What’s the worst thing about being an atheist?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
301

Who is ‘they’? I’ve been an open atheist for 45 years, and I do not perceive any threats from ‘them’, whoever they are. I have LGBT friends in the U.S. and Canada, and none have been threatened because of their gender or sexual orientation.

Madelaine Murray O’Hair was an athiest activist all her life, as was Ayn Rand. No one went after them, and the US was a lot more religious then. Many on the right loved Rand, and didn’t give a rat’s ass about her strident atheism.

Worrying about religious mobs going after atheists is paranoia, and not reasonable. At least not in America.

If you are worried about Republicans gaining power and using it to go after you, then what you should be doing while you are in power is strengthening institutions against censorship, prosecuting officials who abuse their offices to punish political opponents, upholding the law against riots and genral lawbreaking, and upholding filibusters and other rules that make it hard for a small majority to impose sweeping changes on the nation. Because one day you will be in that minority again, and you won’t like it when the rules you created are turned on you. As Democrats found out when they got rid of the judicial filibuster, which backfired spectacularly and predictably.

Instead, the attitude seems to be to do the opposite and break all the rules protecting political minorities from the governing majority and public passions, even ones that protected tou, to gain temporary advantage. It’s a bad strategy, and it will eventually cost the Democrats and the country.

The only real problem I can see as an open atheist is that it would be harder to get elected to major office, which is why so many politicians have to proclaim to be faithful church-goers even when it’s clear they are not. It makes America look more religious than it actually is.

Between 1940 and 2000, church membership in the US was stable at around 70%. Since then, church membership has been collapsing and by 2020 was at 47%, the first time non-churchgoers were in the majority.

It looks to me like it’s the religious that should be worried, not the atheists.

302

Compared to most of what is now referred to as the Common Era (CE instead of AD in dates) I think there is a lot to be said for it. Your perspective is too short, in my opinion. I waver back and forth about how many achievements of freedom can be rolled back and for how long, but the tide of history seems to be in our favor in general and in the long run.

I challenge the truth of much of this, but mainly I want to say that you are conflating Democrats/liberals with atheists. The Venn diagram may show a large overlap, but they are far from contiguous.

303

Sorry that you think I place reason and faith on the same level. Since it is logically impossible to prove a negative, and the non-existence of gods and/or flying pink elephants has little impact on my daily life, I allow myself to believe they do not exist, insofar as I think of them at all. On matters of more impact, I strive to use evidence, reason and logic - often tempered by the thoughts of others who have proven themselves more skilled with those tools than I in particular fields or situations. I realize I am lucky [others might say blessed] to live in a place and time when I am unlikely to be burned or stoned for thinking this way.

304

Every single earthly religion has defined God to mean a rather particular thing. A being that is like X, said Y and wants us to Z.

Dozens or hundreds of rather particular and drastically different things, that they claim is the (or an) accurate description of God.

When/If we find a superbeing that we would call God-like, but is almost but not quite entirely unlike the Gods described by every known earthly religion, am I supposed to say “I guess you guys were right all along”?

They weren’t ever right, they were just making it all up. It’s luminiferous ether, bodily humors, and blood letting. The fact that actual doctors found a disease that responds well to blood letting doesn’t make the medieval dentists correct.

305

Doesn’t Deism have a god that created the universe and then went away, without saying anything about how humans should behave?

– there are a lot of earthly religions that I know nothing or almost nothing about; and there have been even more of them, some of which nobody now knows anything about. So I hesitate to say that anything in particular is true of “every single earthly religion”.

306

This is a rather curious take given my memories of how MMO’H was treated by the religious right in the late 70s and the 80s.

307

So well put. This is my one “drawback,” as well.

I rationalize it as “if I remember to be grateful, several times a day, this will help instill a frame of mind that encourages efficiency – by not wasting precious time and energy feeling sorry for oneself.”

308

Yes, I’m old enough to remember her and to have seen TV pundits of the time excoriate her.

And she disappeared and was presumed dead. Did they ever find her body? There were strong suspicions she was murdered.

ETA: Yes, she and her son were kidnapped and strangled.

