I tend to assume it was for a long time the cultural norm in many many cultures to embellish the factual parts of our heroes’ tales with a lot of puffery and bullshit. It’s not enough to tell the kids that George Washington stepped down and let the nation persist as a democracy instead of attempting to hold onto what could have become a throne easily enough, no, we have to tell them that good o’l George never ever told a lie and he threw a silver dollar across the river. And that’s post-enlightenment era and concerns a figure that was a hero to some pretty intellectual sorts. Now try Paul Bunyan, more of a folk hero. Probably had some real exploits and admirable characteristics but the exaggeration stuff like creating the Great Lakes?
Some of the smartest people in history have focused on the Sermon on the Plains and the Sermon on the Mount and what they perceive to be the general message, and that’s what brought them in; they may or may not even believe the gee-whiz stuff like virgin birth or resurrection from the dead, but even many who believe treat that stuff more as “God underlining that this is God speaking to us” than as reasons in and of themselves to embrace Christianity. There were many who didn’t go that far, even in eras when it was still way way socially unacceptable to not believe in the religious miracle stuff. Thomas Jefferson took a pair of scissors and clipped out what Jesus of Nazareth had actually said (well, according to the gospels at any rate) and discarded the rest as irrelevant and unimportant.
It may be hard for some of you to realize this, but up until the mid-70s or thereabouts there were a lot of people in Christian churches who did not believe in any of the miracle stuff, including that Jesus of Naz was inherently different from the rest of us; they believed in love your neighbor, they believed in forgive those who’ve done you wrong, they believed we could all live in peace and set aside our competition and distrust, and the rest was just inherited cultural stuff that made for some nice songs and pageantry. (You see a lot more of this attitude in Judaism towards the legacy of Yahweh’s miraculous interventionlist powers if you go into an American temple; probably less so if you do so in Israel these days).
It became simultaneously more acceptable to discard the entirety of religion and be an atheist, and less acceptable to be in a church congregation and not be a Biblical literalist believer.
A lack of scientific method and rigor, and a whole lot to explain.
It’s perfectly reasonable to come up with myths to explain what you can’t explain. It’s less reasonable to hold onto those myths when you can explain.
That’s less politics become tribal as it is the Republicans catering to the religious right and taking on those aspects.
Especially for the reasons that most religions find gambling to be a sin, and also it’s not a straight wager, it’s a roulette wheel, as it doesn’t inform you as to which one to believe in.
Also because it assumes that God cannot see into your soul and recognize that you only pretend to believe so you can get into heaven. And God, like Santa Claus, is supposed to be able to see into your soul and know what you are thinking. That’s one of his bigger party tricks. Pascal’s wager never made sense logically or theologically, and I have no idea how it has endured so long.
That’s kinda what I meant by gambling is a sin, if less flippant. If there is a god, then he knows that you are believing what you believe out of cynicism, not faith.
People are pretty terrified about what happens to them when they die. It’s probably what held me to religion longer than I should have let it.
But not just the music – everyone’s assumption that you love the holiday as much as they do. At least Easter and other religious holidays are easy to ignore.
But, you’re not going to experience this. You’re just going where the candle flames go when you blow the candles out. How do you bank on a replica if you don’t get to be that replica? It’s not like they’re good for anything else to you.
I hate the fact that when I die I and there is no afterlife I won’t be able to tell all of the those people who do believe in an afterlife that I was right and they were wrong.
More seriously, I was raised a wishy washy Methodist, who finally lost the last bits of belief in a higher power when he read about the anthropic principal, which eliminated the lingering doubts of the improbability of intelligent life.
But I still occasionally pray about things that worry me. I recognize intellectually that it won’t change anything but it gives me something to do when I can’t do anything else. So I would say that the worst thing about being an atheist is that there is final entity to go to to take care of the things you can’t.
Presumably, God can also see into your soul, and recognize that you only pretend to believe because someone has a gun to your head. And yet, “conversion by the sword” is still a thing that a lot of theists have done historically, and there’s still a lot of far-right types who think state mandated religion is a good idea. Which suggests that their version of god, at least, is satisfied with following the forms without underlying genuine belief.
I suppose the whole, “Why do atheists behave morally if they don’t believe in hell?” is part of the same logical fallacy - God can certainly tell if you refrained from sin because you hate sin, or if you refrained from sin because you fear God, and you’d think the second wouldn’t get you any credit, but a lot of Christians insist that’s how it works.
So, I submit that the reason Pascal’s Wager has stuck around is that it’s a fundamentally accurate parody of a subset of theist beliefs.
This. This exactly. Even amongst the people who know what I am I need to keep mum to keep the peace while still having to participate in the common religious observances, namely, Xmas celebrations. For us in my nuclear family, it’s a cultural observance only. For my religious parents and pastor brother, obviously it’s more to them, but we’ve seemed to come to an understanding and not talk about it. The atheists are the ones who have to give, unfortunately.
Agree. This is where I think technology is the great lifter, though. The world is still a brutal, miserable place, but with each successive decade more and more billions of people are getting better and better access to food, medical treatment, information tech. A mere half-century from now, we could be at a point of global prosperity where people suffering in misery and poverty becomes the rare exception rather than the norm.
Not all suffering is about economics, of course - there’ll always be racism, sexism, bullying as long as human nature exists - but it will do away with a huge cause of suffering.
So, in many ways, one of the biggest atheist goals/ideals should be all about tech, tech, tech.
Say what you will about Ayn Rand, she gave an interview to Playboy in 1963, and when she was asked if she believed in God, she didn’t just say “no,” she said “of course not.” That was a life changer for me – I was already most of the way into atheism at age 13, but this showed me that I wasn’t alone. In 1967 she said about the same thing on the Tonight Show to Johnny Carson.
edited to add: this wasn’t directed specifically at Czarcasm, his post just provided the impetus.
That’s just it. If that happened to me as an atheist, I’d just say shit happens, and try to deal. It seems far worse of the lord of the universe, who is omnipotent, let it happen. After 60 years I’d want to know why god thought it was good for the cosmos for me to suffer.
Multiply that for the real examples of kids with cancer, babies drowning in tsunamis.
There had better not be a god, because I’d be tempted to punch his face in. “Your arms too short to box with God?” Try me, mofo.
To answer the question in the OP, the worst thing for me is knowing that the relgionistas will never find out they are wrong.
Wouldn’t it be great if some entity dressed in black with a scythe greeted the newly dead with “I DO NOT KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING, BUT IT IS NOT WHERE YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE.”
I never liked Christmas music, but that is from being Jewish, not atheist. And I can eat both gefilte fish and bacon.
As to the OP - the social side of things especially when I was an introverted teen. The church long ago worked out how to breed their introverts. Atheists hadn’t yet invented the internet to allow their introverts to find one another.
We stayed at home on weekend nights reading SF books extolling free love. Meanwhile our churchgoing friends were screwing like bunnies at church camps at which they were taught that premarital sex was wrong.
Theism isn’t really a thing much in Australia. Oh, ang btw @Princhester, many thanks for the Minchin link, you made our dinner late tonight because of!
I don’t know the religions or religiosity of any of my friends. They might be churchgoers, they might not. None of my immediate family are religiously affiliated, but late uncles, aunts and perhaps their kids might be (Pentecostals).
There’s no ‘worst’ thing about being an atheist. It’s not an issue. My atheism is about as important in my life and my kid’s lives (and their kids) as what brand of toothpaste we use. It’s just irrelevant. It’s a nothing burger.
