In spite of nearly two millenia of the New Testament, theologians, clergy, and faithful laity telling them “No, that’s not how it works.”
Right. A lot of the Christians I know haven’t stepped foot in church in a month of Sundays. They may talk about being more “spiritual” than “religious”. They may have problems with certain dogma (like the concept of Hell or prohibition against gays). They may have only passing familiarity with Bible stories. But they still cite Christianity as their belief system. With a bar so low to meet and social pressure so high, my guess is that a lot of non-believers are passing. They may just not know it, though.
I’d just like to say that I don’t think that being RAISED atheist/nonreligious means a person was ever actually atheist/nonreligious. For example I was RAISED baptist, went to church every sunday for both sunday school and the adult sermons, attended private middle school in a church, and participated in Awana (is that still around?) for several years, but at no time did I ever believe in god or any of that stuff. I just participated because that’s what my parents had me doing. So I even though I was raised baptist I wouldn’t say that was ever actually baptist.
I think the same applies to those raised in atheist/nonreligious households just the same, meaning just because they were raised atheist doesn’t mean they were actually atheist. They aren’t the same thing.
As I believe I regularly communicate with angels and archangels, and have seen them and they have shared with me so much and believe it is part of my heritage, part of who I am, I do not believe I could do anything more then pretend not to have ‘faith’ as you call it because that would be denying a part of my very essence.
With that said I am not part of any religious community, I would not fit into their system to conform, as again that would be denying my very essence of who I am, however I can visit any of them and get the message of love present that God has given them, discarding anything not born of Love.
What broke me away from religion was not that there was no ‘God’ there (as God is everywhere even in atheistic ), it was they required me to deny myself, deny what God has created in me and my personal access to God. They (normally the priest) wanted to be my ‘god’ and go through him.
So in many ways for the reason that many atheists break away from religion, wanting to get away from the social power structure, was also my reason to do so. The conclusion and direction we set off on was typically different. I threw off the man made shackles of religion, and stopped letting that limit my relationship with Godand in doing so divided God from religion, atheists walked away from God also in the process and many still see them as the same thing.
Absolutely, one of the most celebrated cases, at least in the Christian religion, is Paul of Tarsus. Here are a few ‘documented’ cases. A more commonly known current example is Lee Strobel.
Of course, the reverse is also true. All this really proves is that people can see the exact same thing and come to completely different conclusions, even sometimes internally.
What he said he learned:
Later he reiterates this as something he wishes more Christians knew, and adds that
I’d say that anyone who doesn’t already know both of these things would be well-served by, not necessarily “going to the other side,” but at least getting to know it a lot better.
Good point. I’ve met a fair number of people who are sometimes considered converts from one religion to another, but where there was actually a period of atheism in between. E.g. person raised Baptist, becomes an atheist as a teen or twenty-something, has a crisis of faith later, and becomes Catholic at age 30. Why this is, I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the initial turn to atheism is inspired, at least in part, by disillusionment with the parents’ religion. It takes a while to recognize, though, that what they were rejecting was, in fact, the parents’ religion and not religion in general. They then find that another faith makes a lot more sense to them.
Good point. Religion is, by definition, unprovable and unfalsifiable. If you could prove it, it would be cease to be religion and become science. A few years later, the first degree programs in Theometry would come out. Look at these new pictures of God that a few grad students took with the new interdimensional telescope! John is doing his dissertation on an networked grid of angel detectors and is proposing that Gabriel apparently prefers to hang out in beach communities while Michael the Archangel travels extensively in mountainous areas.
I don’t think Paul counts as a convert from atheism to faith. Rather, he was a convert from Judaism to Christianity. He didn’t start believing in God after spending a period of time not believing, but rather changed his viewpoint on the exact nature of that god.
I was an atheist for a good part of my teens and into my 20’s. I was raised Catholic but, as early as 7th grade, felt that there wasn’t a God and didn’t believe in it. That changed in my 20’s and I do believe these days and have for about the last 15-odd years. So it’s not a one-way street even if it might be less traveled.
