I don’t know how to say it any clearer. You may think my copy is me. The whole world may think my copy is me. But, I know my copy isn’t me. He’s just a very handsome cat who thinks he’s me.
No real big downside for me, but I do keep it close to the best vest. When I was more open about, a few people clearly changed their opinion of me.
I do wonder what issues I’ll run into as we rear our now 6-year-old son atheist. So many social activities are infected - most preschools, Boy Scouts, little league, YMCA, pretty much every non-STEM summer camp, etc. Fortunately, he’s pretty firm on it. He’ll correct us when we say “oh my god” instead of “gosh,” and he’s gotten into at least one heated argument at school about it.
And this atheist LOVES Christmas and Christmas music, although I mostly avoid the overtly Jesus-y stuff. (Funny - my kid believes in Santa but not god.)
On being agnostic vs. atheist, I tell people I agnostic since I don’t know, but by belief I am atheist since I believe that god does not exist. Note that this stronger than not believing that god exists. So there are actually three levels (at least) of irreligion.
The worst part of being an atheist is always having to pay accommodate religious folk.
You’re in Canada, aren’t you? Do you really have to accommodate often to religious people there? Because I never had to (to be clear, not in Canada, but in Germany, but both are similarly secular societies in my understanding), and wouldn’t do it anyway, but I really cannot recall a situation when this was an issue. How do you accommodate?
As an ex-religious atheist, my personal opinion is that there is nothing bad about being atheist per se. I don’t feel I’m missing anything spiritual in my life, nor do any of the traditional things that religion promises seem particularly appealing to me. Especially when you consider that the good things that Christianity promises are very conditional upon you adopting an utterly self-denying mindset and working toward the world to come rather than for satisfaction in the world that is. If nothing else, the need for salvation from eternal damnation far outweighs any advantages that Christianity may offer. As for the social aspect of churches, that can be achieved through other means, though I understand that someone who had a strong social network through a church would feel bad about losing it. When I was religious, I socialized relatively little with people I met in church, so that wasn’t something I felt as a loss on leaving the church.
If there is anything negative about the atheist experience, it’s the fact that you sometimes meet genuinely religious people, who are sincere about their faith, and may want to ask about your religious convictions (or you meet someone from your church days) - and you’re faced with a dilemma about whether to come clean about your lack of religion or play along and not deny your lack of religiosity.
Only if you’re a Christian, you may not blame God for your problem. you can, but you may not, if you expect salvation. You’re supposed to accept that God is perfect, that he is the good one and you’re the miserable sinner who doesn’t understand his perfect will for you. You should direct your blame toward the Devil, and God has clean hands in the greater scheme of things (although he didn’t give you a choice about existing, forces you to have an immortal soul in need of salvation, causes you to exist in a world where you are born with a proclivity to want to do things that lead toward Hell, and knew in advance that many humans would end up in Hell).
I actually find the notion of religious “comforts” kind of patronizing. I don’t want to be “comforted” with the promises of love and friendship offered by a god who I have never seen and whose ideas of love and friendship are different from how I see these terms. I want to get happiness and satisfaction in this life, not to have a life that sucks and be “comforted” with promises of a better life in the world to come, if during this life I deny myself and act as God says I should. How can I feel any kind of comfort from the promises given by a god like this:
I try to look at things more like an anthropologist. If you found ten societies, none of which had ever heard of the other, and you noticed that every one of them had people doing some ritual, would your first thought be that all those people are somehow stupid, or would it be, “Huh? I wonder what function that serves?”
In general, when you come across nearly universal social traits or any other behaviour that seems to be common among people regardless of where they live or what else they believe, it’s more productive to study why they do what they do than to assume they are just ‘stupid’.
Well, at least as important, sure. And there is no shortage of reasons for starting a religion, especially in a primitive society. I frankly think that religion is an emergent phenomenon because it was just so useful. Religions codify rules for living, and establish punishment and reward systems to keep people following the rules. Then the ones that choose bad rules get out-competed and die. The rules that worked spread in a form of natural selection.
