Hmmm. I’m thinking about this a bit. I’m afraid it’ll get too time consuming for my current life. But, I can’t really resist entirely.
Hard Atheist speaking up here.
How do I start? There are so many different definitions of God even within the subset of Christianity. It’s hard to pick one concept that I find erroneous and expect any single Christian to argue it. There’s the whole evolution thing which has been debated fairly thoroughly here already. There’s the whole take the cantradictory bible literally thing, which has also been bludgeoned to death. Those are probably the easiest targets, but probably not what most Christians believe.
The God my mom talks about all the time sounds to me like she started having frequent epiphanies in the mornings when she spends about an hour praying and thinking about her life. These epiphanies are, to her, God answering her prayers for help. OK, fine, except that I get epiphanies without prayer.
If the God you believe in expects you to take care of yourself and take responsibilities for all your actions and non-actions, then I have no problems with your belief. I have problems with people who expect me to forgive them and trust them just because they apologize for wrongdoing. I have problems with people who expect God to take care of them when they fail to take care of themselves, because society ends up having to pick up the burden (and God still gets the credit). I have problems when people judge others morals by some arbitrary standard without evaluating the real motivations and philosophy, and especially when they haven’t seriously evaluated their own morals except that some religious leader told them it was ok.
I haven’t had anyone describe to me a reason to think God exists that I found compelling. Most Christians who I know well and respect have described to me experiences which sound very much like epiphanies. I have felt many many epiphanies and know that they can feel strange and unworldly. They can be very compelling. They are very frequently wonderful. Knowledge which is suddenly understood in an epiphany always seems so amazingly irrefutable. And, it is sometimes wrong.
I still have a very difficult time with factoring because I had a huge epiphany about how it works when I was about 12 years old. My epiphany involved a simple way to calculate the factors of a quadratic equation that worked with about the first ten problems I tried it on. I don’t even remember it anymore, but everytime I need to factor out an equation (which isn’t very often) I find myself trying to remember how to do the calculation as I had understood it in my great, but erroneous, epiphany. I have to remind myself every few seconds that the shortcut I had devised does not work dependably, or I start trying to reproduce it. Argh.
This goes toward saying that I feel that epiphanies feel wonderful but are not reliable.
One elderly couple I know actually claim to have seen an angel come down from the clouds. It didn’t speak to them or anything, it just stood there for a while and then went back. They have pictures, but the angel does not appear, just the clouds with light shining through them like in many religious paintings. All I can say to this is, “why?” Maybe the angel just wanted a closer look at them for some reason? Hunh? I just can’t believe it actually happened.
I guess I really just can’t imagine a reason for God to be so hidden. Also, I can’t believe that a good God would ever condemn a thoughtful and good atheist who God had never communicated with in any convincing manner. In these days where we can simulate so much with amazing realism, and have shown conclusively that many people have delusions which are strongly influenced by stories they have heard of religious or fictional nature, it becomes increasingly hard to give much weight to testimonials which all sound rather vague and unconvincing in the first place.
So, the shortage of evidence of existence seems to me to qualify as evidence of non-existence.
I posted this thought in another thread. I don’t really think it’s accurate, but it’s at least should give you an idea of how I came to believe as I do. Very few people have enough real evidence to know whether O.J. Simpson is guilty or not, and yet many, many people firmly believe that he is guilty. What is it that convinces them? I’m not sure. It is impossible to prove that no God exists, but I am confident of that fact. Actually, I have my doubts about O.J… Very rarely do I feel any doubts about God.
I don’t try to convert anyone to my belief, or disbelief if you want to call it that. I do however try sometimes to show people that their beliefs are unsupportable if I feel the beliefs are harmful to the believer and/or society.
I don’t think I’m one of the people you are speaking of when you say “railing against Christianity” but I would be interested in a dialogue that makes a more thoughtful definition of the Christian God apparent to all. I think that if you had any evidence of God’s presence that you believed would be persuasive to nonbelievers, you would have already trotted it out. However, I have found your posts thoughful and intelligent for the most part, and so wonder what you think you’re going to accomplish here. In the same way that you probably wince at the uninformed fundamentalist spouting quotes from tracts written by extremists, I wince when the militant uninformed anti-christian spouts the same quotes to prove that Christianity is a hoax.
Be reassured that intelligent atheists realize that there are intelligent Christians. I hope that thoughtful and loving Christians realize that atheists can be thoughtful and loving too.
Wow, there’s been a bunch of repies while I posted this. Well, I’ll post it as is, and see what happens.