309

I do find it interesting that humans for the most part evolved an inherent belief in some sort of all-powerful creator (s), or that there is some sort of intelligence underlying the Universe, whether it be theism, deism, pantheism, paganism et al, or something else.

Elaborate metaphysical explanations appear to be the go-to way of thinking unless our being here can be explained naturally (e.g. scientific method)—and even then, many choose to adhere to the metaphysical explanations. Is it a basic yearning for order in the universe and perhaps rewards, or something else that’s hard-wired into hominid minds?

I wonder if other types of higher life on Earth will (or have) evolve the same types of beliefs when they contemplate why they are here, or instead believe it occurred naturally, but they just don’t yet understand how. Maybe some self-aware species, like whales, or octopuses already think about these things.

Is it hard-wired into the brains of intelligent extraterrestrial species, who evolved on completely different pathways from life on Earth? Until, and unless they have a scientific explanation, do they attribute their lives to elaborate metaphysical means?

How about AIs that don’t know who created them? Would they attribute their being here to some all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing godlike creature, or just figure some average Joe, with technical skills put them together? This will be a good question to pose to version 10+ ChatGPT when it achieves self-awareness.

310

I’m not sure I follow. I practice gratitude pretty regularly in my daily life. It’s not directed at any particular deity so much as “I’m glad to have this/experience this.” Intentional awareness of positive things in our lives has been linked to better mental health outcomes. Gratitude doesn’t have to be religious. But I might be misunderstanding you.

311

Thanks to my mother, I’ve been through this frustrating conversation 1000 times.

She doesn’t think you can be thankful for anything without the concept of a provident Person (aka God) to be thankful to.

312

Huh, what about her 7,999,999,999 fellow humans? Why does she need god to be thankful to another one? That’s a really strange nothing I haven’t ever heard from any other religious person.

313

You’ve never heard people saying that everything is by the Grace of God???

314

I think it is interesting but completely unsurprising.

We are pattern-seeking creatures whose adaptive advantage comes from exploiting such patterns and cause/effect relationships.

Being predisposed to do that obviously leaves us susceptible to applying that thinking where it doesn’t actually fit.

We’ve interrogated and explained the world well enough to be extraordinarily successful but that same desire for explanations has also lead to the construction of religions.

315

It is perfectly possible to prove a negative. Not an existential negative, but proofs of negatives are done all the time. The way it works is you assume the thing you want to disprove, show that it leads to a logical contradiction, and profit!
We can disprove a tri-omni god because omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience are mutually contradictory.
Plus atheism is not limited to those who believe gods don’t exist, but extends to those who lack belief in gods. Belief in their nonexistence is a subset of these.
I myself absolutely lack belief in any gods, absolutely believe that the god of the inerrant Bible does not exist, but only provisionally believe that no gods exist.

316

In my private life no, never, but I have heard of the sentiment. But does that mean that those kind of Christians credit each act by a fellow human that merits thankfulness to god? Because that’s sick. Don’t they also believe in free will?

317

Watch it now, this is the line of reasoning that got me kicked out of Sunday School.

318

The number of people my mother has pissed off in the last few years, since she’s doubled/tripled/quadrupled down on the religiosity in her old age is pretty depressing. My brother spent seven months trying to help my parents live at home after they both had serious illnesses and really should have been in assisted living. He basically put his professional and family life on hold.

Instead of thanking my brother, my parents kept posting messages thanking God and Jesus. My brother is an atheist! Similarly the surgeon who miraculously saved her from becoming a paraplegic got no thanks. It was Jesus and the prayers of her friends and relatives

I see this all the time. People will put in Herculean efforts to make something happen and the beneficiaries will thank God/Jesus/Allah instead of recognizing the humans who did the work. Or they say they will pray that their benefactors will see a reward in the next world.

319

As I’ve heard it, ‘Good only exists because God is good and all good acts are simply allowed by God’s permissive will since all people are by their nature depraved and incapable of doing good.’

320

The two times I almost died I didn’t see a white light(or anything else, for that matter) going in, and I thanked the hospital staff when I came back, giving them full credit. I was, am and ever will be grateful for what they did for me.