Take Christianity. It’s hard to argue with the basic rules laid out in the Ten Commandments which come down to, “Obey my rules. Respect your parents. Don’t kill people or steal their stuff. Don’t screw your neighbor’s wife. Don’t spend your time envying what others have. Don’t worship material things. Don’t lie to people.”
These are pretty good rules, and Christianity has therefore spread and more people follow the rules. On the other hand, if the God Ba’al demands that you throw your child into the volcano, pretty soon there are no more worshippers of Ba’al and those stupid ideas fade away.
Religion has also had a major effect on literacy in the past, and has been a force for stability in very unstable eras. It also gives a lot of people comfort who may not be equipped to deal with existential issues but who need to have meaning in their lives.
Religion also created norms that allowed people to deal with each other in commerce and otherwise before there were strong central governments. When people self-organize, trust is a big factor. People in your church have shown they have shared values, face the same punishment/reward system, etc. Also, if members screw over other people in the church they have a lot to lose. So the church is a form of regulation of behaviour at the local level that improves cooperation. Churches often also act as a form of social service, helping others in need locally, organizing charity etc.
I don’t wish to insult people who are religious. I’ve known some very religious people who are highly intelligent and very good. When I moved into the South decades ago, I was expecting to encounter a lot of racist, misogynist religious folks when I arrived, but I was pleasantly surprised—most that I have encountered over the years have been good folks who help each other and help the community at large.
Sure, some tried to convert me into becoming a believer, but they gave up quickly and without rancor when they realized I was a lost cause, and not about to change my way of thinking. I’m friends with a number of religious folks. We just don’t talk religion.
My parents (now deceased) moved South a few years after I did, and were my neighbors for many years. They were strong agnostics, bordering on atheism, but joined a local church for the social comradery. The church accepted them despite their agnosticism, and didn’t push religion on them very hard. My parents gained great comfort from their church. They tried to get me to attend…but, I’m not a morning person. Sundays are for fishing, not sitting in a pew. 
That being said, many religious folks are racist and misogynists (I just avoid those that are). But, I don’t necessarily blame religion for their hateful ways. Hateful people are typically of lower intelligence, and lower intelligent people (good and bad) often gravitate toward religion. The bad ones are the proverbial bad apples. Churches should do a better job of ridding their flock of bad apples, but many don’t. For that, they can be blamed.
IOW, hateful people aren’t hateful because of religion, they are hateful because they are hateful people, and they use religion as their weapon of choice. If religion didn’t exist, they would still be hateful, they’d just gravitate toward some other community to spew their venom.
I contest this notion strongly, intelligent people can be just as hateful as lowly intelligent, and they’re much more dangerous.
I don’t disagree with that premise.
Not during successful surgeries, that’s for sure.
I disagree with this. I look at it this way – an atheist can honestly say “I do not have faith in the existence of any deity (defined as a being that stands outside the physical laws of the universe and can control the elements of that universe).” That leaves the subject open to proof, although how would you prove that a being exists outside the physical laws of the universe? (a rhetorical question, by the way, let’s not get into that discussion again) An agnostic, well I have trouble constructing an honest sentence from an agnostic. “I might or might not have faith in the existence of deities” but that really doesn’t make sense. If they say “deities might be possible, I just don’t know” then they are regarding faith and reason as of equal value in discovering truth about existence. As you can probably tell, that is not a philosophical position that I respect, but I suppose it’s marginally better than some of the alternatives.
Note that the atheist is not denying that any deities exist, just that they don’t have faith in that existence. Lacking faith means they require evidence, and none has ever been supplied (my assertion, speaking as an atheist).
So the worst part of being an atheist is have to explain this distinction over and over again, and having so many people still get it wrong.
