You make many claims and assign theistic belief to others when your claims and assignments are false.Many, if not most, adult believers, at least Christian believers, have experienced something of the Divine. For them it is as much certainty as it is fath, though it does require faith to embrace the Devine in lieu of faith in only the human ability.
In my opinion, one has to reject or push to the back of their minds too many unanswered questions, or has to ignore too much absolute reality, in order to profess Atheism as their belief system. And I still say it takes as much faith to do that as it does to believe in God.
I’m just not understanding this thought process.
I’m not a believer. There’s no active thought process, set of rituals, traditions or ceremonies that are needed or required to not believe. I’d propose that Atheism is really little more a conclusion based upon the facts and evidence available.
Really? When you have more than 90% of the population across the globe believing in some sort of diety and a belief in some sort of deity existing in every culture in human history, how do you shrug that off and say so what?
When you have a couple of billion Christians and Jews professing beiief in God and a majority of these professing personal experience of the presence of God in their lives, how do you just disregard that as evidence? Most especially when many of them are well educated, intelligent, cohereant, well adjusted, and successful adults?
If you were blind, would you discount the presence of shadows or clouds in the sky or that people can see stars in the heaven purely based on the fact that you could have never seen or experienced that? I have never seen certain kinds of foods, or heard certain musical instruments, and have never researched them, let alone tasted them, yet I believe that these exist based on no more evidence than others have told me they have seen and tasted them.
In my opinion, a person has to push aside way too much credible testimony and evidence in the universe itself in order to disbelieve there is no universal presence or intelligence behind it all. And it becomes such an obsession with so many Atheists who are drawn again and again to threads like this, who go out of their way to belittle or diminish or dispute the faith of others, who are so passionate to install their religion as the norm in society, that I have to believe it is faith based.
And while it does not apply to all Atheists, I also have come to the conclusion that Atheism as a religion is perhaps the most intolerant of modern religions.
While it is true that many cultures had deities and superstitions, clearly not all were theistic in intent or in practice. There have been cultures which assigned causes of natural events to many supernatural agents, not necessarily gods. However, I certainly do acknowledge that more recent cultures have invented many gods to account for natural processes they didn't understand. Gods of fire, gods of the oceans, gods of rain, gods of thunder, lightning, etc., etc., have shared time with various mystical entities. But that says nothing about whether the claims are true or not. Most religions make absolute claims, and thus most of those claims contradict each other. Therefore the only certainty is that most absolute claims are actually false.
We are also profoundly superstitious as a people. We, however (for some inexplicable, probably selfish reasons) call our preferred superstitions "religions" and assign them a certain deference that would appear to me they don’t really deserve. You, personally, may not believe all religions are from god, the bad news is that you don’t get a vote on which is the true definition of god(s). God or god(s) seem to have left many contradictory conceptions of what they expect people to accept. Whether a single one of these definitions is true or something completely different, you simply have to deal with it. You don’t really get a vote in the matter and it’s not a majority rules issue .
Religions, as gods, come and go with cultures and civilizations. Consider the Romans, for example. Not only were they exceedingly tolerant of other nation's gods, they actually assumed that those gods were also true. Certainly, they found the earlier Egyptian gods to be a bit… um… strange, but they still considered them powerful and extant. In a profoundly spectacular acknowledgement of their own superstitions and lack of knowledge regarding the gods, the Romans also worshiped "the unknown god." Think of this as essentially praying to the, "to whom it may concern" gods with the explicit understanding that nobody had exclusive or full knowledge of the real nature of THE god or gods... sort of "the gods to be announced at a later date", or… the "gods to suit any occasion", so to speak. Certainly, this idea was borrowed from the earlier Greeks. The Greeks even built a temple in Athens to this: Agnostos Theos.
Unknown God - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lastly, while you may find challenges to your religious belief to be unacceptable, you will have to accept that as part of posting your opinions in a public discussion board. Similarly, to define Atheism as a religion suggests you simply don't understand the connection between theism, gods and that lack of connection in an Atheistic perspective.
Last edited:
