas tree, village, and train set in our Jewish neighborhood. We celebrated Santa Claus, not jesus.
I attended church and synagogue with friends, but it was so obviously make believe that it reinforced my atheism.
Can’t remember when I decided that I’m not an atheist but I know I’m not. I’m not an acyclicst but a pedestrian. To define me as a negation of something is the way the teist describe me and that is as racist as there is.
If you want to know my relation to a god I’m an ignostic. if you tell me what you mean by god I’m willing to discuss the existence of the object you define but throwing out undefined “god” like almost all people do is nonsense and I ignore it.
On the other hand one of my friends used to introduce me as “the guy who made me believe in father christmas again.” My definition of “father christmas” is “an abstraction for grown ups to bring joy into childrens world”, in the same way as one might describe “justice” as “an abstraction to bring fairness is grown ups world.” An in the same way I can concur that if you insist that the builders of the Sistine Chapel were inspired of some kind of god that god did excist but that was for them then and nothing for us now.
You mean an agnostic is not necessarily an atheist. That is true and not in conflict with what I said.
You are wrong, it might be, it might not be. An agnostic might well believe in a god but can also say that they have no way of having certain knowledge of it.
But, as I said, The only thing required to be an atheist is to not say “yes” when asked if you believe in a god.
The same could probably be said of broad generalizations about any group. A lot of Christians would say that my concept of God basically makes me an atheist, because I don’t accept the “man in the sky” concept. I can’t prove that my “God as ground of being” idea is correct, and I have no interest in doing so.
In my experience, people in my denomination (Unitarian Universalist) who had problems with my identifying as Christian were in the South. Nobody in my current congregation (in the DC area) has a problem with it. My sample size is obviously very small, and I try to be careful about drawing any conclusions based on it.
I fully recognize that your heart is in the right = helpful place, but I’d tweak your comment about like this:
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 might possibly have provided them some guiding principals that helped them become a good person. Maybe it also had some coocoo bananas stuff as well that actively prevented them from being a good person, but that doesn’t mean it was all bad or all good. My comment was made in that context of someone rejecting their religion. I wanted to point out that they should realize that there were might be some good parts rather than just thinking it was necessarily a total waste.
As to the JWs specifically … IMO “total waste” is by far the way to bet. But I’m always willing to entertain evidence to the contrary.
That’s interesting, because my experience is the opposite; everyone I know who is a genuine atheist, including myself, comes out of a relatively mainstream, non-fanatic religious tradition or little tradition at all. I have never met a person from a hardcore church who admitted to being an atheist.
My family was nominally Catholic and sent my sister and me to Catholic schools (which are public here) but we didn’t go to church, and I don’t think we even owned a Bible until I got one for free for my confirmation. I never really believed in God.
I used to call myself an agnostic, then I came up with the term “non-theist” and started using that. Mostly this was because the word “atheist” seemed to have been co-opted by assholes who went around suing people over public Christmas trees, and campaigning to get “In God We Trust” taken off money, and berating anybody who says “God bless you” after someone sneezes. I don’t care about any of that stuff and I don’t want to be lumped in with people who do.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that “atheism” is indeed the most fitting description for what I believe and don’t believe. So I am now an atheist, assholes be damned.
I absolutely do not buy in to the notion that being religious makes anyone a better person. But I also don’t think it makes anybody a bad person either. People are what they are, good or bad, and some use religion to justify how they act. Some don’t. It’s an irrelevant detail.
Good luck in your new life, TMC - and don’t be an asshole!
I mean, it’s just one’s surroundings. If you are in the Bible Belt, the atheists you will meet probably came from religious backgrounds. If you are in Canada, the atheists you meet probably came from non-religious backgrounds.
To add to what nearwildheaven said, I think, generally, the more hardcore one’s upbringing was, the more hardcore one will tend to swing to the other extreme once converted away from it. So the most diehard fervent Christians often come from totally non-Christian backgrounds, and the most diehard atheists often come from fundamentalist religious backgrounds. Whereas, “once a moderate likely always a moderate” on the other hand.
I’m in a critique group with a woman who believes this, and just about every other CT out there. She’s also a flat earther. Her story has blue helmeted UN people in white tanks popping up all over. I explained that you don’t drive tanks places like you drive cars, and how come no one ever noticed?
Her next section claimed that the UN built tunnels all around the country with exits as the third bays of supermarket receiving ramps. Still with no one noticing.
My father worked for the UN from 1946 to the early '70s, and I got to go to the UN mission in the Congo in 1961. Your perception of them is exactly right. They can hardly pay to keep the lights on, let alone buying tens of thousands of tanks.
Then you are an atheist. Either you are convinced there is a god or you aren’t. “maybe” means you aren’t.
I’m an atheist and my answer would be “maybe” as well.
No, absolutely not, I’m just telling you what belief state “bucket” you fall into. Don’t be so defensive, the fact that you are an atheist is not that interesting nor particulalrly indicative of what your more detailed worldview actually is.
Grats. I stopped believing 30 or so years ago. I haven’t been struck by lightning or endured any poxes. But I will admit to occasional bouts of depression, because it’s all for nothing.
I think it’s because I had a spiritual void. It’s natural for humankind to believe in a higher power, and such devotion can give an individual a lifetime goal of living up to higher standards.
So, I compromised. I replaced God with The Universe. Unlike God, I can see The Universe. I can experience The Universe without having to immerse myself in ritual. I know I was created by The Universe. The Universe doesn’t expect me to live by archaic tribal guidelines, and doesn’t even notice if I do. The Universe is infinite and omnipotent, everything God was supposed to be. The Universe doesn’t need to be prayed to. The Universe is full of mystery and the unexplained, and there’s no single mind driving its activities. When I die, I’ll become part of the Universe again, and it won’t require that I lived my life a certain way to be in its good graces.
That made me feel a lot better. Everybody has a different journey, and determine different solutions through their life experiences. Even though you stopped believing in God, you still have to make your own way, and your biggest guide is yourself.
That’s pretty much the way Taoism, an atheistic religion, was explained in a Philosophy class I took at U. of Evansville (Indiana). Everything just is. Nothing is right or wrong, it just is.
I think you misunderstood the comment, which distinguished garden-variety atheists like thee and me from what they called Big A atheists, although I had never heard the term before and have to imagine what it means.
Except that I was raised in a nominally Jewish home, your experience sounds a lot like mine. We never went to services, mostly ignored the holidays (except for fasting on Yom Kippur–I still do) and when I got a school assignment asking that we do something involving the bible, it turned out we didn’t own one.