Well, the fastest-growing religious group in this country is people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” - the Christmas-and-Easter folks. Probably a fair number of nontheists in that mix.
I’m sure she is a fine woman, and her vision of what a decent God would be like and expect of her is quite different than what is found in the bible.
How do these angels and archangels communicate to you, is it an audible voice, or do you have things happen in your day that you perceive is communication on their part that you’re able to pick up on?
While I’m sure many atheists as well as quite a few theists don’t care for the power structure of religion, it’s certainly a safe haven for many scoundrels, but I still think that many are atheists mainly because the world started making far more sense when they realized it’s a very natural world.
That’s how he tells it. With him being a journalist, and studying law and all, during much of this time, I would think there would have been plenty of papers of him talking about his atheism and addressing the arguments. Has even a single one been found?
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
I agree with him 100%. Intellectually, looking at the world out my window, I find no more reason to postulate the existence of God than to posit the existence of unicorns.
But if you’re a believer - and a pastor, yet - only because you had thought that thought experiment would come out the other way, then WTF?! Why did he become a pastor in the first place? That’s what I want to know. The Dylan line “you had no faith to lose, and you know it” comes to mind.
Wait, what? I don’t understand your response to SMV. How is what SMV’s mother said “quite different than what is found in the bible”? The bible takes as a premise that God exists, and the whole book is about how we respond to that premise.
Observant Jews act as in accordance to how they think God wants them to act. But Christians don’t call these folks Christian. They call them Jews.
I haver a hard time believing a pastor would engage in this experiment if he weren’t already going through a crisis of faith.
Yah, I was thinking along those lines as well. Maybe he never “believed” to start with. Still, he played the game for a while as a faithful, and was willing to check out what it would be like being faithless.
I appreciate the thoughtful comments here. It helps me in examining my own atheism. Altho, I really don’t spend too many cycles on it. I start getting irritated when I see some fundy political games, but otherwise I live-and-let-live. If I am at someone’s home and they want to say grace before dinner, no biggee, even if they are visiting my home and want to say it. I don’t really care. If someone asks me about faith, I will tell them my positions and leave it at that.
I am born Jewish and have an affinity for Jewish culture, and identify with Jews, however, I have never attended a temple service, and celebrate only a few of the formal Jewish holidays and observances. I teach my kids what those occasions mean, and make sure they know they are half-Jewish, but that’s about it. I think it would be tough for me to become more religiously Jewish, as opposed to just identifying as a Jewish-atheist. Not sure that makes any sense.
It isn’t up to them to decide. (And, yes, there are a few denominations that allow for personal belief being sufficient.)
The trouble is we have no real way of knowing how strict God is going to be in his judgement. Maybe he’ll be cool with people who, while imagining themselves real Christians, are actually pretty awful heretics. (The “Jews for Jesus” movement comes to mind.) Or…maybe he’ll be hellish strict, and if you took his (I’m sorry, “His”) name in vain so much as once, the Devil plays the violin on your guts forever.
It comes down to personal faith…
A lot of us use the “Census Form Check-Box” model of religious identity. You are whatever religion you say you are. This certainly lets a lot of odds and ends – and arrant heresy! – into the Tabernacle, but the alternative is a “literacy test” of the sort the Old South liked to use to keep blacks from voting. And quis custodiet? Who writes up that test?
A denomination – and even a major faith – is a “fuzzy set.” There are gonna be some damn queer cases near the boundaries. I find it all but impossible to believe that Fred Phelps was really a “Christian,” but what’s my opinion worth?
(I figure, on Judgement Day, there are going to be a lot of very surprised people…both ways.)
(Sigh…yes, I’m an atheist. The biggest disadvantage of atheism is that I’ll never get to say, “See! I told you!”)
When his mother says the question is not that “Does God exist?” but asks instead, “if God exists”, I got the impression that she isn’t operating on as firm a ground of his existence. She simply decides that if a God exists, she wants to know how she should act. If she has gotten that far, she may be questioning many of the biblical stories as well, and also wondering if the bible is really the best description of God that one can come up with, and also how a God should act.