Being an atheist is not passive, it requires an active stance

[robvalue]

Theism would be more like walking very slowly while leaning on a crutch because someone kept telling you your leg was broken so often you started believing it. The same person was kind enough to sell you the perfect crutch on credit, with easy monthly repayments.

[Secular Elf]

Well put.  Do you find many others who think as you do where you are?  Nice to know we have such capable spokesmen in such gawd forsaken places.  We need you on that wall.

A few.  I write letters to the editor of the town paper, and in my home town I have come across a couple of people who agree with some of the positions I  take on some issues.  There was one fellow who was religious when I first met him and he asked questions about why I am an atheist and I explained to him my thoughts on religion, freedom, etc.  He left the job still religious, and about three years or so later I friended him on FB and he told me that he and his father are now atheists.  And there were a couple of other freethinkers who wrote LTEs to the paper and they were published.  One I remember wrote about the civil rights of homosexuals in favor of, and another wrote something about science.  So, there are a few of us in my neck of the woods.  Whether people or religious or not, I am open to meeting and having honest mature conversations about anything.

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I think Atheism is natural but, unfortunately, most societies have been corrupted by Theism. If you look hard enough, you will find people whose language does not have a word for "god". Deep within the Amazon Jungle, live the Pirahã people. The linguist Daniel Everett went to the Pirahã people initially as a Christian Missionary and returned as Atheist because what he found shocked him.

He discovered the Pirahã have no interest in deities. I've read his book about his experiences with the Pirahã, Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, and he says he had to create a word to represent Yaweh because the Pirahã had no deities in their culture. Although they believe in "spirits", spirits are not the same thing as deities so that makes Pirahã Atheists because Atheism a rejection of claims made about deities and nothing more.

Initially Daniel thought the Pirahã had an interest in the Bible (he recorded it in their language) but they apparently kept repeating the part in the recording where John the Baptist was killed and showed no interest in anything else. He found out that Pirahã are only interested in the present and recent past. When a person dies, the Pirahã people gradually forget about that person. Daniel would sometimes refer to people had died and the Pirahã would deny that person ever existed.

Other interesting facts about the Pirahã people:
1. Pirahã can't count. They struggle with even small numbers.
2. Pirahã can't draw. They can only create 'lines'.
3. Pirahã society is akin to the Primitive Communism Karl Marx talked about.

I absolutely have no respect for missionaries and their imposition of Christianity upon other cultures that have lived for centuries without it.  The only thing that I would say that any of them do any good is when they uplift the health conditions of the villages they live in, but it is always attached to teaching native cultures about their stinking Bible.  If I had my way, I would outlaw missionary work.  Ever since I became acquainted with anthropology and archaeology, cultural relativism impressed upon me that no one culture is better or worse than another.  It saddens and angers me whenever I hear cases of missionaries going to some remote region of the world introducing their bullshit.  Western religion for the most part is removed from the original contexts they were born in.  At least in native cultures they have their own religions or spiritual concepts which serve a function in their society.  Just leave them alone.

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Theism would be more like walking very slowly while leaning on a crutch because someone kept telling you your leg was broken so often you started believing it. The same person was kind enough to sell you the perfect crutch on credit, with easy monthly repayments.

I do think rob has nailed it.

[emjay]

I think it could come down to two tendencies of the human mind: a) the tendency to try to understand anything that does not make sense, and b) the tendency to see agency in events (for instance ascribing human motives and feelings to insects). If that's the case then in pre-scientific times, when knowledge about the world was essentially non-existent, it would seem almost inevitable that the notion of human-thinking gods would come about. And in more modern times, when science explains most of the world, belief in gods could come down to ignorance of science (wilful or otherwise) or the fact that it still hasn't explained to everyone's satisfaction many of the deeper questions of existence and the universe.

[comet]

People are people first. dehumanize ourselves before we dehumanize others. It all flushes out for the regular good guy when we start there. List personality types and mixtures of emotions that people can have. You will be able to make predictions based on that list. Make sure you use columns and rows. toss in addiction, mental health, and abuse and you can imagine what that does to the predictions.