The worst part of being an atheist is that every thread about any aspect of atheism always and inevitably leads to this discussion about atheism/agnosticism. It’s tedious.
Sorry, I resisted for a while, but this is one area where I am probably too sensitive to perceived errors.
I’m going to respond anyway. Not on a being existing outside physical laws, though. Say a god showed up, and you asked it to rearrange the stars to spell out something (Hi, Opal?). It does it, and observatories confirm that the rearranged stars are as far as they are supposed to be.
That would convince me, at least.
But my main point was that the line between agnostic and atheist is so blurry to most people that if I were a pollster I’d group the responses, not wanting five minutes (if I were lucky) of philosophical discussion as part of the poll.
Everyone is an atheist if they reject the existence of any other gods save for the particular one they happen to believe in. If I embrace the Christian god, for example, but deny the reality of the many Hindu gods, then I am an atheist as far as Hindu gods are concerned. Maybe not an all-out atheist as far as rejecting ANY concept of god, but you get the idea.
Yup, one can check out this chart of IQ scores of Nazi defendants at Nuremberg.
Yes! This! and I NEVER get to see people acknowledging this! Thank you. Well put, too.
This hinges on what people mean by “believe”. Doesn’t Twain say that faith is believing in something when you know it ain’t so? I’ve read a writer who, after very religious upbringing, explains that he understood there were two categories of things we believe: the ones we know are real and true, and the ones we know aren’t.
We do get to choose what to tell ourselves, what to repeat in our heads to ourselves. Maybe this is what some mean when they say “believe”.
I truly think water runs downhill, and furthermore think I do this because it’s really true. I think that water does this independently of me.
It’s god’s fault he doesn’t exist, not mine. So to speak.
A car drove by, the reflection of the morning sun getting me right in the eyes. The cat jumped onto the desk, getting a claw in my arm. The phone started ringing loudly. I struggled not to spill my hot coffee. In all this confusion, it appears that I must have clicked unsubscribe.
A few days later, the toast popped up, and there was no miraculous image of some saintly figure in its browning. I buttered it, as I always had, and sat down to breakfast. It occurred to me that I did not feel guilty about something. That thing last night did not trouble me somehow. What about on Tuesday, when – nope, I had nothing.
The demons were gone, and I did not miss them at all. And so I had become an accidental atheist. It felt good. Well, OK, at least. Really, it did not feel like much of anything. Liberating, I guess.
That would not convince me this was God (or “a god” or whatever). I would not conclude I’d just seen a being that stands outside the physical laws of the universe. I would conclude that there are laws of the universe we obviously don’t understand as well as we thought we did, and I’d assume that if we understood them better, the phenomenon I’d just observed would make sense within that context.
I’m theistic. This, to me, has nothing to do with God.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the glitzy magic shit is pretty irrelevant. Maybe it’s because I grew up with DC and Marvel Comics. Lots of powerful characters who could do amazing things but had ordinary human foibles (kinda like Greek and Roman gods come to think of it). Definitely not divine or relevant to theological content. Nothing to do with what is good and holy or how one should live one’s life or the meaning thereof or anything else that would change one’s own life, other than perhaps “be wary of pissing off the people with the plastic skintights and capes, they’re badass”.
To me, atheism is all about “everything that is real is caused by prior events and the location and momentum of things; existence is like a giant clock or an array of dominos, including you and the thoughts inside your head”. Theism is all about “no it isn’t, there is purpose”. The rest is just trimmings and window dressing (and dense layers of Paul Bunyanesque bullshit).
Yup. This is what I was always facing in the church - Christians who insist that belief/disbelief is a matter of will and choice.
The analogy that some atheists used was that you can’t make yourself believe that the Moon is made of chocolate, no matter how much you may wish it were true; it’s just too far-fetched. Not that I’m saying the proof for God is like Moon-is-chocolate, but the point stands, for many/most people, they can’t choose what to believe/not believe.