I once believed when i was a child, then i learn that its all illogical and just plain incorrect. Believers need to think out side there little safe bubble they call "God" and "Heaven" and just at least try think that there is a VERY VERY BIG possiblty that there is no God?

(November 15, 2010 at 3:51 pm)coffeeveritas Wrote: First of all I begin with the viewpoint that all I'm interested in is the truth. If it's not true, why would I waste my time believing it? As I outlined I believe in what I can see as being the most true at every level.
Secondly, I see no reason to assume there is no God beforehand.

Truth has various meanings, subjectively and objectively, for the sake of the argument I'm going to assume you are inferring the criteria of truth within epistemology to test claims and statements to see whether or not they stand up.

What you're doing here is not investigating or verifying the god claims' logical coherency or rational soundness, actually, you're not even attempting critical thinking at all here - all you've shown here is the overwhelming contradiction of your two positions that can be humorously summarised as "I'm going to test everything but God!" which I'm sorry to inform you is nothing more than special pleading.

Quote:The physical universe we live in exists, but that doesn't tell us anything either way right off the bat.

Nonsense, it tells us is what manifests, what is real i.e. demonstrable. You are deliberately being skeptical about what we know and understand about reality in order to strengthen your half-arsed argument for god which is counterintuitive. We can test all kinds of claims about the universe, for example, we know from current observations and measurements the distant planetoid 90377 Sedna takes around 11,809 years to complete one orbit. Did the "Holy Spirit inspired Gospels" teach you that? Nope.

Quote:How do we know this isn't the kind of universe a Creator would create? What other universe are we comparing it to?

Hooray for begging the question, unfortunately if you'd done some proper research you'd appreciate there's no extraordinary evidence for any extraordinary deity and natural phenomena often have a valid-working natural godless explanation to them.

Quote:So my basic approach to everything is: always seek the truth in its most complete form and hold all views equal until proven otherwise (as in belief in God vs. Naturalism).

That is the most *asinine* statement of a brain fart I've heard all month. You've unwittingly put yourself in the most dire of positions where you have no choice but to accept every claim there is without sufficient evidence, all simply because they can't be disproved (who needs confirmers right?), every single nonsensical argument, every single god or gods claim there is, and consequently you are going to hold all kinds of contradictory positions.

Quote:Because I see Christianity to be the most true thing in explaining the story of man and the universe, giving purpose in life, and making logical sense out of existence, as well as having a subjective experience of God and His positive effects on my life, I am inclined to believe that Christianity must in some way be true.

You may be justified in thinking Christianity as true, however no one else can be justified by your testimonial evidence, or rather, your display of egocentricity. So you basically believe because you find life to be currently pleasurable? Well, I'm happy for you, but tragically how you "feel about reality" has no bearing on what it actually is, what is real, what is true.

All you've demonstrated to me thus far is that...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I05JAL9MB-Y

How did I become an atheist?, I do believe I have always been an atheist (although I would have never consider myself as such). Because from age 4-13 I lived with only with my mother who is an Atheist. Also living with my father and stepmother in my teenage years with their neopagan/new age beliefs contributed to my atheism by myself becoming a skeptic towards anything which is supernatural.

It was only really recently (earlier this year), I really gave deep thought to why I think god/s did not exist and that there is nothing apart from what is material in the universe. I can attribute that to me being one of those people who never really question the “religious beliefs” their parents instilled in them, fortunately in my case my mother is an atheist. Thus when it came to me investigating this whole thing further, I found what Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Stenger, etc to make a lot of sense.

Yeah sam harris deffintly made alot of sense to me!

Coffee, you do not believe in the god/s of other religions. You therefore know how you arrived at your own dismissal of the god/s in these religions. You just need to extrapolate this, to also encompass the god/s you believe in to arrive at a form of atheism. Given that this is a starting point you then re-enforce it with looking at the arguments for theism, which are woeful either from logical necessity or inference. Then look at the arguments for atheism which are far more convincing and largely evidential.

At a personal level I could never force myself to believe it. Religion always seemed (and still does) like the emporers new clothes. Nothing there but folks say how fine it is.

How do you become an Atheist? Well, keep in mind that Atheism is not a religion and doesn't require any special baptism of the sort. To become an Atheist, you just have to believe in no God(s) or angels or anything supernatural or beyond this world that created all humanity. That's all there is to it.

How do you become an Atheist? You're born.

How do you maintain your Atheism is a more interesting question. A large amount of luck is involved in avoiding the childhood indoctrination that religion thrives on.

Well, I was born Christian (Baptist to be specific) and did everything you could. I got baptized, read the bible, everything. Anyways I was Christian all the way through high school because it was the thing in my town. However I went to college in a big city and got to talking to people who had different beliefs and it was then that I began studying texts for evidence and reasoning as to why one religion was right. I found none.

Now I am reading books about Atheism and it just makes so much sense to me. There is so much that isn't backed by evidence that I just can't put my mind and body through that.

(December 3, 2010 at 11:08 pm)lrh9 Wrote: 1) Observation
2) Modeling
3) Testing
4) Analysis
5) Repetitions of 1 to 4 until the model is not falsified.
6) Publishing of the model.
7) Verification.

No room for a priori in there? Good luck finding necessary truths.

I was a cradle Catholic. I was never a fervent Christian. I just accepted everything. Maybe eight or so months ago I started asking questions like "If a god created the universe, what created him?," and "how can the Christian god exist when there is evil?" From there I started reading Bertrand Russell, and now I am an Atheist because I see no evidence to believe in god(s).